I went and had my three month bladder scope today. Guess what? I was shown the nasty little tumor right there on the screen in my urologist's office. I should be getting used to this routine, but I am really not. They'll schedule scope surgery again and I'll heal for a month or so. It could be a lot worse.
Having said that it also sucks! I eat well but am overweight and don't get enough exercise. Those are probably not the reason the nasty little polyps keep growing on the bladder wall like little cauliflowers. The rate at which these things come back is 70% so I have the odds against me.
My urologists likes to make an analogy with skin cancers that also keep coming back in different places. I don't dare remind him that the dermatologist does not usually put you out and invade your body.
Read on below because I'm in the mood for some repetition of what Cancer can mean in a broader social context.
I am always forced to remember Norman Mailer who I am not ashamed to admit has always been a favorite of mine. He wrote some fine essays about plastic and cancer. Here's a bit from the Harvard Crimson by Jesse Kornbluth in 1967 :Norman Mailer
It is fashionable to call Norman Mailer the bad boy of American literature and leave it at that. The underground stories about him circulate, and the incidents he provokes have become legend. Who has not heard about his poetry reading at the 92nd St. YMHA in New York, when officials rang down the curtain during a performance for the first time in twenty years? Or his nomination of Hemingway for President? Or his own candidacy for Mayor of New York? Or his belief that plastic causes cancer? Mailer, the cynics say, is "paceless, tasteless, and graceless."
. People had a hard time understanding Mailer but his brand of sarcasm and his use of metaphor resonated with my way of thinking. That's why I enjoyed him so much.
So now I have cancer and it brings back his metaphors about plastic and our society and this disease that was so appropriate for what we are. We have created a place to live and a way to die in it that plastic is so good a symbol for.
Then I have to think about Dan Agin who wrote, among many other good things, More Than Genes: What Science Can Tell Us About Toxic Chemicals, Development, and the Risk to Our Children
We are all shaped by our genetic inheritance and by the environment we live in. Indeed, the argument about which of these two forces, nature or nurture, predominates has been raging for decades. But what about our very first environment--the prenatal world where we exist for nine months between conception and birth and where we are more vulnerable than at any other point in our lives?
In More Than Genes, Dan Agin marshals new scientific evidence to argue that the fetal environment can be just as crucial as genetic hard-wiring or even later environment in determining our intelligence and behavior. Stress during pregnancy, for example, puts women at far greater risk of bearing children prone to anxiety disorders. Nutritional deprivation during early fetal development may elevate the risk of late onset schizophrenia. And exposure to a whole host of environmental toxins--methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, pesticides, ionizing radiation, and most especially lead--as well as maternal use of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or cocaine can have impacts ranging from mild cognitive impairment to ADHD, autism, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders. Agin argues as well that differences in IQ among racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups are far more attributable to higher levels of stress and chemical toxicity in inner cities--which seep into the prenatal environment and compromise the health of the fetus--than to genetic inheritance. The good news is that the prenatal environment is malleable, and Agin suggests that if we can abandon the naive idea of "immaculate gestation," we can begin to protect fetal development properly.
Cogently argued, thoroughly researched, and accessibly written, More Than Genes challenges many long-held assumptions and represents a huge step forward in our understanding of the origins of human intelligence and behavior.
I hope you make the connection between what Dan is talking about and what Mailer was doing with his metaphors.
Dan is a special person in my life. He was a postdoc in the lab at the University of Chicago where I did my PhD work. He and Howie Nash and I had a study group where we went through Courant's two volumes on the Calculus like starving men. We did this all being very well versed in higher math so it was like we were into an art form rather than math. If you don't know these you have missed something in life:
Differential and Integral Calculus, Vol. One
Differential and Integral Calculus, Vol. 2
This is one of the most important and influential books on calculus ever written. It has been reprinted more than twenty times and translated into several other languages, including Russian, and published in the Soviet Union and many other places. We especially want to thank Marvin Jay Greenberg, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, University of California at Santa Cruz, for his Appendix on Infinitesimals, which includes recent discoveries on Hyperreals and Nilpotent Infinitesimals, and for his bibliography and references, which include up-to-date references to current publications in 2010. A professor of mathematics writes: "I've enjoyed with great pleasure your foreword, discovering many interesting things about Courant's life and his thoughts. In particular, your citations about the antithesis between intuition and rigor were very illuminating, because it corresponds to the methodological thread I'm trying to follow developing the theory of Fermat reals. "Infinitesimals without "mysticism", explicit or fogged into unclear logical methods, seems possible. Now, I think we can make a step further, because the rigor increases our possibility to understand."
I suspect that most of you reading this will not see why this has anything to do with cancer, but some of you will possibly understand that we are talking about a science that has grown without being constrained by boundaries that most folks find natural.
In my case it led to very interesting career for Dan was the person who directed me to consider doing my postdoc in Israel with Kedem and Katchalsky studying the new non-equilibrium thermodynamic approach to biological problems. I won't go further with this here, but you can see where it led if you have followed me in other diaries.
Finally, Mailer and I are both political animals and we resonate about cancer in many ways politically.
It seems clear that we created a world where preventing cancer was too hard to try. Rather we let an industry grow and feed into the capitalist oligarchy. Prevention would destroy the opportunity for profit by the medical industry, drug industry, etc.
So like Mailer I find myself talking about the disease in broad terms rather than think about my years of working with the head of our Cancer Institute making computer models of how chemo works.
I am haunted by my father's ghost. He died from complications of prostate cancer at 82. His is an example of how diseases can be mismanaged but that is another story.
I am approaching 80 and my cancer is not like his and I have as much confidence as one can have that my urologist knows what he is doing. So I await them to schedule the surgery and then look to the following three months waiting to be scoped again. You never know how you will die. I am in no hurry to end my existence since I am enjoying life too much. I have so much to write about and enjoy it so much. I am thankful for this site and its diversity for I can indulge myself in the many facets of the reality I have come to know. Thanks for reading.