Got that song "O, Death" from O Brother Where Art Thou in my head this morning.

It's comforting.

This, my friends, is the wildest ride I could have possibly imagined.  There's a novel in this, somewhere, if I could only write....

Only 12 more radiation treatments!  Yay!

So, this is an odd thing.

I'm finding all this strangely liberating.  I can't begin to understand why.  Perhaps I'm wearier than I thought.  Perhaps I had (or have) more discontent with work than I was aware of.

But ever since finding out about this thing, I've felt liberated.  It's really weird.  Why that particular emotion?  I wonder if it's common, but people don't talk about it much.

In fact, people tend not to like to talk about death at all; we've managed to insulate ourselves from it in so many ways: hospitals, funeral parlors, and all the rest.  There're several industries that are more or less devoted to keeping death away from our thoughts.

There's a whole area of psych now called terror-management-theory, and the idea behind it is that when we are confronted with thoughts of death, especially our own, it makes us think differently about things.  I've thought over the last couple of weeks that TMT might be something that I could spend a little energy on; learn about it, perhaps find some little niche piece of research surrounding it.

But I still have that other project to try to connect dual-process theories of decision-making and motivated reasoning.  I think the results of such a marriage would be very scary to me as someone who really hopes that US politics can once again turn into something approaching a functional government.  But that cannot happen until both the right and the left can think rationally about the problems we have and at the very least agree on a common understanding of what those problems are.  Shit, right now we can't even agree on the language we use to describe things.

It's something of a mess.

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Much later.  Went to see the docs today; things seem to be going about as well as they can be.  We won't know until the post-treatment scans show what effect the radiation and chemotherapy have had.  The doc says there will be a lot of dead tissue in there; I assume that what functional glial cells I have left will eventually clean that up, but it's a little weird thinking about all those dead neurons.  But they are bad neurons, so if they're dead, all the better.  I just want to make sure that they get cleaned up.

Dendrocytes!  Get to work!  Clean that shit up!

So, all of my faithful 8 readers!  Thank you!  It means a great deal to know that I'm not merely shouting into that nasty Kasnas wind that is right now telling me to put more wood in the stove.

But here's what I'm amazed at.

There is nothing special about me. But if you look at the entire Western canon of "What must be read," you find a lot of fear of death.

I do not fear it.  Perhaps if I had children that would change things a lot.

But right now: no,  Bring it, bitch.  You want me, come get me.  I don't want my friends and family to suffer, and I wish I could share some of this "fuck you" attitude with them, but being as most are pretty religious I'm not sure i would work as well.

But right now, it's "Fuck you, death."  You can carry me some place, but it doesn't sound like any place I'd like to be. So, fuck you.  Sideways.

Hello!

  So, this eve a little less morbid.

I was once, but am no longer a believer.

But through my entire adult life, John Donne's Meditation XVII (from his Devotions on Emergent Occasions) has resonated with me.  (It's the "Never ask to know for whom the bell tolls.... thing.)

Well, through this discovery and operation and now recovery I have felt more support and more presence of others -- it's uncanny and somewhat unsettling to me: I wasn't in any way expecting that.  Prayers, good thoughts, well wishes, and food: amazing how much it has moved me and made me feel part of something much larger than myself.  I reckon having lived with the Donne all these years has sort of predisposed me to think of things that way, but it's never happened to me in such a felt, concrete way.  Wild.

Humbled, I am.  Humbled at the power of connection between people.  It doesn't have to be religious (although I do in some sense see it as deeply spiritual), but there's something about being part of the human experience that binds us together into a whole.  All are a part of the continent, a piece of the main.

So, I feel a gratitude that surpasses understanding.  A wholeness, a connectedness that I find amazingly comforting.

Sure, I'm going to have to shuffle off this mortal coil soon.  But man, have I had a richness of people who have walked through life with me.

Wild, isn't it?

Makes me wonder if something like this isn't at root underneath a lot of religion.

At any rate, I feel a deep gratitude to all who have expressed good wishes, and especially those who have sent me food.  ;)

I may not have a lot of time left, but I'll live it as a different man.

Okay, this is starting to feel too self-indulgent, too self-absorbed.  I'm not sure that's healthy.  No doubt I have a ton of stuff I need to process, but I'm not sure it's necessarily the best thing to do it in such a public way.  I can journal, and then maybe share some of the stuff that might be more generally interesting.

I'd like to turn away from the particulars of my own situation and try to generalize those to anyone in this situation.  Trouble is, I'm not at all sure how generalizable any of this is.

Cancer is, from what I've read, a particularly idiosyncratic disease.  The fucker.  :)  Everybody's is different.  Everybody reacts to treatment differently.

Being a sort of brain-guy (been interested in brains ever since I knew there were such things), it might be more fun to bring a little science into some of these posts.  Like: what is an astrocyte?  What do they (usually) do (when they don't go rogue)?

Of all the neurons in your brain, the majority are glial cells, sort of "helper" cells (or so we thought, for a long time, before we learned how much they contribute to thinking).  Sort of the Cinderellas of cells.  Sweeping up while the regular cortical neurons get to go to the Ball and have all the fun.  The Cinderella cells had to stay home and do dishes and shit.

No wonder they got mad.  I think I would, too, were I an under appreciated, and yet essential part of a healthy brain.  I'd be all up in those other neurons' grills.  "You think you're such hot shit?  Well, let us show you what we can do, you uppity neurons.  We will cut you.  You have made us feel particularly stabby."

And so, they did.  Not directly -- apparently astrocytes are somewhat passive-aggressive.  Rather than a frontal assault, they simply went rogue and caused enough swelling that the other neurons were impaired in their abilities to do their jobs.  "Oh, I'm sorry.  Is my edema bothering you?"

Heh.  I should write a play and all the characters would be brain cells.

So, last might I decided to do some Googling and find out what the end stages of this disease are going to look like -- both from my and Erin's perspective.

Ugly.  Easiest description would be to imagine a brain shutting down over the course of about 6 weeks.  One function after another would go, one by one.  Muscular control, cognition, and so.  I'll waste away.

Makes me think there's gotta be a bus out there with my name on it.  I just hate the thought of dragging everyone through a bunch of care-taking crap, especially at the end when I am minimally-responsive (or sleeping 20+ hours a day).  We did a lot of the end-of-life wishes recently, and many of the things we discussed were on the list.  So we have that settled, as difficult as it's going to be for E and my family and friends.  I just don't want to be in pain, and I don't want to be cold.  I hope when this finally goes down, it goes down in the late Spring or Summer.

Makes me think also of hospice.  Or that twilight sleep thing until you slide away.  I just don't want to turn the downstairs of this house into an ICU, no way will our insurance pay for more than the minimal nursing care, and Erin has a job and a life to live.

So, many things to think about.  This thing ends like a slo-mo train wreck.  Ick.

But!  I'm postponing that shit as long as I possibly can.  I still have some fun left in me and aim to use it.

A quick note.  In the movies when someone is told they have a terminal illness, there is usually some sort of strong reaction.

I didn't have that.  Not sure why, but it was more, "Okay, what do we do next?" sort of thing.

Movies are not much like real life, I reckon.  But I just find this sort of interesting.  I think my reaction to what the doc was saying would have been perceived as inauthentic in a movie or TV show.  They would have had to dress it up, somehow.  Weird.

And hey, this is not to say that others might have a more typical Hollywood response.  I'm just struck at how different mine was.

So there.  :)