Return

Last Tuesday, September 11^th, I returned from the hospital, where I had spent 17 days.  To make a long story short, my prostate cancer has metastasized to my lungs – an exceedingly rare occurrence – and a tumor traveled from a pulmonary vein into my heart.  For reasons I don’t understand, the tumor has collected blood clots, which have a chance of breaking off and causing a stroke or worse.  What are the chances?  A surgeon told me that it’s less than 50% but more than 1%.  He estimated it at 15%, but he has no firm data to support his guess.  In the meantime, my doctors are trying to dissolve the clots with anticoagulants and to retard the spread of the cancer with new medicines.  They sent me home to get strong enough for chemotherapy, which as I understand it would be given to me in the spring.  I’m considerably stronger now than I was when I left the hospital and I hope to recover sufficiently to walk in Prospect Park again.   Right now I’m doing my best to enjoy what there is to be enjoyed – and there is still much to be enjoyed.

I’ll try to return to posting three times a week.  I’ve several posts in mind about my hospital experience.  If I stop posting, don’t assume that a clot has found its mark. I expect a few more gaps in the months ahead.

To those who have sent me e-mails, I apologize for not having yet answered them.  I haven’t opened my e-mail for almost a month.  That’s next.

A Holiday

No, I'm not really at a spa, but it feels like one.  My room has a safety deposit box, I'm given a snazzy blue bathrobe with white piping which covers robes that don't make look as if I'm in rags, I order my meals from room service at whatever time I want to eat, and the food is not only delicious, but beautifully presented.  There's an afternoon tea service.  A single pink carnation stands in a pretty blue bottle on my bedside table.  For the first time in my hospital experience, I'm given my anti-reflux medication before breakfast, when it should be taken, rather than after.  Television service is free and the channel numbers corresponding to various networks are given.  My room provides free Wi-Fi service.  You can order meals for your guests.  It's a great place to be if you have to be in a hospital.

I entered it on Saturday afternoon, August 25th, thinking I'd be dismissed soon, but they keep finding things wrong with me.  I'm now scheduled for a minor operation on Friday, August 31 and will spend Labor Day weekend here. If all goes well, I'll return to posting next week.  Wish me luck.

Perfection

While preparing a commentary on “Shoftim,” last week’s Torah portion, I came across a statement by Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993), the noted Talmud Scholar and religious leader of Modern Orthodox Jewry.  He said that at Rosh Hashana we are judged on our efforts to perfect not only ourselves but also society.  We are all obliged, he said, to seek out the injustices in our society and to try to correct them.  

If I believed that on Rosh Hashana the Power of the World would examine my behavior over the past year and decide whether to write my name in the Book of Life, as the tradition has it, I would be examining my will right now.  I’ve done nothing during the past year, if ever I have, to ascend the scale of perfection or to improve the world.

But Rav Soloveitchik’s s statement made me think what I’d be like if I were perfect.  I’d never speak disparagingly of another person.  This morning, when I made our bed, I’d have smoothed over the wrinkles at the end of it.  I’d never burp, fart, or pick my nose when no one was around to see, smell, or hear me.  I’d be unfailingly kind, patient, empathetic, and considerate, and I’d speak only when it was appropriate to do so.  I wouldn’t complain about my various aches and pains.  And I’d leave the last piece of chocolate in the refrigerator for my wife.

And what would the world be like if it were “corrected,” if all the injustices were removed.  There would be no car alarms going off in the middle of the night because there’d be no need for car alarms.  We’d leave our car doors and our house doors unlocked because there’d be no theft.  Nor would there be any more stop and frisks.  Police forces would be drastically reduced, but in a perfect world there’d be plentiful alternative sources of employment for them.  Able people at the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid would rise, and the rich would no longer be able to pass on their advantages to their children.  In a perfect world, we’d figure out what to do about those who are lazy or incapable and fall to the bottom of the pyramid.  And of course there’d be no more war and no more increase in global warming.  The industries that produce weapons would reconfigure their machines and find other markets for their goods.  There’d be gender equality in all spheres of life, and the whales and polar bears would no longer have to be saved.  Furthermore, in a perfect world, everyone would be perfect, so that social interactions would be unfailingly pleasant.

If I were perfect, but nobody else was, I’d soon be regarded as a pain in the ass.  If the world were perfect, there’d be no more “causes,” there’d be nothing left to fight for, there’d be no justification for complaint, and life would be irretrievably dull.  But we are so far from perfection in ourselves of in society that there’s plenty of room for improvement, with no danger of attaining perfection.   I think I’ll start with society.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Silver Linings

Doctors have different strategies for delivering bad news.  In the spring of 2007, my urologist at St. Lukes Roosevelt Hospital  perched himself on the window sill of my hospital room and said “I think we need to have a little talk.”  This was his introduction to telling me that I had prostate cancer. 

In 2011, my regular doctor ordered a bone scan because my hip hurt.  When I entered his office to hear the results, he said “I’m so sorry.  Your cancer has spread to the bone.”

Last week my urologist, at Memorial Sloan Kettering, after performing an unusually painful cystoscopy, said “how would you like to wear a catheter for awhile?”  He went on to explain that he found growths not in my urethra, as I expected he would, growths which he would excise as he had done several times before, but in the penis.  These were inoperable.  “So what’s the story?” I asked him.  “It looks as if you’ll need to be attached to a tube and a bag from now on,” he said.  This would either be a conventional catheter or a device that entered the bladder directly. It was clear that it was painful for him to tell me this.  It wouldn’t be “awhile” that I’d be wearing a catheter or its equivalent, unless this was his way of telling me that my life expectancy is exceedingly short, but as long as I live.  The “awhile,” I guess, was his way to break the news gradually.

Well, it’s not so bad.  I won’t be wearing a colostomy bag, which collects feces, and to my mind is even worse.  And I won’t have to swallow a pill with a tiny camera, as a dear friend of mine must do this week, in order to find the source of unexplained bleeding.  And there’s a silver lining to my cloud.  I’ll never again have to get up in the middle of the night to urinate.  Lately I’d been getting up every hour or half hour, disturbing my wife in the procress.  She's sleeping better now and as for me, I’m at last sleeping through the night, and I feel more rested than I have for years.  Now I can drink soup and dinner and not worry about it.  One more advantage:  I wear long elasticized socks to control the lymphedema in my legs and feet.  I need to check them constantly and pull them up if they’ve slipped down.  But now the straps that keep the urine bag affixed to one leg keep that sock up all day long.  It’s an ill wind that blows no one good.

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

The Sixth Grade

In the wall of my study hangs a black and white photograph of my sixth-grade class.  All of us are there except one. He was the most popular boy in our class and easily the most brilliant, becoming a professor of applied mathematics.  I would often daydream that I’d save him from a fire by carrying him out of a burning building.  (At the time he was among the shorter boys and I was among the taller.)

He is not the only person who has left this world.  The cute girl in the second row, who lived next door to my aunt and her family, died young.  Since those of us who are still alive are 80 or 81, the gaps in our numbers are probably considerable by now.  Next to her sits my first date, whom I took to the circus when I was thirteen.

In the third row stands a tall girl who lived in the street behind ours.  When I told her, forty or so years later, that I had had a crush on her then, she turned unsmiling away from me.

We’re standing on the steps of our school building, with the tallest standing on the top step and the shortest sitting on the ground.  Some of the boys are wearing ties.  Others are wearing knickers with long socks.  Most of the boys and girls are fresh faced and smiling, with the notable exception of yours truly, who’s scowling at the camera.  My head is topped by a mass of curls.  I was tall for my age so I was standing on the top step. Every time I look at myself in that photograph, I’m struck by how very dark I was.  This was no tan.  This was me.  “Dark as the Ace of Spades,” my mother used to say of my father, and in that regard I am his son.

Even now, about 70 years later, I can still recall the names of about half the class.  I’d be thrilled to attend a reunion, but there’s almost no possibility of one’s being held.  What’s been the fate of my classmates?  My curiosity is almost great enough for me to join Facebook.  I’d enter the name of our school, the John Ward School.  Perhaps that would reconnect me with some of my sixth-grade colleagues. 

Looking at their youthful faces now, there’s no way of knowing who will become distinguished, who will fail at their careers, who will remain single and who will divorce, who will suffer more than average heartbreak, and who will die young.  No one looking at that scowling, dark fellow with the mass of curls would ever predict that he’d amount to much.  Considering that I was born into a prosperous family that could afford to give me a first-class education, perhaps I should have achieved more.  But I'm satisfied with what I've done.  In any case it's too late now to change the assessment, if anyone is keeping score. 

2010-2012 Anchises - An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved

Stages of Life

My niece recently published a beautiful tribute to her mother, detailing the debilitation age has brought but celebrating a spirit that insists on not letting these disabilities keep her from traveling or from otherwise participating in the life around her.  (lazygal.blogspot.com/2012/08/my-mother-is-alien.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FNqJH+%28Killin%27+time+being+lazy%29).  My niece’s mother is my sister, six years younger than I am and a college classmate of my wife, which was a friendship that resulted in our marriage.

Radcliffe permitted her to keep a car so that she could readily visit our father who was a widower and lived alone.  It was a white Ford convertible with a blue top.  Once when driving with the top down, she stopped next to a truck at a traffic light.  The truck driver leaned out his window and shouted, “Hey, Red, you’re looking like a queen!”  And she must have looked like one because she was a spectacularly attractive young woman, with her curly red hair and her long legs, shown to advantage in the chorus line of a college musical in which she participated.  But she viewed her attractiveness as a disadvantage, fearful that people valued her only for her looks.

Her hair is now white – I think she was glad when the color turned – but she was never simply a good-looking woman.  Of our parents’ three children, she is, in my opinion, the cleverest. When I told her that I loved raisins, she said, “they’re your raison d’être.”  When I asked her if she’d like some wine, she asked for “a thimbolic amount.”   

It’s hard to apprehend the physical changes that have overtaken her.  She has difficulty rising from chairs.  She can no longer take long walks.  “She still has the chorus girl legs…” writes my niece, “but the knees are swollen, as are her ankles and there are no high-kicks in the near future.”  Three of her fingers are notably arthritic.  The changes my niece saw were so great that she viewed her mother as an alien, a stranger.  It seems unfair that my sister’s physical disabilities are so much greater than mine.

Can this be the same person whom I tortured, along with my brother, with tales of Cobra Island?  Can she be the girl I drove to and from school and took shopping for clothes after our mother died?  Is this the bride at whose wedding I served as best man?  My niece summed it up very well when she noted my sister’s infectious laugh.  “My mother has a laugh that can verge on the hysteric – so much fun except when she’s driving!  And she’s Mom again.” 

My sister’s laughing sets me off on a laughing jag and together we laugh until it’s hard to keep our breath.  We stop, breathe deeply, and start laughing again.  As long as we’re both compos mentis, and even if we’re not, I trust this will never change.



2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Drinking Cocoa

A recent study suggests that drinking cocoa with flavanol daily improves the mental functioning of patients with mild dementia   

(http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2012/08/14/Cocoa-may-help-mild-cognitive-impairment/UPI-74461344922109/#ixzz23djNU0tg).

Dr. Giovambattista Desderi, director of the Geriatric Division of the University of L’Aquila in Italy, reported that 90 elderly persons with mild cognitive impairment drank daily either 990 mgs, 520 mgs, or 45 mgs of a dairy based cocoa flavanol drink for eight weeks.  (A flavanol is an antioxidant found in various types of plants, particularly the cocoa plant.)  Not only did participants who drank higher levels of cocoa have higher overall cognitive scores at the end of the study than those who drank lower levels, but the blood pressure also decreased in those who drank high and intermediate levels of flavanols daily.

Wouldn’t it be fine to drink cocoa daily?  If that can improve mental functioning in those with mild dementia, can it prevent the occurrence of dementia in the first place?  Would it reduce my blood pressure?  I hereby volunteer to participate in a study that examines these questions, as long as I’m in the group that gets to drink the most cocoa. 

2010-2012 Anchises-An Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved