Weird Al meets Lady Gaga and I’m mesmerized. It’s a good time to be alive.
I know the question is going to come, probably sooner than later because I allow my tiny children and their developing minds to watch the X-Men franchise movies.
What is a mutant, what is mutation, how does it happen, and is it real?
It’s the key to evolution. It’s what makes my eyes green. It’s what makes Daddy and Georgia’s hair auburn.
It’s what triggered our evolution from single-celled organisms to bilaterally symmetrical invertebrates to fish to fish with jawbones to fish with four fins to a variant of lungfish to amphibians to reptiles (but not dinosaurs) to mammals to primates to hominids to modern humans. We’ll talk about Lucy the Skeleton, and Neanderthals, and about the possibility that we’re part Neanderthal ourselves on account of Daddy’s red hair.
We’re going to talk about how some people don’t believe in evolution, and we’re going to talk about Galileo and the Scopes Monkey Trial, and we’re going to talk about why my kids are in private school, and how it’s okay to teach both creationism (in religion class) and evolution (in science class) and about faith versus reason and how it’s not really a versus, but a both-and.
It’s going to be a lot of fun.
I’m not going to stop there.
I’m going to tell my children that gene mutation is what causes cancer, and that it happened to me, and we don’t know whether it happened in the genes I was born with, perhaps the genes I passed down to them, or whether it was a freak thing that happened after. I will tell them that I think it’s the latter, but that I can’t say for sure.
I can only hope that their takeaway is that perhaps I am also hiding a super power.
The answer is that I don’t know because I don’t know how my relationship to God and The Divine would have grown had I not had cancer.
The smartass answer is “Slowly. It’s been a long journey.”
My family, friends, and neighbors have all been wonderful, but the people who have made the biggest difference to me have been my doctors.
Oncology is, in my opinion, the hardest of all medical specialties in so many ways, and I think the men and woman who answer the calling are among the greatest heroes of our era.
I’m not quite ready to address how I feel about them directly, but I allude to it in posts throughout this blog. I’m sure at some point I’ll talk about it in greater detail.
It’s not the answer you wanted, and it’s definitely not the answer my family, friends, and neighbors want, but that’s how it is.
The smartass answer is that I have one now.
The official word is “probably cured” but it will take more time before my doctors are comfortable telling me that I am officially cured.
People ask me questions. It’s a good thing, since it means people are reading my blog. Thanks!
I’ll try to answer them as well as I can.
This post has spoilers to the new X-Men movie. If you don’t want to know then don’t read any more.
Hats off to a friend from my wild college days for, a few weeks ago, posting what, I believe, is the most fascinating link I’ve seen blip across my facebook feed: an article from the UK Daily Mail detailing the not-quite-ancient European practice of consuming medical “cures” created out of human flesh, blood, and bone. It’s a story of partaking in and becoming a feast of humanity, and it is worth a read.
Again, I thank God for modern medical science.
Again, I indulge for a few minutes into a self-reflective reverie on my lifelong quest for the visceral.
I cling to my iPhone, ignoring my husband, his parents, and my children until I have devoured every word of the article. It’s like a train wreck. I can’t look away.
I can’t quite stop thinking about it.
It’s the nexus of cannibalism, of medical history, of the history of science, of our conceptions and misconceptions of what is savage, and where we stand on the spectrum between civilized and primitive, only not primitive, because this happened a mere 150 years ago.
And then it hits me, a recent memory, a mere ten weeks ago. I am sitting, half-naked, in the office of my outstanding plastic surgeon, the doctor whom I refer to as the Best Doctor in the World, signing the consent forms for my upcoming surgery, the latest round of breast reconstruction. His assistant is describing the specifics of my upcoming procedure. I’m trying not to listen to her describe what they will be doing to me, but I know it’s her job to give me complete information, so I try to look as if I am paying attention.
“What is alloderm?” I ask her.
“It’s a product that helps the tissues hold together during breast reconstruction.”
“Oh. That’s a good thing,” I say. “But what it is?”
“It’s a cellular matrix. Your body grows into it and absorbs it as it heals.”
“Cellular matrix? That’s cool. What is it made of?”
Silence. Then, “It’s a cadaver product.”
“Oh. I see.”
I signed the consent form.
I spent the afternoon in a friend’s pool today. I am ever-so-slightly sunburned on my legs, legs which exhibit the pallor of skin that hasn’t seen the light of day in nearly a decade.
The last time I remember enjoying an afternoon in the pool was at the Tokyo American Club, before I became pregnant with Graham, one afternoon when I put Georgia in the Baby Room and just lounged. Georgia is eight going on nine: at the time of my memory, she was not yet one.
It’s not precisely a milestone, but it is a benchmark toward the something, I’m not sure what. Something good.
Our family arrived back from a long vacation two days ago. I’ve been climbing out from beneath a mountain of laundry, but it is good to be home.
We kicked off our vacation close to home with some good friends who happen to have horses: she is a horse whisperer, and, while we go see our friends for our friends’ sake and not just to sponge horse time, their horses are part of the family, like our dog, but less stupid, and bigger. A day’s drive took us to the Amish settlement of Arthur, Illinois, where we saw plenty of horses and buggies, the hallmark of Amish country, and my children learned a little about the Amish, their faith, and their traditions. Another day’s drive took us to Mackinac Island, where “horseless carriages” were outlawed immediately after they made their appearance. Mackinac Island, a wonderful place in many ways beyond its quintessential quaintness, derives much of its charm from the horse and carriage teams that the people who work and live on Mackinac Island rely upon to get stuff done. No matter how far you to into the tiny interior of tiny Mackinac Island, you can still hear it: the clippity cloppity of horses.
It’s a relic of another time.
A simpler time. A better time. A time when people had values and neighborliness, and crime was low, and families were happy and divorce was rare. A time when, instead of being the second leading cause of death in the United States as it is today, cancer didn’t even rank in the top ten. Today, we’ve polluted our environment with industrial waste and deforestation. Our food is full of additives and preservatives, and our cosmetics are full of hormones, all causes for the exponential increase in deaths from cancer. Right?
Well, no. Not remotely.
According to the splendid book, The Emperor of All Maladies, A Biography of Cancer by Columbia School of Medicine professor Siddhartha Mukherjee, a book that just won the 2011 Nonfiction Pulitzer, cancer rates have increased because we have aged into them. Cancer is overwhelmingly a disease of the old: the longer you live, the greater your chances of having the bizarre mutation that causes this disorder. As a society, we’re riddled with cancer because we in our technologified, sanitized, commercialized, informationalized society have largely solved the medical maladies that used to kill people off so effectively: infectious disease, food poisoning, and other ills that have mostly been relegated to the Third World, the risk of antibiotic-resistant epidemic notwithstanding. Cancer is the Grim Reaper’s last, best weapon. To die at an old age from cancer is to have lived a long time.
I’m not nostalgic. Not remotely.
I like horses, riding them, and riding behind them, but also liked driving from Texas to Northern Michigan in three days. I liked driving past the endless fields of cows and barns of pigs, showing my children how food happens, today, letting them see whence comes their beef and bacon, from grass-fed cattle and feedlot swine. I liked driving past the hundreds of acres of wind farms, seeing them replacing the heavily subsidized net-oil-loss fields of industrial corn and soy.
I like that things get better. I believe that they do get better, and that people working together to make our society better in new ways have a good chance of doing just that, which is why I consider myself a liberal, as opposed to conservative, opposed to change, liking things the way they were and are.
It all came into sharp focus yesterday morning when I met up with a friend I haven’t seen a while, someone I like a lot, but because I am a terrible friend, I haven’t followed up with her as much as I should have, in a way that reflects the high esteem in which I hold my friend.
“How are you,” I asked her. “How is your older daughter, the one who was in class with Georgia a few years ago? How do you like your new school? How is your husband? How are your pets? How is your baby?”
“I’m good, my daughter is good, my husband is good, my dog and cat are good, and my baby, well.
“The baby.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard.
“He’s not doing well.”
I look at my friend and don’t say anything, but I remember to make eye contact, and to listen.
“We’ve been round and round with doctors and neurologists and, well . . . ”
My friend was silent for a measure.
“It looks like he may have Autism.”
My friend, the epitome of a caring, loving, detail-oriented mother who spares no effort to make sure that her children have the best childhood possible, the kind of mother I aspired to be before I got cancer, before the kind of mother I aspired to be was the one who isn’t dead, has spent the last six months dealing with the possible diagnosis of autism in her infant. She’s been to specialists and to support groups and she’s made miraculous progress: her son is once again smiling, and he’s begun to walk and talk, and, while I can’t begin to know what she’s been through, I know what it feels like to have the rug pulled out from under you when all you want in the world is to be a good mother, and my heart breaks for my friend.
I listened to my friend tell her story, listened to her describe the sudden changes in her beautiful, ebullient baby, and I remembered the Changeling myth, and I thought about how some people with Autism embrace this ancient story, and some people find it repugnant, and all I could think about was that it wasn’t going to be the end of my friends story, because she has unearthed resources and support and expertise, and now her son is smiling and laughing and walking, because we have science, and we have information, and we have a community and a culture and a society that isn’t satisfied with the status quo.
100 years ago my friend’s beautiful baby would have been institutionalized.
40 years ago my friend, my wonderful-mother friend, would have been blamed for her son’s condition.
Five years ago I would be dead and my children would grow up motherless.
It’s good to love history. Mackinac Island is one of the loveliest places I have ever visited, and I’ve been to some beautiful places in this world. We loved our week there, our week back in time. We have a lot to learn from visiting the Amish community and seeing how lives so different from ours can be equally fulfilling. On the way home, we stopped at the Laura Ingalls Wilder home and museum in Mansfield, Missouri, and I don’t know of a better celebration of the American spirit than that brilliant writer’s simple home.
It’s good to look back at how things were, but it’s even better to look forward and see how they’re getting batter.
Dance with the Reaper 