13 Oct 2013: An Opportunity to Teach

Last week, Dr. Cheung asked me to address three medical students/HKU undergraduates from my hospital bed concerning my cancer journey. HKU’s medical school is on the British model so there is no pre-med; undergrads are on a speeded-up track.

I had no time to prepare a formal outline but did a reasonable job all the same of coverage. I described my feelings of being very fit and healthy person and how they may have contrasted with a smoking habit that lasted until 2000 and a Nicorette/nicotine addiction that held on until 2012. I described managing the terror of the diagnosis result day fairly well through a spiritual practise.

I said that perhaps palliative care sounded less terrifying than it does to many because I had entered the cancer journey at a mostly palliative stage (IV/D1). I also described how highly addictive prescription drugs such as Fentanyl hold for me at this time little attraction since I’d always preferred booze. I do admit their usefulness as pain suppressants as the essence of civilisation which doesn’t allow even the Stranger to writhe in agony in the park (and doesn’t by default code him/her as an addict as a part of its lack of compassion).

It should be noted, however, that I didn’t make the last point in the above passage in my talk.

I thought of  the late Edward Said who lectured on English topics while being hospitalised for leukemia. These activities are very important for me at this time.

13 Oct 2013

First-thing workout at 6:04: 20 minutes included 150 supine movements with weights, walking, 100 midrise steps (steps in stairwell, not lowrise steps in ward), and 50 slow dancing with walking stick (the old soft shoe: acceptable pain accompanied this return to the OSS.)

Notes on  a Pain Episode

For unknown reason, on the last few weekends, especially Sundays, I have had intense bouts of direct and referred pain; I think it was last Sunday when I first crossed “the screaming barrier”, bothering the other patients.

However, today I was able to endure 10/10+ pain in my butt and was able to practise Acceptance instead of “exclaiming”:  for as Lovel admonishes Hastings i’th’old play (Richard III), “Come, come, dispatch; ’tis bootless to exclaim.”

Notes on the Incomprehensible War

Some heroes included Sgt. “Breathless”. The Kid said, gee, Sarge, it hurts to breathe”. Sgt. Breathless. eyes scanning the dark, said, “so don’t breathe.” So the Kid figured that that meant finding a way to breathe at  a low level, more through his skin almost. So the Kid did this, and survived.

There was also Sgt. Rock who kept firing with his ass shot off. When the position, still held by his men and a dead Sgt. Rock, was relieved, the commander of the relief troops collected his leather belt bitten clean thru because the Sarge was busy killing Cheeseballs whilst in pain. This gruesome artifact hangs today in the Incomprehensible Museum.

12 Oct 2013

20 minutes first thing (5:30 AM): 100 midrise steps in stairwell, walking. Went back to sleep, woke up realising that this is the real deal. Barring a miracle my lifespan may be measured in months, there will be much pain, and I have moved too far away to make it possible for most of my family, with kids and responsibilities of their own, to come see me.

I need to face this steadily. I hope to prolong my life since as my father was, I am “pro-life” in the good sense. I believe in women’s right to choose while I believe Dad was mostly opposed to abortion, but like my Dad I do believe that old people should be allowed to prolong their lives however they can, and like him, I believe that assisted suicide is evil.

It’s wrong in my view to loudly assault women’s rights to autonomy (“if men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament”) while throwing white men on the scrap heap in their fifties and blacks in their thirties or much earlier in the case of incarceration rates at insane levels.

I closely identify with my gay friends who have AIDS or are HIV positive:the frustration of their desire to stay alive and flourish. I mean, just when you think you’ve cut yourself a SLICE, the worm turns, you get some crazy spots or sweats and the Doctor says “the news is not good”.  Just when you think you’ve got it all, the big fat quivering SLICE, it’s all gone, the Enlightenment reversed and you find yourself, either in AIDS or what I have, you’re in the Seventeenth Century, a darkling plain of threats and fears.

To be “pro-life” in this sense is to be  pro your own life.

 

11 Oct 2013

20 Minutes first thing (50 midrise steps), 150 warmup movements, with and without weights.

Sunday’s first agon, was the one in which I first crossed the “screaming barrier” where you bother other patients and have “10 over 10” pain, which breaks the measuring device of your own perception and therefore means that the “actual” pain could be higher than 10/10 having such values as 12/10 (with, possibly, part of the pain being caused by not-knowing if Aristotle is right and we long to know), taught me among other things that I may need these lessons at the endgame.

With possibly a lifespan of months and those months spent in increasing unawareness and no more godlike mobility.

Which exacerbates, does not reconcile the need to know. In Sunday’s agon I was still the observer, trying to store up “impressions” for my “journey” like Flashman’s blasted wife Elspeth in Madagascar or Boswell in Scotland…and making  a dog’s dinner of it, scupper my kidneys, else.

Which exacerbates and does not reconcile my need to be with my son and my granddaughters.

The Chorus begins, softly, with quiet cymbals, at first a confusion of voices and instruments later triumphant…

Pace we slow pace we soft
For ’tis known how well and oft
Philosophy comes a cropper at the solemn time of death

Pace we slow pace we soft
For ’tis known how well and oft
That proud man the cynosure of Nature
Is at Nature’s mercy at the limit beyond the Pillars of Hercules

Pace we slow pace we soft
For as Oedip knew so well
There’s none can tell
Whether beyond this life there’s reassurance
For he who has worn life’s many harsh robes of  ‘durance

26 Sep 2013: Paint It Black (1)

Worked out 23..26 Sep with 20 minutes including 150..200 step aerobics first thing every morning.

But having increasing health issues including: standard hip pain and now, headache that spreads and increases to migraine levels.

Have 570.00 HKD in wallet and more in bank. Not too concerned about effect of USD government shutdown on social security payments on October payment of “my” social security since these checks have been coming and I have been able to save.

22 Sep 2013: Defcon 4 Level Crisis

Total crisis for every time I go off painkiller the pain is truly unbearablw. I do not know what a migraine is supposed to feel like but I kinda sorta think I sorta think I got unsupportable pain. I mean, it is incapacitating. I can’t type or spell rords. I just typed “rords” instead of “words”: this sort of error is happening in every setence. I just dropped the firt “n” in “sentence”. I did do a 20 minute workout aeons ago first thing ago this morning.

When I do get enough pain killer the room shifts around mysteriously and I cannot stop singing silly songs, and I type slow as I am constantly fixing fixing [oops oops] silly songs. I have lost kinesthetic orientation so things will appear out of whack as in the beginning of Kubrick’s 2001, where “down” becomes “up” on board the moon shuttle.

I was going ti analyze Jubrick’s film but the pain and error rate is too high. “You cannot face it steadily, the patient is no longer there.” “The dove descendung breaka the aire with flame of incandescamt terror,” amd I am going to sleep.

Sep 17 2013: Crunk BOING Groan

OK, so guy’s got a CD player on which he insists on playing without earphones so his homeys in the same ward can hear bam ping a pong WHAM a lula yowl miaw crunk boink which is approximately a word picture of Chinese opera (I like Chinese opera).

ANOTHER guy is groaning loudly as he expires of lung cancer in all probability, that being the commonest form of cancer here. I also like my homeboys here.

So the overall effect is approximately bam ping a pong WHAM a lula yowl miaw crunk boink GROAN bam ping a pong WHAM a lula yowl miaw crunk boink groan GROAN miaw ping a pong.

And I am struggling to see with ever higher magnification powers to overcome chemo effects on my eyesight and to keep my computer alive so I can communicate this reality.

My God have mercy on our souls GROAN whang boink.

13 Sep 2013: workout, pain, Kant study and my need for a citation, and other such crap

20 minute workout first thing: 50 motion warmup without weights and 300 lowrise step aerobics. No physio anticipated because I have to go to Causeway Bay to get a higher magnification in my readers. Running out of commercially available magnifications at 300, do not need this magnification when rested; a midday nap often eliminates the need. Do not look forward to hike to stall/shop near public library, but will check library status if I feel up to it. Need to make an appointment thru my Grantham doctors with an eye doctor.

No need for pain-killah before workout, mild to moderate pain now. This despite the fact that on my request the doctor has reduced the Fentanyl patch dosage to about 2.1 mg per day (6.4 for three days) on my request. I don’t want to be sent let’s say back to Chicago with Fentanyl need, for this will probably be assumed to be an addiction.

But that’s stupid. If I have metastatic pain then won’t I need some form of opioide? Even during the summer of 2012 before my son’s death I was using Tramadol, an opioide, probably just as addictive as Fentanyl, psychologically. Which means that to be close to my son & grandchildren I will have to travel back on the Grantham prescription and get some sort of pain control > Bayer aspirin at the other end. This pain is not my friend.

Study

Reading the Gorgias dialogue of Plato as I read Johansen (History of Ancient Philosophy) on Plato. Take one book (Johansen) and the large red notebook into Causeway, the laptop too heavy.

Asked Bill Liktor at his Sitdown Tragedies blog to give credit to my use of diagrams as the “objective” source if his, where my understanding is that you cite when the previous work has or could have been a source “objectively”. No reply. I really hate having had to make this request but I did discuss “a picture is worth a thousand words”, the relation of Kant to art, etc last summer and would appreciate the acknowledgement. But my picture is sloppy and may not have been seen by Liktor…who may not be replying to the thread because of my demand for a cite…quite possibly disturbing Internet crap to him.

I used another type of “art”, the sentence diagram, to discover something interesting about Kant’s complexity of style in doing just a partial diagram of “the whopper”, an enormous 180 word sentence on p 613 of the Guyer/Moore translation.

But there is a real issue raised. Sensation to concept can go to multiple concepts at the same level or thru a series of lower then higher level concepts, and is this part of what Kant called the empirical. I think it must be, with the final concept (possibly a logical expression with more than one part such as “clown(x) & evil(x)”) emerging into the timeless/spaceless world of phenomena as a final step.

Need then to redraw last June’s “evil clown” diagram to show this.

Same deal as at Coursera where I’d waste time with peer review to get a piece of meaningless paper. Same instinct as of old (1971) to leave humanities with all its BS, for computer science or math, where you can be right if you are right without a lot of BS.

All is vanity. Do I just want to be recognized as right? I am old, time must have a stop: after many a summer dies the swan.

23 Aug 2013: Something is Afoot

Edward G. Nilges, “Something is Afoot: Cancer’s Effect on My Left Foot”

My Left Foot has been grievously wounded by the combination of the cancer’s pressure from the lymph nodes on nerves and muscles and bones of the groin, and last winter’s “Deep Vein Thrombosis” acquired on my 14 hour transpacific flights for my poor son’s funeral.

The therapy shall include this drawing, and a deeper drawing of the muscle structure, for it appears that when I push my left toe to the left or up manually, it isn’t participating in the motion. But then it powerfully pushes back. Which means that of a matching pair of muscles called the “adductor” and “abductor” the one that lifts the toe towards the mean saggital plane of my body, the adductor, has failed while the abductor is working.

Got the details above from wikipedia, knew of the concept from art anatomy.

So, the question is whether I can spend time pushing the toe up and towards the mean sagittal plane, and let it abduct away from the MSP which it seems to do by itself. Will this bring back abductor function?

I got a holistic sense in running that it’s all like wow this big sphere and if you fix any part of a sphere you fix the whole thing. Wow…where did that come from. Of course, it comes from the Jewish saying that he who saves one life saves the whole world. Or one toe. Just keep the damn thing moving, each healthy cell contains the whole story in the form of DNA. Keep it moving in running, the dance, walking.

I hate walking, it’s so old aged. It forces you to stay at the speed of the slowest member of your family. Oh yeah, let it out, let out the bile…I want to run and run free on Bondi down to Bronte along the Fatal Shore (translation: Sydney Australia). And yet the eyes of Peter’s babies keep drawing me in these pretty little photographs the volunteers helped me frame. Tessa America offers me her baby ring toy if I would visit and Esme perks up.

Listen! For some oddwad with nothing better to do has loaded a very good (English Baroque Soloists) version of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with its sublime, dignified arias from one of those overpriced DVDs or BluRays.

Schlafen, meine Lieben…: Sleep, my dearest: enjoy thy rest

Schlafen, meine Lieben, the aria at about 40 minutes, is exceptionally good. I am using the music, somewhat guiltily, to mask out the coughing of the bird lung man (the one whose lungs have been so weakened that his cough is like the call of a bird) and Bald Man’s Wife, the wife of the balding man who’s dying, who comes up almost defiantly with a normal man’s cough, heavy with sputum. The wife of the dying man has caught a virus or a bug and is coughing her lungs out but there’s nobody who’ll stay with her husband, I’d guess, but her. The men of the family show up, stick around for five minutes waiting for, what? Money? Forgiveness? To be able to forgive? I don’t know, I just know that the women hold up more than half what’s left of Tian, sky, for the men.

The Bird Lung Man’s Wife came, apparently for the first time. She brought congee in a metal breakfast bucket and the Bird Lung Man ate it greedily for each home made congee in Hong Kong is unique.

But the Bird Lung Man’s Wife refused to sit where he could see her, and kept sort of turning out the door or looking my way as if I’d help her. I was very annoyed by this and went to the small convenience store. When I got back, Bird Lung Man’s Wife and he were actually exchanging pleasantries. Some sort of reconciliation? But she’s gone with me resenting her a lot for not staying.

20 Aug 2013: Triumph, Disaster, Triumph

IF you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat these two impostors just the same …

– Kipling

Post Blog 19th August – a Great Day and then Disaster

…an expedition with my main British mate to resolve issues with HSBC and visit IFC, with me in a wheelchair.

Snagged Lindt choc bars at the divine levels of 70% and 85%, where the bitterness of the 85% cacao solids added creates a delayed release of chocolate’s powerful pure flavor AFTER the bitterness, like a fine wine or polyphonic music:

–Flavor release 1————–
…..|
…..|
…. +–Flavor release 2————–

And…no pain whatsoever by way of a strange law: spending time in public with people at least as smart as you, is a marvelous analgesic.

But first…yesterday’s most incredible development: I was waiting in the cab queue at Queen Mary, standing temporarily as my wheelchair was loaded into the boot of the cab, and I found myself, without any pain, executing dance moves. I was thrilled and immediately resolved to experiment with a few more in my next workout, gradually increasing them as is needed and as would be possible.

Well, of course, that’s just not on now owing to disaster at end of day 19 August. For as I got ready for bed, my rib started to pound with pain. I’d probably banged it in a fall on the 17th, running for the can. Or it may be, frighteningly enough, a manifestation of metastasis to bone, a feature of prostate cancer. As I crawled into bed, minutes before so smug, I could hardly draw breath.

“I that in heill was and in gladnes
Am trublit now with great sicness
And feblit wi’ infairmitee!
Timor mortis conturbat me.

William Dunbar, Lament for the Makarys

I was given morphine (Fentanyl synthe-morphine) and like any person in pain, from the drummer boy lying on the field of Saratoga or Waterloo to a rich lawyer whae helpis no conclusionis slee my “study” was reduced to what I could do to stop, or endure, the pain. Thinking and feeling hard I realized that I needed to get the pain under the threshold set by my subjective pain (10/10) to have a chance of sleeping (and thus eliminating or reducing the pain) and to do THIS, I needed to … reduce my breathing.

To do THIS, I needed to reduce my activity so, no pounding on the pillow in agony and no picturesque sobbing and grimacing.

Relax in order to focus all energy on the breath.

Which worked after a while. And I slept, a gift, until morning.

When I awoke just before congee of course no workout was “on” and grimly the pain was the same. I struggled thru breakfast.

But…amazingly not only have I had no hip (cancer) pain all day as if my Hip Devil was deferring to my chest devil as a better tormenter than he…that in fact the pain was in the mind, forming one of Adorno’s strange constellations (“Dream Notes”) in the night sky of my illness to signal me that intelligence was behind my pain…perhaps, my intelligence.

The chest pain was minimal by early afternoon and all the above was me pitching a fit, or, more likely, thinking hard under pressure and finding solutions, or most likely, thinking hard under pressure, finding solutions…

…and, of course, pitching a fit.

Even tho the above was pretty much a false alarm…

with this new pain I was back at square one, searching for the limits of my new world like a man in a dark chamber who probes the shape of the wall, like Kant transcendentally exploring the limits of sense and reason in the dance of pure reason.

Kant was trying to discover how the dance of reason can take place. Imagine a room with shapes in black curtains, protruding from the wall:

How can the dance of darkness and pain take place?

How did the Irish Dancer dance in the holds of ships escaping the famine?

Imagine trying literally and figuratively to dance in the space provided by pain without passion and without hatred, for

“La mission est sacrée, tu l’exécutes jusqu’au bout et si besoin, en opérations, au péril de ta vie.”

“Au combat, tu agis sans passion et sans haine, tu respectes les ennemis vaincus, tu n’abandonnes jamais ni tes morts, ni tes blessés, ni tes armes.”

Articles 6 and 7 of the vow of the French Foreign Legion enhanced with my poetic feu de joie et l’honneur which I write “drawing my breath in pain” as Hamlet admonished Horatio, for indeed it is honorable to do so when recounting tales of honour, contes de l’HONNEUR:

Vow, of the Legionnaire of the Legion of the Endurance of Pain

Legionnaire, remember, the mission is sacred
Carried out to the bitter end, without hatred!
Carried out with utmost respect for the vanquish’d
As YOU would be treated as you would have wish’d
In storm of stress you keep your shit wired together
Keeping your weapons clean in fine and foul weather!
Abandon not your dead nor your wounded nor your arms
In the name of bright Honour, even in defeat, risking all harms.
And in victory never may you succumb to cowardice’s charms:
Abusing prisoners, or capering like an ape
And above all no violence against women. Rape
Is a coward’s act
You will be held fast to this pact.
Here, finally, is our most treasured possession as Legionnaires:
The leather strip we bite upon
When wounded so as not to betray our mates or our position.

Threnody Français

La France est ton Pere, la Legion c’est ton mere:
Vous est nous heros vous est nous enfants plus cher
Faire vous la combat au l’outrance comme l’audace
Et l’audace et toujour l’audace!
Et l’honneur brilliant, comme le Soleil
Qui grace votre armoire de la noir hey hey hey.

Edward G. Nilges 20 Aug 2013: Copyright 2013 by Edward G. Nilges: Moral rights asserted.

AND…lest there be any smart remarks…this is a matter of life and death and if I have to write poetry to stay alive then by GOD I shall.

No pain evening of the 20th.

“For Thou didst not leave his soul in hell, nor didst Thou suffer Thy holy one to see corruption.”