I Live in a Lab

It’s hard to write when you’re wondering why your body is breaking down and to what extent it intends to break down further.  My blood work reads like a horror story in places, most of it spelling out a resurgence of cancer.  (The official term is “regression”; but the cancer, if returning, is actually progressing.  Doesn’t it say a lot about us that our veneration of the word “progress” will not allow it to be used of any unpleasant event, even when it’s the obvious logical choice?)  Yet this is not entirely true: what my tests show, rather, is that I have an abundance of cellular particles floating around loosely, abnormally, in my blood, and that proteins are not being integrated effectively in the restoration of strained muscle cells.

At least… well, that’s interpretation competing with the “resurgent cancer” hypothesis.  I seems to me to account for more of the alarming values on the blood tests, and it also has a likely culprit within easy reach: the testosterone-suppressor Firmagon, which I have been taking in excessive doses (50 percent excessive) for half a year due to a clerical error.  Testosterone is needed for cell repair and is also an anti-inflammatory—but it feeds prostate cancer, as well, and hence is regularly targeted in prostate patients by drugs like Firmagon and Lupron.  As a result, unrepaired muscle tissue, overdosed with this poison, could well be expected to spill its disiecta membra into the blood system while also giving the patient chronic, anguishing pain (far worse, believe me, than, anything I encountered with cancer during our first tussle back in May).  An elevated Prostate-Specific Antigen test number (PSA) might well follow: the PSA’s mechanism apparently reads inflamed tissue indiscriminately as cancer cells on the move.  But my “regressing” cancer (please God that it indeed be regressing!) isn’t striking me along bones as it did earlier.  It manifests precisely as muscle pain—all over the place, dependent upon what I’ve been doing lately.  A long walk yesterday?  Pain in the glutes.  More stair-climbing than usual?  Pain in the calves and knees.  And a torn triceps I incurred in making a baseball video has constantly nagged me for three months now.  Clever son of a bitch, that cancer: it finds your most vulnerable muscle tissue and sets it on fire!

Or… well, it really doesn’t, you know.  In my personal experience, cancer doesn’t work that way at all.  Even when it was raging through me like a forest fire in late May (thanks to the American medical establishment’s refusal to diagnose and treat it: more important concerns like COVID had preoccupied it), I could always take a two-mile walk or do a medium-level workout without great discomfort.  I wasn’t paralyzed with pain.  No, I contend that Firmagon has done this to me.  My PSA had flatlined throughout the months of late summer and early fall: then, just before Thanksgiving, it surged to 42, and lately has almost doubled up on that plateau.  Yet there’s no specific generator to account for such an explosive resurgence.  I’ve been taking all my supplements; my vegan diet is exemplary; I keep very regular hours and nap during the day if my night’s sleep goes poorly; I religiously adhere to the regimen of therapies (hyperthermic pads and lamps both targeted and full-body, ultrasound cleansing of the prostate area—the prostate itself having been almost fully removed, by the way—and even hours of experimental Rife technology five days a week).  There’s simply no “driver” for a riproaring comeback of the disease in my case.

What there is, instead, is a steady build-up of Firmagon in my system for months.  I don’t know what the critical mass would be to trigger muscular meltdown: that is, I don’t know how much Firmagon you have to overdose on for how long before your muscles go to pieces.  By listening to my body, though, I’m utterly convinced that escape velocity for massive malfunction was reached some time shortly before Thanksgiving.  My body, after all, is a lab wherein I live every minute of my days.  I get to observe constantly running experiments there which men in white coats may never hear about.  Some of them don’t want to hear: they have their test numbers, their “objective evidence”.  This is the feigned wisdom of a pompous fool, however.  Numbers require interpretation.  If Smith’s manager refuses to start him in a World Series game that Jones is pitching, the decision may or may not be justified by Smith’s never having landed a hit against Jones.  Perhaps the sample size is small.  Perhaps Smith hit the ball hard most of the time but was unlucky.  Perhaps he had only faced Jones before in Jones’s home park, where the hitting background is poor.  Perhaps, through trial and error, he has completely overhauled his approach to Jones.

The further possibility exists, I acknowledge, that if Firmagon overdose stresses the system as much as I’m conjecturing, cancer cells may opportunistically profit from the chaos and proliferate while the body’s immune reaction remains focused on ailing muscle.  That just might be the driver for a genuinely resurgent cancer.  I’ve been poking about this morning into the subject of cachexia: the degeneration of skeletal muscle implicated in as many as a third of all cancer deaths, it seems.  One government site observes with a relevance to my case that’s pretty alarming, “Researchers still need to dig deeper into how cachexia develops in patients with cancer… and how its course is influenced by everything from nutrition and physical activity to disease-specific factors, such as reduced testosterone levels caused by cancer therapy or opioids to treat pain” (my italics).  That sentence froze me in my tracks.  Yet the onset of my muscle pains has been so precipitous, and my previous health was so unusual in a man of my age, that I’ll cling to the optimistic view of my still having time to flush Firmagon from my system and right the ship.  As I write these words, I’m engaged in a day-long fast with heavy water-drinking.  We’ll see.  At some point, you know, optimism is the only card one has left to play.

My present doctor has heard out my theories and very helpfully offered to keep me closely monitored for further verification, all the while encouraging me, as well, to lay the ground for some aggressive kind of cancer-fighting strategy.  I would return to the Immunity Therapy Center in a heartbeat if I could afford another long stay in Tijuana.  Even though entrusting me with booster shots of dangerously excessive potency was the gaffe of a low-level ITC employee, it’s the sort of thing that could happen anywhere.  (And believe me, it does.)  In the meantime, I’m working in my little lab and watching.  I need the honest truth, not a narrative that eases my mind; but I also need a sensible truth, not a line of crunched numbers that permits an arrogant “expert” to play God with my life.

I have this to say in closing: are you comfortable surrendering your life and lives of your children to guys in white coats who’ve never met you—who stick you in masks, confine you to four walls, declare public spaces off limits to you, and soon may decree regally that you be forced to accept an inoculation—all because… well, because they’ve actually never met you?  Because their Olympian vision isn’t obscured by farmhouses and shop fronts?  Because they have numbers at their fingertips, and you have only experiences?  Are you among their vast throng of idolaters?  I suppose I was, too, in the early days of my cancer… and then, after they had very nearly killed me with their indifference—their exclusive attention to the “big picture”—I learned the importance of working away in my lab. 

Is Fretting Over Politics Worth Shortening Your Time on Earth?

I don’t know where my cancer came from.  To be clear, we all have cancer cells circulating within us like so many little time bombs… but a healthy person’s immune system is up to the task of diffusing them, or at least sand-bagging them.  Why did my system fail?  I didn’t drink or smoke.  I never ate junk food or sweets (well, hardly ever), and I worked out vigorously for an hour a day.  Why me?

Genetics?  Prostate cancer is particularly hard to trace in that it only affects males, of which my mother’s side of the family featured very few to study.  I was under the impression that my one uncle died of a cancer first appearing in the prostate… but my big brother says “no” to that (and big brothers are always right, you know).  So… who’s next on the suspect list?

Could it be stress?  I’m hearing more and more about that culprit, and he has no alibi in my case.  I “stressed out” horribly at times during my academic career.  I walked away from all three tenure-track appointments I once occupied, not because I was facing release or dismissal, but because I couldn’t stand the steady onslaught of back-stabbing.  (At one institution, a dean urged me to stop publishing because I was making my colleagues envious; at another, I was told—oh-so-confidentially—to cast my vote at departmental meetings in conformity with the subtle hints of our Buddha-like chairman.  At all three jobs on occasion, my schedule was deliberately arranged to keep me yoyoing to and from campus from early morning to late evening, a tactic deployed against no one else around me.)  I had all the signs of clinical depression numerous times over these years.  Could I have been incubating cancer over that span because my immune system had been worn down?  Were my ruthless “scholarly” superiors planting my future road with deadly mines?

Whatever the truth may be, I’ve certainly chosen “stress reduction” to be a prime objective in my overhauled life as a “cancer survivor”.  (I’m using too many quotes; but honestly, all of us who survive in this life are cancer survivors, whether we know it or not.)  I haven’t entirely given up social media, though one social medium has apparently given me up: several Twitter friends are no longer receiving my posts after my five-week hiatus at Tijuana’s Immunity Therapy Clinic.  (No, nothing to see there: move on.)  Nevertheless, I’m very consciously awarding a lot less attention to politics.  I know we’re supposed to be activists, to get off our fundaments and mobilize, etc., etc.  Daniel Horowitz’s interview of Shannon Joy last week (Episode 686 of Conservative Review) left me blessing young people with confidence, energy, and appropriate poise.  But I’ve personally never been able to take the field for a few downs without transforming into Cu Chulainn during one of his supernatural distortions.  I get too worked up.  The younger and more stable of you will have to play this game without me.  (Seriously, when I did indeed play high school football, my classmates remarked upon my fearsome, homicidal transformations into a fireball of hatred.  I quit the game and detest it to this day because I could never regard it as “play”.)

If what I’m about to write strikes some of you as quietism, I apologize.  It’s not my intent to endorse the attitude so common among my wife’s Appalachian relatives: “You can’t do nothing about nothing in politics.  Why vote for any of ’em?”  This is not unlike the attitude I discovered among the good people of Tijuana—and many who crossed my path were truly good people, by my estimate.  They cared about me when my own countrymen crossed to the road’s far side and hastened their step, leaving me to bleed out like the mauled traveler in the Good Samaritan parable.  I had to fight down tears when I left the nurses who had attended me.  They knew—every one of them knew well—that their nation rested firmly in the squalid hands of hooligans and shysters.  And there was nothing they could do about it, so they just got on with their own tiny bit of existence.

Down the backstreets surrounding our hotel, my wife and I would take occasional walks.  Empty storehouses and busy repair shops would alternate with ornate residences guarded by high fences and vicious dogs.  All of it cheek by jowl.  Strange.  But that’s how people live, in Mexico and in most of the world outside the U.S.  You cling to your bit of turf and try to keep it safe.  What goes on beyond the reach of Massimo’s canines is none of your business.

Defeatist?  Quietist?  Yes, indeed… but more and more, this attitude is also survivalist in the U.S. of A.  Just one very brief illustration.  Jeff Sessions, one of the most principled men in politics over the past couple of decades and perhaps the most coherent, consistent advocate of maintaining our national sovereignty over that time, recently lost his seat to an “I’m for Trump” cheerleader whose position on border security might as well be Chuck Schumer’s—or Thom Tillis’s, or Kay Granger’s: all three of them (I mean, including Tuberville) ostensibly opposed to Trump on his signature issue yet endorsed by him because they stroked his ego.  The “Trump base”—disappointingly, but not surprisingly—cannot distinguish between the positions championed by their superhero and the superhero’s charisma.  They will follow him to their own destruction (and quite possibly to his own destruction, as his impulsive reactions shred his message) rather than measure every local candidate against the Constitution.

And that’s what’s happening on the law-and-order side.  On the other… chaos, tear-it-all-down, helter-skelter—“anywhere out of this world” (in Baudelaire’s immortal phrase).  While the Republican, self-styled “conservative” punditry derides Biden’s dementia and indicts CNN’s mendacity, educated, middle-class white folks (some of them in my own family) draw all their information from… CNN, and also grow weary of masks, quarantines, and Armageddon without any speculative genius for tracing our national lockdown back to root causes.  They just “want it to stop”; and the Man doesn’t help them figure out where it started because he can’t admit that Anthony Fauci’s canonization was a gross lack of judgment (any more than he’ll concede that Jeff Sessions’ self-recusal was not responsible for the Mueller witch-hunt).

Average citizens won’t unravel this tangle; and even if they do, the President himself will continue to foul his lines even without a shamelessly lying mass media to sabotage the ship.  Our future isn’t going to be rosy.  It’s going to be a Mexican prickly pear.

But we’ll survive somewhere in the cracks, most of us.  The Pat Buchanans and Diana Wests who warn that the republic will be destroyed forever if Donald Trump isn’t re-elected have assigned death to us if we don’t get chemo.  I figure I could hunker down and live in Mexico 2.0 if I had to, though—and I figure I’ll probably have to.  (Hell, I’m already there: my government just bled my wife and me for over $300 to get a passport in case I have to return to ITC in Tijuana… and kept our birth certificates lest we try to travel on those again, and keeps all we paid into Medicare for forty years, and refuses to pay out a dime of it for the medical strategy that saved my life. Is this Mexico… or the Soviet Union?) If my future neighbors are people like the ones I met in Tijuana, then they’ll be much truer to me in our common misery than the elitist medical mandarins north of the border who left me to die as they hazed an ailing herd into costly, toxic treatments.

For that matter, Pat and Diana, what I consider most dangerous about the Left is its utopianism: i.e., its conviction that an inspired few can play God and make the world perfect.  When we of the Right, in turn, lament the passing of a Shining City on a Hill, aren’t we falling for the same mirage?  The corporatist state that birthed the Medi-Pharm Complex, you know, was a cancerous by-product of Mom-and-Pop Main Streets horribly mutated (at the expense of Mom and Pop) into ravenous wealth engines.  We lost our own way, and now the vultures are gathering around a corpse that has rotted from the inside out.

Mend your fence, grow your garden, and keep your head down.  Build locally if you can: stop letting pseudo-messiahs insert themselves into your hometown politics.  That’s my advice… and, for that matter, it’s Horowitz’s and Mrs. Joy’s.  Yet I need peace: I personally need a lot of it right now. There’s no live grenade I call fall on to save the rest of my squadron, so… so I’m not going to blow myself up in the garage. Why should you die before your time, asketh the Preacher?

Live what years God has given you on this earth.  Stop trying to make earth into heaven in your impatience with heaven’s hazy plan.