What Cancer Treatments Have Wrought

Its all just fairly bizarre. I’m talking, of course, about Cancer Related Fatigue, which I happen to live with on a daily basis.

The point of this blog is not to troll the depths of sympathy from my dedicated and dear readers but to give them an insight into what cancer treatments do to the patient after the treatments end; life goes on (fortunately) though the collateral damage can be significant; in my case, it means fatigue.

To begin with, I probably shouldn’t have the amount of fatigue that I do. When I tell my doctors about my fatigue, I get the same glazed look and blank stare, and on to the next topic we go. Once when I showed my oncologist a book on Cancer Related Fatigue, he admitted he didn’t know anything about the subject. My other doctors are the same. In general, their view is that I shouldn’t be having these problems this long after my treatment has ended and – just maybe – it’s all in my mind or even I’m bending the truth so I can stay on disability and enjoy the good life.*

I assure you, that is not the case.

My fatigue does wax and wane; it is sometime better and sometimes worse, and it can flair up at any time. It is often completely debilitating. It completely mystifies me, and for the life of me I can’t make a clear line between cause and effect. Action A happens which leads to Effect B. No, it’s not like that at all. It seems to just do what it wants, for reasons only it understands, and the more I try to analyze it the less I understand. I will give you a good example. There are many times when I have slept well but, when I wake, I am incredibly fatigued, such that I can’t move – lifting my arm is a chore – and I just lay in bed like a lizard, completely still for a long, long, loooong time: still. The strange thing about this is that I’ve slept well; my body has been in a relaxed state for a long time so – logically – I shouldn’t have any fatigue. I shouldn’t, but I do.

So odd.

(Also, this situation is a canary in the mine: when I wake with fatigue, it’s a bad sign for the day.)

It is difficult to explain what bone numbing fatigue is like, and I myself had no frame of reference to understand it before I was diagnosed with cancer. First, fatigue has nothing to do with being tired. I can be completely rested but incredibly fatigued at the same time. The sleep system and energy system are two distinct systems. Second, cancer-related fatigue can be a low energy state but often means being without any energy at all. How can I depict this? A car can wait at a light, idling, and when the driver taps on the gas, it accelerates. In each case the engine is running. So, you can be watching a show on the couch (idling) and then get up and push mow the lawn (accelerating). Energy is available to draw from. I am different. I can be sitting at a traffic light waiting for it to turn but when I press on the gas, the car engine shuts off. I turn the key: nothing.  I’m stuck.

It’s cancer-related fatigue!

I clean up the kitchen, and I’m wiped out afterward. My kids are messing around in a good hearted way – just having fun – and I feel my energy drain. People talk to me and I have respond.  Problem: responding takes energy. Stores exhaust me, especially Walmart, as they blare out stimulation overdose on every aisle. Standing is often difficult, and when I’m out, the Earth seems to open up and swallow me; I just have to sit down. Gatherings of people with lots of people likewise drain me.  I love Church meetings but they can be dangerous. So can family gatherings and parent teacher conferences and visiting friends and so forth. Sometimes when I sit, I feeling the energy drain out of me onto the floor. It’s weird.

It’s cancer-related fatigue!

If I push through anyway (or have to do so due to the circumstances), I sometimes can dredge up energy from some dark place I didn’t know existed. This, however, is fraught with pearl. Later my body aches as if I’ve been hit with a crow bar. It’s weird. Even if I rest, my body still aches from every joint. If I keep going, I get dizzy, and at at that point it gets scary. I try not to go that far. When we start wading into these waters, everything is gray and all sounds are like fingers-on-the-chalkboard. I enter into survival mode, and cannot bear anything or anyone, even myself. Often I just want to go to bed and be done with the day, hoping tomorrow is better. Sometimes tomorrow is better, sometimes not.

It’s cancer-related fatigue!

In these times I am completely debilitated. I have to retreat to a low intensity, low stimulation environment, and that means my bedroom. I spend a lot of time in my bedroom when I am fatigued; I don’t have a lot of choice. In my bedroom I don’t sleep and can’t focus enough to work – no, I need something very low intensity and ultra chilling, so I can read a light book on – of course history – or play chess on my phone, or look at Facebook posts. I’ve started to play Euchre on my phone. Sometimes I’ll look at the news, if it’s not too intense.

Then after a while, I can come out. I find that sometimes I can reintegrate myself into human society but sometimes it once again is all too much, and back into the bedroom I go. We can at times split the difference: be out with the people for 20 minutes – actually being the father and husband I would like to be – and then retreating into my room for rest for 20 minutes. Then out for 20 minutes, like letting the lion at the zoo out for a bit to see the people, then back in my room (cage). It works – sometimes.

I really haven’t figured a way out of this, and I try to moderate my activities, which isn’t always easy with eight kids, a job and an active Church life. I will do a bit of light work and then rest, and then do some more light work and rest some more. It works on some level right up until the moment it doesn’t work, but then again I figure I can’t spend my entire life in my bedroom. I have to do something. Weirdly, at times I am in a semi-functional state – able to be with people and do a few things – but underneath I am fatigued, though just not to the point of being debilitated. At least not yet. And sometimes I can think I’m ok and life life as if I’m a normal person, but the fatigue sneaks up on me, like an assassin. Then I just have to excuse myself.

I often think that there is a switch in my body that is tripped by something, and who knows what that can be? I can be doing fine for a month and even in February of this year I remember telling my son how much better I was feeling. And I was. But then something happened and – click – dark days come. One time I remember working hard outside as if I was a normal person and – click – I soon found myself in the dank dungeons of fatigue, and for quite a while. But then I will rest aggressively and feel a bit guilty about basically doing nothing – but, hey, what can I do in this state? – and this low energy state will linger on until one day – click – I seem to have energy again; not a lot but I can talk to people. Be with them. It’s really nice: to be able to talk to people. It’s great. And now we are on the uphill leg of the roller coaster, and life is good.

It does happen.

In general we can compare my energy situation to money. If you are rich, you can throw your money around: buy an expensive car, tip hugely at restaurants, buy impulsively on Amazon. It’s all good. But if you’re part of the working poor, every cent has to be spent carefully, lest splurging on lunches at Taco Bell or Wendys means that you can’t pay your rent that month. So you pinch pennies. That is me: energy poor and so very careful!

So, you learn to live life with limitations and boundaries, and who likes limitations and boundaries? No one. In my 55 year old mind I still inhabit a pre-cancer 18 year old body and get crazy ideas, like to go hiking up a mountain with my teenage boys or to spend an entire afternoon cleaning the garage. But when I go to do any of this, I am reminded of my limitations and boundaries. Its like in one of those movies where the circular cage bars come crashing down around the main character, and now he’s caught. So am I.

Yes, things need done, and I have a whole list in my head, and there in my head it mostly stays. I try to prioritize as much as I can, but it’s hard to know what to put first when everything (and sometimes everyone) is screaming out to you. Everyone and everything wants something. I do manage to do a few things, and the rest? There’s an art to letting it all go, and revisiting the question down the road when perhaps some energy has come in, like a letter from a good friend.

But if I do happen to figure out my boundaries and stay within them, in the midst of my busy life, I seem just fine to others, and have you thought of going back to work full-time, they ask me? I can even be deceived myself: perhaps I can. I feel better, after all. Why not? Day after day it is good, but then again I have been a good boy. I have stayed within my boundaries. The truth, however, is this: once I step outside my boundaries, I meet the fatigue monster again. I then remember I now inhabit a very finicky body pummeled by cancer treatments, and the entire thought is just ridiculous.

The good news also is that after my initial treatment in 2007, I was better after about five years. It took all of five years, but hey: who’s counting?! I remember those days, five years out, when my body returned to something close to normal. I remember telling Nathanial, my son, “I have energy! This is like Christmas!” And it was, and I did have energy, this blessed energy: enough energy to get through the day but – on every one of those days – I was done with that day by 10 p.m. The day was over for me by then, but before that bewitching 10 p.m. time, energy was mine.

All that unraveled in 2014 when I had my first cancer re-occurrence and the treatment that followed: seven months of very difficult chemo, a lung operation then a second re-occurrence, which was treated with high intensity radiation (Cyberknife). It was the same cancer treatment lineup as in 2007, just in a different order: 2007 – surgery then chemo and radiation; 2014 – chemo, surgery and radiation. The effects, however, were the same. Everything I gained in those five years after my initial treatment I lost, and there is no telling how long it will take my body to recover. I wouldn’t think it would take more than five years and perhaps less, but we shall see.

Alas, alas, who ever said cancer was supposed to be fun? What did we ever expect from all these treatments and surgeries? My poor body: I was always quite healthy right up until I was diagnosed with cancer in 2007. I often tell people I’m really quite healthy except for cancer, but that’s another subject. We can ask: what would cancer be without all this collateral damage? It would be a walk in the park, as they say, or a cruise in the Caribbean. It would be too easy, and who would want that?

*I should mention that there are few specimens like me. Eighty percent of those with esophageal cancer have passed away after three years. I am an outlier, and in a huge way.

Animal Update

Where would we be without our furry four legged creatures, and the two legged winged poultry that walk quacking around our yard? Far less enriched, I am sure. So I feel it important to give you – the dear readers of my blog – and update on our animal friends.

Nathanial with one of his Chickens

Mr. Kitty, the graceful killer of mice, moles and rabbits, is very thin, and there has been talk of putting the old psychopathic killer down, due to – of all things – constipation. Let’s just say it’s a long story, and the idea has been floated to use the .22 or asphyxiation by car exhaust, but no method has been settled upon. In the end, we might pay the buck to do the old gentleman in, but Father is balking at the cost.

Then there’s Melcore, the second cat, who somehow has lost the curiosity and stalking behavior of his species, and reacted to an old hound dog in the yard by running up a telephone pole just off our deck. Many comments on his fatness are made by bigoted members of our family, to which our 13 year old teenage girl strongly exhorted us not to “fat shame” the cat.

We started with six chickens and three ducks, but the life is cruel and the faceless man in a black robe and a sickle paid us a visit, and now we have suffered a loss. First Alfonzo, a poor young chick with a big heart, fell in the water dish and drowned, and we were thus one chick less. Then a dog came down from a neighbor’s house – an old hound dog that seemed to have barely enough energy to get out of the driveway – this old hound dog trapped two of our ducks under our back deck. The old hound roused himself enough to snap at one duck, flapping wildly, and killed it. He took it’s little life, an act of Darwinian cruelty. At the next duck he aimed his big jowls at with poor precision and only broke it’s leg with a wild snap of his hounddog mouth, and the duck managed to escape with its life.

So we are now have only two ducks, though one of the two is – yes – a lame duck and has to sort of hop and drag his lame leg behind him as he goes, whereas the other duck is just ducky, having never encountered the old hound dog. And whereas we started with six chicks we now have five, and they are no longer chicks but, like a young girl developing breasts, they have some chicken chunk on them now proving their adolescence.

The brain behind all this animal activity, my son Nathaniel, did some Google research and found out that ducks can be traumatized by the death of one of their kind, so he has devised a second, less stressful coop just for them, out of respect for their mental health issues. The ducks (on respite) and chicks (not on respite) were separated for a while, but when he just put them back together, they bonded again without any problems -fortunately.

Then just today I was pulling into my driveway and what did I see by our mailbox? Two turkey-like creatures, just gobbling away in the grass. I’ve never seen such a thing in 15 years of living in this house. What does this portend? More animals. Oh no.

The Birds I saw in my Driveway Today

Thoughts on History

I am a history buff and as such am always working on a history book. Right now I’m reading about the Oregon Trail; did you know that 500,000 people crossed 2170 miles – usually with a team of mules – from 1840 to 1860 or so? Many didn’t make it, but a lot did. That we have States in the Northwes is a testament to the settlers rugged determination.

The Oregon Trail, 1840-1860

You can learn a lot from history. It is amazing what people lived through. Imagine if you were born in 1890. You would witness one of the biggest wars ever (World War I), followed by one of the biggest plagues ever (The Spanish Flu, 1918 to 1920), followed by a rising prosperity (The Roaring 20s, at least in the US and among many but not all classes), followed by the biggest economic downturn (The Great Depression), followed by the biggest war (World War II), followed by the biggest peace and prosperity the world has ever seen (the Post War period) – and all in one lifetime!

Now that would be an interesting (though trying) life!

My children live in relative comfort and so did I growing up, but we know of one friend who grew up in Germany during World War II. At 14 we can ask: was she playing video games and texting her friends about pop culture? She was not, but rather traveling around Germany pretty much all on her own while it was being bombed by the Allies. Let us reiterate: she was 14 years old! She was in a train station when the air raid sirens went off, and down she went into the bomb shelter. Boom, boom, boom. When she came up, there was no longer a train station. Let’s just say it was a different world that people lived in back then.

It’s also interesting what could have happened but didn’t. Of course, many have speculated what if Germany had won the first world war (and they almost did), or what if they had won the Second World War – and they weren’t far off at certain points either – but after reading a book on the discovery of America, I came up with my own counterfactual history, mine being that of the New World. It turns out that European disease decimated Native American Indians; historians estimate that somewhere from 70 to 90 percent of them died once Europeans hit their shores. Seventy to ninety percent! It’s staggering. Given that, you can see how the Europeans subjugated them – there weren’t many left!

But imagine if biology worked the opposite way. Imagine how history would have turned out if Europeans took Native American diseases back to Europe and these diseases killed 70 to 90 percent of all Europeans! There is a good chance that I would be speaking the Iroquois language, if I was even here at all. Remember: it was difficult for Europeans to get a foothold in North America, and that was with many of the Indians no longer around. It might have been impossible if North America was teaming with Indians and Europe bereft of people.

It certainly is interesting to think in that manner but really doesn’t get you anywhere. We have to stay with what actually happened – that’s called history.

You can say that this history is the study of the interpretations by the victors of what happened as they understood it. It is hugely ethnocentric and at times verges on propaganda. At 26 years of age an Egyptian realized that despite what he had been taught his entire life, Egypt lost the 1973 Yom Kippur war with Israel. In Egypt it was taught as a win, and he had even visited museums as a child that showed displays of the amazing victory – victories that never happened. How could they do that?

We can find amusement in this, but I myself had the same experience. Imagine my surprise when I realized in my early 50s that most of what we did in the European theater of World War II was at most a sideshow. Normandy was great, as was the bombing (well, some now call it a war crime, but that’s another story) but the war was won and lost in the East, with the Soviet Union. That’s where the 80 percent of the war was fought, and at a tremendous cost for both Germany and the Soviet Union. So I had been taught a very america-centric version of the war my entire life.

This is just one example. Winston Churchill said, “I have not always been wrong. History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself.” And he did. I couldn’t find the quote, but he said the same of Neville’s Chamberlain – something like, “Poor Neville. History will not put him in a good light, because I plan to write that history.” Recent scholars have put the man in a better light: at the time, not one of Chaimberlain’s generals urged him to have a showdown with Hitler. The armed forces were just not ready, and he followed a policy of appeasing Hitler and buying time but at the same time building up the military – the same military that saved Winston’s hide later on. But we commonly read Churchill’s version of history. Just how it is.

And regarding this World War II – whose meaning and version China, Japan and others are still fighting over – we have Obama going to Hiroshima recently and, though he didn’t apologize for the dropping of the bomb, his very presence could be construed to mean that. Me the history buff read a book a year ago about the Battle of Japan, 1945-1947  which we won. This was the invasion of Japan that never happened and, after reading the book, I was strangely thankful for the atomic bomb. Lets just say the invasion would not have been pretty, and the Japanese government was prepared to sacrifice 10 to 20 million of its own citizens to get better peace terms. That’s a lot of people, and we haven’t even added in the American deaths.

In general, though, history is the study of foolish and sad epics punctuating the timeline of this Homo Sapien species. You would think we would have learned something after so many centuries and millenniums but no: we haven’t. And the more our technology has advanced, the more foolish and stupid we have become it seems. Look at the 20^th century, where blood was nothing and oppression outrageous. You would hope that there would be some development toward the good – some upward arc that shows that we were becoming more civilized – but we we seem to be going in the opposite direction, actually.

Finally, if I ever become a PhD of History, I’ve decided to write my thesis on this subject: What Times in History were the Best Times to Raise a Family. Someplace in all this mess there had to be periods where you could live a normal, boring life raising a family without calamitous wars, depressions and diseases intruding. I’ve read about the Harappa civilization of ancient India  that apparently lived in peace for a millennium; there is no signs of any strife or warfare for 1,000 years. Now that’s civilization! But of course, perhaps these tranquil periods are interspersed between all the craziness, and all the textbooks emphasize that which is upending, because by these events things change and move forward, and we can understand the ebb and flow of history this way. I agree. Still, it’s an interesting proposition: when would it have been best to bring up baby, and not just concentrate on the wars?

We can make two comments about our present era in the light of history. Obviously we are more refined and much more intelligent than our forefathers; they were obviously stupid (and what was World War I fought about anyway) but we certainly enlightened. Cough, cough. If anything we are dumber than they are. Just an opinion.

And second, is there any other era that can compare to ours when we look back? I don’t think so. It is really quite unique in every way. Well, isn’t every era unique? It is. But it seems something is different about our charged times – radically different – but it’s difficult to put my finger on it precisely. Perhaps its liberalism out of control, where like a bulldozer all laws are smashed and then tilled under. Perhaps its technology invading every aspect of life and changing the dynamics of human interaction. Perhaps its a great heaving of cataclysmic forces, swelling like a great tsunami ready to pound land and sweep the ignorant masses away. I don’t know. I guess I’ll just have to read more history books to find out.

Sodom

Back when I would read my Bible in the 80’s, I would come across this passage in Genesis 19:4, where two angels came to Lot’s house in Sodom, and I would read: “Before they had gone to bed, all the men from every part of the city of Sodom—both young and old—surrounded the house. They called to Lot, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.” At the time I had a hard time understanding how this could have happened: how could you have a society that was so depraved that two strangers were a target as soon as they came into the town – and not by just a few, but by every male who lived there.

I think I know now.

The progress has gone so fast, it’s hard to keep up with it these days. The late Anthony Scalia, in his dissenting remarks on the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling, mentioned that gay marriage wasn’t even on the map 15 years before the case came before the court, and now it had carried the day. That’s how fast it has gone.

One of the speakers at our Church conference began, “When I look at the wisdom the rulers of this age have, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.” I share his confusion: laughter or crying? It’s hard to know. Just when the weirdness has reached its max – when you couldn’t conceive of anything more weird than what has just entered Center Stage – something even weirder appears. With gay marriage we would seem to have come to the apex of weirdness. (We should mention that there has been no society over all ages or cultures that has recognized gay marriage, but suddenly our enlightened age has come to this new light about how we shall organize human affairs.) But, no, we are not done. From Stage Left comes the fringe of all fringes: transgender rights, and here we see not a fifteen year arc but like a two day arc, such that all schools in the US by Obama’s executive order have to now honor transgender bathroom rights.

Wow.

It is frightening to think what could come next, and when we try to imagine the next ultra weirdness, we instinctively think: that could never happen. But just you watch. It will. For the forces of good in this dark world are growing quiet, and a world is being forged that is without law: fertile ground for a man who will have all the answers, the anti-Christ. Just watch and see. We have only begun.

The Oh So Great Computer Guy

I often tell my clients not to encourage their sons and daughters to be a computer guy (or gal), as it is a life of constant frustration and a chasing after the wind, which on occasion is caught but oftentimes not.

Nothing ever works as it should. Sometimes it does work and that is a genuine surprise; when it doesn’t work, it’s just another day on the job. Nothing new. Of course it should work this way and always has, but for some strange reason – perhaps Neptune is now aligned with Pluto – now it will not. “What’s that error message saying?” the Computer Guy says incredulously under his breath, having never seen such a message. The next step is always the same: Google it, and then sift through web page after web page, trying to find a possible answer. Then: try this and try that. This will fail and that will fail. But eventually something will work.

We have caught the wind.

All of it should hang together but none of it does. It all works until it doesn’t work. There are definite standards right up until there are no standards, and Microsoft is king here: “Embrace and extend.” Crappy software pollutes the planet, Internet Explorer being the chief. It is at the same time both scourge of the software world and retribution from the Gods. Windows itself is not far behind, but a fair amount of software is sloppy these days and full of holes, Windows only being the worse. Updates to all this crappy software are designed to make them less crappy until it breaks something – “Thank you update!” – and then there’s the computer guy to figure it out. It’s his job.

Trying to tell the computer user why their computer has done this or that is pointless. They can’t understand and you – the Oh So Great Computer Guy – can’t explain it, they being a mere mortal. Many times it does it because it does it, or shall I get into how the router assigns dynamic IP address to every host on the network and, by the way, an IP address is like a house address and has to be unique; your letter can’t arrive at two addresses, now can it? We have lost them many sentences ago, and their eyes show confusion; the Computer Guy pauses and realizes its best to use the easiest explanation: it just happened.

It’s all complicated, too, even for the computer guy. The amazing thing is that any of it works at all. The operating system (whether Android, Windows, Linux etc.) has millions of lines of code behind it and is complicated, as is the hardware, which all has to work together hand in glove with the OS, and on top of all this are the programs – complicated themselves – all of which are connected to the great and complicated internet, which shoots packets around the world believe it or not like cars on a train being disconnected and taking different tracks to the destination, then all reaching it and being reconfigured into a proper train again; that’s how the internet works, and somehow it works. You want a page on Hungarian history and a server in Budapest gets the request and sends it under the Atlantic to you, but part of it goes via London and another via Lisbon, then arrives at your PC in your living room or on your smart phone at the beach. How crazy is that? Then there’s your teenager complaining that the web page took four seconds rather than two to load, and can you do anything to make the internet faster?

The Computer Guy can cause great joy and great destruction. When he with his magic gets it to work, there is joy and thankfulness for this Oh So Great Computer Guy. The printer didn’t work before but he has come, and in a few minutes it spits out pages. Or the computer wouldn’t connect but now it does. Amazing! But he can also be scourge of the devil: the backup he setup doesn’t work, and now all the banks records are lost (yes, this has happened), or it was working before he set foot in the building, and now it doesn’t. That gets into another concept fraught with pearl: cause and effect. The hardware (example: router) is working great but really is a bit flaky here and there; the Computer Guy arrives and does something routine and there you have it: the network has blown up. No internet, no programs, no work being done. There is blood in the hallways. At the hospital I had occasion to sit at a users computer and get my email. A phone call 20 minutes later: “What did you do to my computer? I died and now won’t boot.” No amount of words can convince them that I did nothing. I read an article that cautioned: never accept responsibility. Two Computer Guys work in a computer room: one at a server, another on the wiring hid in the floor. The server crashes, with much noise from the server guy, and the wiring guy makes his first mistake: he looks up. The second mistake is to say, “Oh.” The farm has been bought.

Microsoft is the gift that keeps on giving. Everyone’s computer is infected somehow. Some are not infected but we can call them Virgin. There are not many virgins left in the world anymore. Everything is hackable, and security – true security – is remarkably difficult to achieve. Users are generally clueless. When computer security experts were asked what is the most important aspect of computer security, an anti-virus program came in eighth. When average users were asked, an anti-virus program came in first. Cluelessness reigns. Whoever feels secure because they have an anti-virus program is not secure. Then this is what happens: their computer is hosed by a virus or, worse, ransomware. Bye bye system; bye bye data, and hello Computer Guy!

Backups are another sore point. Users commonly become convinced that backups are absolutely essential and should be done on a regular basis once all their data has been blown away. Then they call the Computer Guy, but the deed has been done. Or a secretary will work all day on a document and then, with a flick of her foot, turn the power strip off. The screen goes blank, and a day’s work is gone. Losing data is like losing a child. As people commit all their treasured photos to the digital world, they risk losing all their history if they don’t know what they are doing, and most don’t know what they are doing. Thus: a steady stream of work for the Computer Guy.

No one knows everything or even a small piece of everything, and because you are a Computer Guy users of course figure that you know everything, even regarding the most exotic questions. If you’re an Apple man anything to do with Windows is probably similar to a foreign language, and if you’re a programmer the nitty gritty of networking is obtuse. Information Technology is so vast, you’re lucky if you have a good handle on even your specialty, and even if you have such a handle, when you’re in the field you’ll find someone has a weird configuration you’ve never seen before. And the guy with the good handle gets hit with new releases and new devices and new this or new that continuously, so if you can’t learn all the time, your Computer Guy credentials will soon grow old, in like three weeks.

Everything has to be rebooted, and the Computer Guy spends half his life waiting for the progress meter to get to 100 percent. Reboot first, then ask questions later. Sometimes you can wonder whether to do this or that. Don’t wonder. Just reboot. You can say that God rebooted the world and took six days to initialize it – to get it configured as he would like it. This is a paradigm for the Computer Guy to consider. Then there will be a New Earth, which can be thought of as a System Upgrade – new hardware. It’s all Biblical.

Such is the life of a Computer Guy. Be kind to him; he is a special person with unique DNA, perhaps the next evolutionary jump for the species. His brain is big but his nerves might be frayed. And he has to work with Microsoft products. Need I say more?

Cancer Clusters and Me

I am weirdly a part of two cancer clusters, though both are very informal.

What is a cancer cluster? A cancer cluster is when a large number of people for some reason are diagnosed with a particular type of cancer in a geographic region. Everyone seems to get ___ (you fill in the blank) cancer, and soon we are all wondering if either something in the water or something in the food (chemicals) are to blame; it has to be something, right?

Esophageal Cancer Rates in New York State

The fact of the matter is that often it is not something. Things happen, like shooting darts at a board; sometimes the darts may hit in the left-hand region and at other times the right, and sometimes the darts land in a scatter-plot. It’s purely by chance, but sometimes they all happen to be on the left.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I am part of two very weird cancer clusters, and it begs the question: is there some casual relationship here?

The first cluster happened when I worked in management at a dialysis center in Syracuse, NY. Now, there were six managers, and I was the IT manager guru guy. All of us got cancer. Two of the woman, being of a feminine nature, got 1) breast cancer and 2) cervical cancer and the cervical cancer didn’t make it. Then my colleague, whom I shared an office with, was walking up to the hospital when his upper neck collapsed due to a tumor eating away at his bones; he is still with us. Another manager came down with some type of cancer – I forget what – but didn’t want the treatment to be too brutal. She is also not with us anymore. And then there’s me, Mr. Esophageal cancer man who happens to be still alive.

The score here is 6-0, cancer winning. What could possibly account for all this? We all worked in the same building, but then again other people did also, and they didn’t get cancer. Our offices were not in one area; in fact, we were spread out throughout the building. They used formaldehyde to clean the dialyzers, and formaldehyde is a cancer causing agent for esophageal cancer, but I never cleaned the dialyzers and actually never came in contact with the chemical; you would expect the technicians to come down with esophageal cancer, but they didn’t. I did.

Perhaps the gods just didn’t like management. That’s as plausible explanation as any.

The second cancer cluster I’m involved with isn’t so compelling. Out of several good friends of our family that I grew up with, three of us have come down with cancers in our late 40s or early 50s. We have all gone our own way in life, but nearly all of us have had or are having an experience with cancer. Again, we can ask: why? We get back to the water hypothesis: was there something bad in the water in Gates, NY, in the late 1960’s, or was pollution from Kodak plants (and there were many in the 1960’s) somehow cancer causing, thus leading cancers showing up later in life?

Probably not. But you do wonder: why?

Some things are just weird in life, and you have to get used to that. We would like a nice theory that would put it all together so it all makes sense, but oftentimes just because it seems to be one way doesn’t mean it’s that way. It looks like there should be an underlying cause but perhaps there is none. All I know is that I got cancer, and who knows how or from what. We’ll probably never know. But still – it is pretty strange that all the managers at Dialysis got some form of cancer, now isn’t it?