Cancer Journal

 Maybe five years ago or so, my wife attended a reunion of what she calls her old hippie friends.  Also at the reunion was an old boyfriend, Davy, and his wife.  She hadn't known the wife but they visited and liked each other.  The wife said, "I won...I guess."  Jean also learned that the wife's mother had been part of The Chordettes, the old 1950s group that had sung Mr. Sandman.  The mother was still alive, in her 90s, active and alert but with virtually no short term memory.  They all lived across the state in Sheboygan.  A door of invitation was kind of opened up to come over and visit some time. I wasn't at the reunion but when Jean told me all about Davy, his wife and her mother, I got quite hepped up about visiting with a member of the group that had sung Mr. Sandman , a song I had heard plenty in my childhood and which has been an intermittent earworm ever since.  I pressed Jean to make a definite acceptance of this invitation which m...

 Do you know Archie Bleyer?  If you do, it's probably from a song he sang, "Hernando's Hideaway" although, as you are about to learn, there are plenty of other reasons why you just might know him.  Anyway, I ask because I own an overcoat that was specially tailored for him.  The provenance is established by a tag on the inside of an inside pocket with his name and a date, 1-26-60.  It's a camel hair dress coat made of cashmere.  I've been told and I believe that cashmere from 60 years ago is superior to what they call cashmere today.  You feel that coat and you know you are in the company of high quality.  When I wear the coat on an evening out, I am indiscriminate in who I ask to feel my coat.  People are slightly uncomfortable with being asked to violate my space in that way but when they touch it, the universal reaction is, "Oh, my!  Yes, that's so nice!"  The lining could use some repair.  I'm willing to live with that, at ...

 This won't be long.  Only to say that I had blood work done today and my PSA# is still too low to be detectable.  My last appointment was with a physician's assistant I mentioned to her that going three months between PSA tests was making me a little uneasy.  She reduced it to six week intervals.  Good of her.  I joked with her that the doctor was willing to give me a three to seven year life expectancy range when I first met with him, he would not give any revised numbers with my long stretch of undetectably low PSA.  I did get kind of a number out of her.  She said that there would maybe be five years, give or take, before the cancer did a work around of the meds I've been taking, given the success that I have had so far.   My main interest in getting numbers is to give myself something to beat.  Perhaps my regular oncologist sensed that and didn't want to be party to my plans to beat the cancer system.  Can hardly fault him...

 There is a blog  dealing with aging that I used to follow closely.  When I got my cancer diagnosis, it became a little bit of a dark joke and my interest flagged.  More recently, since I've been doing well, my interest has resumed. It is "Aging Matters" by Josh Mitteldorf (https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/). Perhaps a better title for it would be "How not to Age". The standard theory which he believes to be all wrong is that all living things evolve so as to stay alive for as long as they can but that wear and tear with the passage of time inevitably drag those living things down into decline and death.  He says that instead, members of a population are genetically programed for the well being of the population, not the individual, and that this requires death for the members that have been around long enough.  Without death, overpopulation will create unsustainable demands on food and the other resources necessary for the population's well-being....

 I have some things to say about Ross Douthat's wish that there was a viable middle ground between standard medicine and alternate treatments--a way of perhaps blending the two to the benefit of both kinds of treatments.  I'm heartily with him on that but it's only in an alternate world that that happens.   I think of an example from the history of Christianity and astronomy that illustrates the point for me.  I don't know how helpful it will be for you.  Copernicus proposed that the Earth revolved around the Sun and the Catholic Church had no problem with that.  100 years later Galileo said the same thing and he was put on trial, convicted of doctrinal error and confined to his residence for the rest of his life.  What happened in those 100 years?  I'll tell you.  There was a Reformation with the reformers saying that the only authority for spiritual matters was the Bible, not whatever Catholic Church wanted to tack on to Christianity....

 I want to tell you about my friend, Maria.  I've referred to her before but not by name.  She's the woman that gets Vitamin C infusions the same time I do.  I've spoken of her as the women with whom I have a good rapport.  We yack and yack.  She was diagnosed with Stage IV esophageal cancer a few years ago.  It had been caught so late and was so unresponsive to standard treatment that her doctors gave up on her.  She was told that she did not have many months left to live and that she should get her things in order. Maria was in her mid-fifties with an adolescent son and a husband with whom she had recently married (I may have that part of the story wrong.  They may have just been living together and got married after the diagnosis.  Doesn't make much difference.)   Anyway, too early to be dying of cancer.  She went passive,  overwhelmed by the news.  Her first husband, the father of the adolescent, had died of ...

 I promised more on Ross Douthat.  I'll start from an odd point.  When I first got saved, I had the very definite idea that I must not sit off to the side and watch what was going on.  I had to be sure to be doing what was going on.  Since, at the time, we were full flower Charismatic at our church, that meant that I did some pretty bizarre stuff.  Praying quite loudly, singing spontaneous melodies in tongues meaning that I sang words I had not formed in my mind through any natural process and whose meaning I did not know. I would go forward whenever there was some kind of prayer request.  Other stuff too.  My natural tendency would have been to sit back and make a critical assessment.  I was caused to know that if I were to do that, I would be drinking poison.  I would have gone outsider when what I needed to do was be inside.  I always had been sort of an outsider anyway and I really was with these folks.  I was a professiona...