Breathing Room

More Speechifying, Courtesy of Harvard Law School and Berkeley SS

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:16:00 -0400

My debate alumni e-mail list was recently treated to one of the speeches given at this year’s Harvard Law School graduation. The speaker was my former debate partner, Tejinder Singh. It’s easier to comprehend the content if you have seen a picture of us debating together (and guess which debater is named Tejinder):

Under normal circumstances, I would feel obligated to ask Tejinder’s permission before posting this for all and sundry to see, but these are not normal times. In what I can only describe as a feat of stunningly uncharacterstic modesty, he neglected to mention giving this speech when we spoke two weeks ago. In retaliation, I am posting it without forewarning him.

“On this solemn day, I want to talk … about tipping in restaurants. I could write a law-review-length article about the subtleties … whether the wine counts toward the baseline, whether you calculate tip based on the bill before or after tax, whether you adjust the tip with the Federal reserve rate … you get the idea. But at the end of the day, I find that how much one tips is largely considered a personal matter. Personal in the sense that everybody does what they want, but also in the sense that how much you tip maybe says something about the kind of person you are. Me? I tip somewhere north of twenty percent, and sometimes as high as a third, and I understand that this is higher than the norm. But I have a reason, and I would like to share it with you today.

I have “overtipped” ever since I was young, when a friend reminded me that because I wear a turban, which is a symbol of belonging to the Sikh faith, people tend to see me not just as me, but as a representative for all people of my religion. He told me that when I tip big, I make life that much easier for the next person who looks like me and walks into that restaurant. And he told me the rest of the story too: when I do a good job, my people look competent; when I lose my temper, we look like hotheads; when I smile, we look agreeable, and so on. And when any man in a turban does any of those things, that conduct is imputed onto me, at least a little bit.

I protested. If I recall correctly, I stood up! “That’s not fair!” I exclaimed. A little dramatic for the Olive Garden? Maybe. But then I gave a brilliant speech about how this is America, where people are not judged based on how they look. I went on and on about our venerable freedoms and about our just society, and if you listened really hard, you could hear the faint, but distinct tones of the national anthem as I built up to the climax of it all—that we must be free to tip as little as we please. My friend sighed, shrugged, and left twenty percent for our server. As I reflect now, lurking behind my high-minded and patriotic rhetoric was quite a healthy dose of selfishness. I resented the idea that I owed a duty to anybody, and I wanted to be free to behave in whatever foolish way felt good at the moment.

But as sure as I stand here today, my friend was right. I’ve seen it play out enough times to know for a fact that I am not alone, and I never will be. And over time, I have come to understand that I shouldn’t think about my ties to my religion as a burden, but instead as a form of power. By living the good life, I get to serve my community. And every day, I am the beneficiary of all of the hard work and good decisions that my people make. That’s a pretty good deal. So I tip big, and I try to be fair, and I try to be smart, and I don’t always pull it off, but I have a lot of motivation to be my best at every moment.

Some of you may have had an experience similar to mine. To the rest of you: Welcome to the club! Today, as we leave this place for the various corners of the world, we find ourselves bound to one another by our new common possession: a degree from Harvard Law School. From now on, people will think of us not just as individuals, but as members of a class, as heirs to the tradition of those who took this stage before us, and as examples for those yet to come. And we should embrace it, because we are all lucky to find ourselves in such magnificent company.

We now have everything we need to make the world a better place. We have always had the talent, charm, and good looks. Today we add a degree from one of the greatest educational institutions on the planet—the type of qualification that people notice and take seriously. In this crowd I see brilliant attorneys, executives, public servants, teachers, artists, brick-toting admissions deans, you name it, all ready to come into their own. And as we realize our potential, our successes will have the collateral effect of lifting up our peers and augmenting this school’s great tradition of success.

And all of that is great. But we have another opportunity in front of us—one that, in my view, means even more. People will be watching us, and so we have a chance to show them our hearts. Wherever we find our bliss, and whatever side of our various cases or controversies we ultimately adopt, we can conduct ourselves with grace, courage, integrity, and compassion. We can play the game in a way that leaves the world astounded by the quality of our character. This will probably be harder than it sounds, because it is easy to be selfish, easy to take shortcuts, and easy to forget how fortunate we are. But we can help each other. When life gets tricky, we can remember that we are not alone, and we have 765 classmates who are rooting for us to make the right decision. For me, there is comfort and inspiration in that. And as I think about the challenges ahead, I’m not too worried about how this crowd will do. I feel nothing short of blessed to find myself in your hands. And I promise to do my very best not to let you down.

Congratulations everybody. And as you celebrate your successes and your friendships tonight, remember to tip big.”

Shameless self-promotion: my first cameo (on HBO)

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:03:14 -0400

Shameless self-promotion: my first cameo (on HBO): I am in this movie for a few minutes. I hear it is good, and the subject matter is near and dear to my heart.

Shameless self promotion: a documentary about my final debate...

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:01:17 -0400

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4993105670382677553

Shameless self promotion: a documentary about my final debate tournament.

Update: Medical News, Pictures, Next Steps

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:47:00 -0400

Sorry for taking so long to post another update. As my energy level has been declining, I have undertaken a bunch of new tasks and found new diversions, including a playstation and a trip to California. Simultaneously, I have been assigned to a series of new projects at work, so if I have neglected my correspondence with any of you, I plead distraction and weakness.

First, the medical news. I had my twelfth dose of chemotherapy during the last week in May (first week of June). That makes six months of systematic medical poisoning, and I’ve had about enough of that. Towards the end of the treatment, my body was getting very weak and my mental strength was flagging. I mentioned in previous posts my anticipatory nausea, and analogized it to having to avoid thinking about your toe, knowing that the pain will increase if you think about it, after it has been smashed with a baseball bat.

What I meant is that the chemotherapy makes the patient sick to his/her stomach - usually it gets bad starting about 24 hours after the injections. Nausea is a neurochemical reaction to stimuli in the digestive tract. Anti-nausea medications are actually anti-seizure medications that work on the brain, not the digestive system. In other words, your brain is what allows you/forces you to vomit. Your mind alone can make you sick, if it is confronted with the right stimuli - think of someone getting sick at a crime scene or battlefield. As the patient is getting injected (it takes about 6 hours in my case), if he/she thinks about how they are feeling sick, or about how they will eventually feel sick, they spontaneously get sick. So imagine sitting in a room full of people getting injected, all of them being sickened, getting injected with toxic chemicals that burn your veins - and imagine sitting through it without thinking about getting sick, knowing that if you do, you’ll have to come back again (and again) and the sickness will only get worse. The problem is that if your mind is making you sick and you actually throw up, every time you feel sick after that, the memory of having given in and thrown up will come back, and, in fact, make you feel sicker subsequently. For this reason, I avoided vomiting entirely for the last six months.

I consider myself a pretty disciplined thinker, and pretty experienced with the urge to vomit (thank you, underage drinking), but after ten or so treatments, the nausea just about outstripped my self-control. Every time, I had pre-vomiting spasms that I was just barely able to control. Each time, the spasms were precipitated by visual stimulus - the nurse placing the drugs on the table next to me, the sight of a syringe of “the red devil,” etc. My doctors gave me steroids again, and a bunch of pretty strong anti-nausea medications - nothing worked. Eventually the only solution was for me to take such strong anti-anxiety medications that I fell asleep and snored/drooled through the injections.

The last treatment was the most difficult, both because of the progressively worsening nausea issue and because I was scared. Everyone kept telling me, “it’s almost over, this is your last one, you can hang on that long” and other “victory is just around the corner” propaganda. Nice thoughts, and I don’t fault any of you for having said this, or for having otherwise put your feet in your mouths - I’m too verbally clumsy to hold grudges about that sort of stuff. Anyway, I heard “it’s almost over,” and thought “yeah, it’s almost over… for everyone else.” If it was “almost over,” then I could just throw up all over the nurse and be done with it, but it’s not. If I did that, and the cancer comes back - or fails to go away - I will face more chemo, having given in and thrown up, making it that much worse. Just thinking about chemotherapy makes me feel sick, and even in the best case, I will get scans every three months for the next five years, and annual scans every year after that. In other words, I’ll have to live at least a few days of every year looking over my shoulder for the Cancer Reaper. Other people might worry about me, they might even hold my hand while I get treated, but I have to face those moments alone (as does everyone else), and being reassured that “it’s almost over” makes me cranky and resentful.

Besides, it wasn’t the last treatment that was scaring me exactly, it was the fact that I look inside myself and can’t find a reserve of strength left over to face another dozen chemo treatments, if it comes to that.

Speaking of “best case,” after the final chemo dose, I got my last PET/CT scan. It was good - even better than the “best case” I was told about when I was first diagnosed. When my oncologist first described my situation, he told me that the large tumor was large enough that it would probably never completely go away. Even if they killed it, it would probably just shrink and turn into a big lump of scar tissue. You might recall that my first set of scans showed the tumor was still visible but that it was metabolically “dead.” This was a good prognostic sign, bolstered by the latest results. They showed that the tumor had “melted” - the lymph nodes in the area are still abnormal - there is scar tissue and some “thickening.” The PET scan also shows no abnormal cell metabolism. If my treatment concludes, and the final scan is identical to this one, my disease will be in “complete remission.”

This raises the question: what happens next?

I hesitated to post anything because the bottom line is, we don’t know. More chemotherapy seems off the table (for now). The question is whether or not to do radiation treatments. The upside of doing radiation is that it cuts the risk of a recurrence from about 15-25% to single digits. On the other hand, it increases the risk of serious side-effects, most notably coronary artery disease and “solid tumors,” including lung and breast cancer. The solid tumors in question are very, very deadly. Lung cancer, is basically a death sentence and studies show that Hodgkin’ patients who smoke are more likely to get lung cancer after radiation. I don’t smoke now, but I did in college, so it’s not clear how much that matters. These risks are not negligible, and increase over time, so that the younger you are when you are treated for Hodgkin’s, the greater the risk that you will develop a secondary malignancy (because you will probably live long enough to do so). The risks are minimized by taking precautions, like carefully targeting the radiation and reducing the dose. There is no such thing as risk-free irradiation of the chest. One school of thought argues that since Hodgkin’s Disease is among the most treatable of cancers, and the solid tumors caused by radiation are almost universally fatal, “first, do no harm” means using the minimum necessary dose of chemo and radiation to obtain a remission of the initial disease. On the other hand, since a recurrence of Hodgkin’s can be very dangerous, oncologists who prioritize aggressive treatment of the initial diagnosis argue for using both radiation and chemotherapy. Doctors are reviewing my results and records now, and I’ll let you all know what I decide to do.

2008 University of California, Berkeley Debate Reunion - Keynote Address

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:44:00 -0400

This month I was invited to give the keynote at the first-ever Cal-Berkeley Debate Reunion. This is the speech, with some minor modifications.

I confess that I am both honored and humbled to be here. This room is filled with exceptional and successful individuals of diverse backgrounds, spanning over half a century of joyful disagreement. Over the decades, our beloved activity has dramatically changed. The hundreds of debates today’s Cal students win every year are very different, for example, from the Joffre debates between Cal and Stanford, which annually discussed an issue of French national policy.

To find common ground, I undertook a search for the quintessence of debate – that which ties us together and transcends superficial differences of form and content. I stumbled across Prof. Alexander Meiklejohn, a university president, and philosopher who wrote that:

“when I try to single out… some one group which shall stand forth as intellectually the best - best in college work and best in promise of future intellectual achievement… it seems to me that stronger than any other group, tougher in intellectual fiber, keener in intellectual interests, better equipped to battle the coming problems are the college debaters - the students who apart from their regular studies, band together for intellectual controversy with each other and with their friends…”

This is a room full of successful, brilliant people, and the sooner I finish speaking the sooner you can get around to the business of conversing and proving me right. It makes no sense to belabor the point that team-based, labor-intensive, competitive persuasive argument strengthens the moral character and intellectual fiber of participants. So tonight I will dwell on the relationship between debate and matters of life and death. I speak from a heart filled with love and reverence for debate, and hope you will indulge my verbose nostalgia.

Recently I began graduate school at Georgetown and became friends a GU graduate voted the Best Debater of the 1970’s. He took a three-decade hiatus from debate, and after thirty years that utterly transformed America and its debaters, he attended a tournament and immediately felt the love of the game surge, adrenaline-like through his veins and super-charge his brain. He said that witnessing the brilliance, wit and determination of the students reminded him of something Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach once said about the relationship between competition and greatness.

Being a compulsive researcher, I went searching for this Lombardi-ism. I have a rather personal attachment to Lombardi. At 57, at the peak of his profession, he died ten weeks after being diagnosed with intestinal cancer, in a room at Georgetown University Hospital. Today the Georgetown Cancer Center is named after him. I visit his building every other week to get treated for the Hodgkin’s Lymphoma that is trying to kill me.

Ironically, the Lombardi-ism I found is the opening quote of Any Given Sunday, the movie that Cal debaters of my generation traditionally watched before departing for tournaments. It reads:

“any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.”

Vincent Lombardi would have been a hell of a debate coach, and told his athletes so. He said:

“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor.”

I would like to make three points using three of Vincent’s maxims. First, debate is life. In both games, “if you’ll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish.”

Since a small group of dedicated Cal Debate alumni decided to dedicate their time and resources to rebuilding the team ten years ago, UC Berkeley has experienced the most dramatic rise to greatness in the 61-year history of the NDT. Excellence starts at the top, with Dave Arnett and Greg Achten. Just one year after arriving at Cal, Greg guided debaters to our first-ever national championship. But since I, like Greg and Dave, have a vested interest in proving that Cal Debate has achieved something momentous, I consulted a source of unimpeachable credibility – the coach whose team ended my debating career with crushing defeat.

He said that “Cal “breaking the mold” of the monster private school… will be one of the most important developments of the decade…. Now, [all other public schools must abandon the oft-repeated] argument that public schools are “screwed [by the system]. If that sentiment festered, the activity [of college debate] would have been in real trouble.” It is no exaggeration to say that we have changed the landscape of competitive debate in America: we catalyzed the rebirth of West Coast debate. We challenged the conventional wisdom that only elite private schools could sustain success in 21^st century policy debate. The coach of the reigning national champion team, agrees with this: “The return of Cal debate to the national scene has been a blessing and a curse… “Hearing” and “knowing” the Cal debaters is a blessing, he said, and our team is “a blessed exemplar for all who would aspire to debate well and successfully. Every program, extant, or dormant, can say, ‘See, this is what is possible.’ No excuses. But Cal’s rise has been a curse for all of those who thought they were ready to [place in the top 16, win the Copeland award for the top-ranked team], or win any one of a number of tournaments.”

Our debaters are leaders; they exert a multiplier effect by enabling the achievements of others – typically, each Cal debater coaches a high school team of between 4 and 20 students. As a result, even though I am a half-decade removed from college, I know over two-thirds of the current Berkeley debaters – they were my students as teenagers. Just as UC Berkeley’s flagship status raises standards and exerts centrifugal force on the entire UC system, weaker teams in our region have ridden the coattails of Cal Debate to revival.

Like a strong family, a market-leading company, or a great nation, Cal Debate is built of sweat and love. I know this because I have worked for 8 years to help strengthen it. When we began the Cal Debate renaissance, the debate community stereotyped all Cal debaters as friendly, easy-going hippie slackers with more intelligence than work ethic. Today, they know Berkeley’s friendly, easy-going hippies will, more often than not, charmingly and overwhelmingly demolish their best and brightest students with the flair for originality and sophisticated research that makes UC Berkeley a global force to be reckoned with in every academic field.

I recently read the debater orientation handbook that Dave and Greg give to new students, and I realized that it distilled the results of all our late nights and early mornings, our shared heartbreaks, petty fights, and reconciliations, our near-death experiences with car thieves and house fires, academic and UC-bureaucratic calamities of varying but inevitable proportions, our joint backbreaking labor, our life-altering successes, and heartbreaking defeats – our shared existence as teammates and our unbreakable fellowship, reduced to a pamphlet size for our debate descendants to relearn. Everything I quote here is from the handbook – which, for the record, was written before this reunion was a glimmer in Greg’s eye:

“Research is the foundation of the Cal tradition… Our team has a long history of producing some of the highest quality [arguments] in the nation.” I should point out that words like “tradition” and “long history” should fill every heart in this room with joy: we wrote that history. We are the tradition, and it almost died out – on several occasions. Socrates, the world’s first Debate Coach of the Decade, said that “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is a habit.”

It is, perhaps, difficult to appreciate how dramatic our habit formation process has been. When I arrived at Cal, I was aware of only three traditions: getting lost on the way to tournaments, the resolution of disputes through games known as “not it,” “shotgun,” and “face in the copier,” and accidentally skipping events like celebratory banquets and preliminary rounds of tournaments.

The Cal Debate handbook contains 8 Guidelines for Success in Debate.

1. “Work is Desire. Hard work makes [the] good… great and great… transcendent…. Work almost every day. Cramming… is not a substitute to hard work… and will cost you dearly when it most matters.

2. [Have] Patience. Nothing about this is easy. If it was, [it] wouldn’t be half the game it is… it can and should be frustrating at times. The process… entails fits and starts, trial and error, and ultimately a lot of reflection. No one is born… great… It is a long process that never ends.

3. Never lose [to] the same [thing] twice.

4. Using your teammates, coaches, professors, and friends as a resource is essential.

5. We work for each other… If you take nothing else away from… college…. I hope it is this ideal.

6. It is understandable to get upset at times, [but] rudeness is unacceptable and unwise.

7. Think about your competit[ors].

8. Healthy Body, Healthy Mind.

These are rules for great debaters, but with only minimal modification, are generalizable guidelines for a life well-lived. Perhaps this is why, when other debate institutions produce champions who graduate into spectacular unemployment or worse, Dave and Greg’s students without exception go on to successful careers. Debate is life. We win at both.

My second overarching point about debate and matters of life and death is that we all need to do what we can to support debate, because our national life hangs in the balance. Lombardi said “Individual commitment to a group effort… is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work… The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.” I ask you to consider this in light of the following two salient facts: 1) We live in a nation that chooses to fight and kill for its interests, beliefs and in defense of its homeland and 2) only 1% of society serves in the military, and only one out of seven people in uniform is a combat arms professional. In other words, less than half a million Americans daily pay the life and death costs of foreign policy mistakes.

I passionately believe that debate has a significant role to play in a society at war, but will not treat you to a harangue about the value of vigorous wartime dissent and the perils of totalitarianism – this is, after all, a meeting of Berkeley alumni. Greg and Dave did not invite a professional agitator to speak here – they invited a “strategic communication” planner, a man who works with the military to persuade foreigners not to kill Americans, help kill Americans, or kill each other in ways that threaten American interests.

One of my good friends holds a senior position in the US military. Like me, and most students of international relations, he believes that anonymous, structural forces and dynamics drove the US to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and made both wars so intractable. We agree, however, that such explanations are somehow incomplete and unsatisfying. I asked my friend after a particularly frustrating day in Iraq how the most powerful nation in human history could have made so many catastrophic errors in judgment, at such staggering cost in blood and treasure.

He said without hesitation that “we made bad judgments because the professionals did not know how to debate.” In our system of government, when civilian politicians are convinced that war is necessary, they must rely on professional knowledge producers and action planners. Ultimate responsibility for justifying and implementing political decisions lies with these people. When dealing with al-Qaeda and Iraq, they systematically failed to correct retrospectively obvious analytical judgments and poor operational decisions.

Although my friend never debated, he understands what debate is: strategic analytical argument. Competitors are assigned to mutually-exclusive positions, and objectively evaluate all of the available evidence. Each participant is required to think through the arguments on both sides. They then identify strongest arguments and assemble them into logical cases which they deliver persuasively, and an unbiased evaluator dispassionately renders a judgment. Subsequently, arguments may be reevaluated in light of changed evidence or circumstances, and the participants may switch sides, but continue to argue with equal passion and competence.

My friend identified five failures in the professional conduct of the war on terrorism, all of which plague unskilled debaters: 1) Failure to consider plausible but unconventional interpretations of the available evidence 2) Failure to thoroughly consider alternative means of achieving an agreed-upon goal 3) Failure to re-evaluate strongly-held beliefs in light of new, discrepant evidence 4) Failure to respect and understand the adversary 5) Failure to react to intellectual intimidation and vitriolic disagreement from authority figures with moral courage and strong, evidence-based counter-argument.

When Goldman-Sachs considers an investment, analysts and economists are assigned to Blue and Red teams to debate the question out in front of the decision-makers. No comparable institutionalized process exists in the US intelligence and military communities. Fortunately, we may win these first battles in the 21st Century’s Long War without fixing these problems. But if we do not resurrect a national culture of robust debate on issues of life and death, we will eventually pay a butcher’s bill so grotesquely massive that our losses thus far will seem a bloody pittance. And unfortunately, in war, as in life, as in debate, it is the last blows in the struggle that dictate the outcome – not the first.

For my third and final point, there is no Lombardi-ism, because it deals with the opponent that he couldn’t bring himself to face, that undid all his maxims about strength and courage and made him a coward. The first thing I did when I found out I had cancer was hug my mom and cry. The second thing I did was debate.

According to my doctors and other cancer patients, even patients with treatable disease may face crippling mental obstacles to successful healing. Because of debate, I have been blessedly free of such problems as I struggle to defend my life. By way of explanation, here is a debate I had in my head in the surgical recovery area of Georgetown University Hospital.

Resolved: I should be angry at the world because the injustice of what has happened to me

Affirmative:

1. Anger at the world over the injustice of my cancer will help provide a coherent explanation for, and emotional response to, being sick

2. Coherent explanations for unpleasant events help make them manageable

3. Attitude will not determine if I survive, but it is one of a very small number of factors under my control. I need a coherent mental response that strengthens my determination to fight

4. Anger is part of what I am feeling right now, and denying that would be counterproductive: feelings that are buried get buried alive. Sometimes they come back as zombies.

Negative:

1 a) Not everything is the result of purposive or coherent causes – some things, including bad things, are the result of random unpleasant occurrences like spontaneous genetic mutations or freak storms – a man struck by lightning cannot reasonably complain about the unfairness of the event

1b) Attempting to provide a coherent explanation for random events is not always a good thing: superstitions and stereotypes are examples of this.

2) A coherent cause for my cancer would not necessarily improve things. If a doctor comes here to say smoking cigarettes in college caused this , I will feel worse about having made myself sick, not better.

3a) Attitude matters, but a will to fight is not as important a positive and sustainable approach that is consistent with my beliefs and personality.

3b) I am not the kind of person to prefer comfortable illusions over uncomfortable facts

4a) If anger is the difference between me wanting to live and accepting death, I don’t want to live enough to survive this

4b) Anger is just another strategy of denial – I’m actually scared and frustrated at being powerless. Accepting anger buries alive the reality of that fear and my powerlessness in the face of mortality

Just as I did hundreds if not thousands of times at Cal, I planned the debate out in my head, from beginning to end. Then I judged the outcome and decided that the benefits of anger were outweighed by its costs. No more impotent frustration at the unfair world for me - much to the frustration of the hospital social workers and psychiatrists. I had several debates with myself that night. Topics included “Resolved: I should act as if I know I am going to beat this disease,” and “Resolved: I have wasted most of my life until now.”

Vince Lombardi was so scared of cancer that even as it rotted away his gut, he refused to get tested for it. He buried his head in the sand, just as American officials did as internecine strife ripped out the heart of the Iraqi nation, and just as I am daily tempted to do. I have heard and seen a lot of responses to cancer that appear, like most bad ideas, simple and seductive. People get entrapped in these well-intentioned emotional traps, and sometimes they deprive themselves of the tools they need to survive. There but for the grace of God go I: I know that without Cal Debate, I would probably not be capable of fighting off the disease without losing my mind.

It takes hard work to stay healthy and active, engaged with the outside world, employed and sociable while sick. It takes character to face seemingly-endless bombardment with toxic chemical and radiation, nausea, baldness, sores, acne, and pain that cuts right to the bones without collapsing into self-pity and fear. Keeping a family together and sustaining a multi-state, international support system requires teamwork. And keeping up the strength required to survive with dignity requires commitment. Hard work, teamwork, character and commitment are the four pillars of greatness that the Berkeley debate team and its coaches struggle to uphold every day. These values are intrinsically laudable, but they are also effective – I am happy and increasingly healthy: after 2 rounds of radiation and 12 chemotherapy treatments, as of this week, scanners can no longer detect active cancer cells in my body.

Debate is life, debate saves lives, and debate is keeping me alive. Long live UC Berkeley Debate.

Cat + Microwave = Cockroach

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:37:05 -0400

Cat + Microwave = Cockroach

Just when you thought it was safe to walk around...

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:35:23 -0400

Just when you thought it was safe to walk around Georgetown…

This is one of my mom’s favorite DC landmarks (another...

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:33:44 -0400

This is one of my mom’s favorite DC landmarks (another doorway in Georgetown).

This is the entryway of the hospital where my brother and I were...

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:31:01 -0400

This is the entryway of the hospital where my brother and I were born. That is my brother and mother standing in the doorway - you may be surprised to learn that I am related to a tall blond athlete and a pretty readheaded woman. Rumors of baby-switching and adoption abound.

This is the American branch of my family - our first holiday...

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:27:16 -0400

This is the American branch of my family - our first holiday together in 14 years.

When Thumbs Up Is No Comfort

Sat, 31 May 2008 16:25:02 -0400

When Thumbs Up Is No Comfort : My mom forwarded me this article from today’s NY(F)T. This is probably the best short article I’ve read on emotional responses to cancer. Curiously, I can identify with nearly all of the people they interview, even as they disagree with each other. This gives rise to my only complaint about the article: it frames the various responses as if they are mutually exclusive alternative positions rather than phases or moments that anyone might face, regardless of their chosen “outlook.”

Happy Mother's Day

Sun, 11 May 2008 05:18:00 -0400

In my cancer-related correspondence, my mother comes up quite often. Usually people convey regards to her; other times they ask me about how she is doing, or how we are getting along. She is often in the background of my updates, because she’s around me all the time and takes care of me when any other person (except probably my father) would let me kvetch myself to death or starve. I don’t talk about her explicitly very much because her presence is so ubiquitous that it rarely occurs to me to discuss it. Recently it occurred to me that not all of the readers know about the role my mother plays in keeping me alive, and that she might not know how much I appreciate her. To remedy this, I present the following shameless plug for my mom.

I tried to come up with a short list of the best reasons I have for loving her:

1) She hasn’t killed me or returned me to the vegetable stand yet: if you got to know me through cyberspace, chances are you have no idea how annoying I can be when unscripted. If you got to know me in the flesh, you think you know, but you have no idea how much worse it was when I was whippersnapper. My mom was smart enough to know I’d be trouble on Day One. The first thing said upon seeing me was “he’s a redhead! Put him back!” Fortunately for me and her uterus, I was a blond - with blood on my head. I should add that when I was three years old, I absent-mindedly asked my mom where “children [like me] come from.” She told me that she bought me for 25¢ from a woman selling cabbages. She brought home the cabbages, and there I was in the bag. In all fairness to my mother, Cabbage Patch dolls were the rage at the time.

My continued biological existence is strong evidence that my mother is incredibly cheap, or really likes cabbage because before I hit puberty I: tricked my brother into drinking pee, bit another pre-school student to “teach him what a carnivore is, [we were studying dinosaurs and apparently he was some kind of idiot]” told a teacher that my new baby brother would be named “Chair,” precipitating the most bizarre parent-teacher conference of all time (I convinced her by telling her that “it could’ve been worse, at first they were going to call him ‘Tug Boat’”), made her read me a book called Spring is Here, Spring is Here (the plot is somewhat predictable) for 18 hours while flying to Israel, cried so loudly about letting a frog my dad caught in our backyard that the neighbors suspected child abuse (it went something like “[scream] but I love him [scream] (anyone know how to tell the sex of a frog?)!” and gave her three descriptions of my dream job: “butterfly,” [age 2] “garbage man [this at age 3, as we drove past Harvard and MIT - forever ensuring that both institutions would reject me whenever given the chance],” and “telling the President what to do” (age 6). Needless to say, pubescent hormone surplus did not make me easier to deal with.

All of that said, the jury is still out on the whole infanticide thing. Speaking of which, does anyone want to volunteer to come to my last treatment to make sure she doesn’t make good on her threat to “kill [me] once [I’m] cured?”

2) She has pushed me to find all of my great loves: without exception, my mother has encouraged me to do everything I love. My fascination with guns, bombs and jets, my boundless enthusiasm for all things dinosaur and Japanese, Peter Sellers and Mel Brooks, drawing and my lifelong bond with animals. She also taught me to love women and other humans (but that’s covered below).

Two items of particular significance stand out. First, books: my mother and father both read to me when I was little, even though they both worked. Even when I was way too old for that they kept doing it because I had trouble learning to read. Most people I know who read the way I do started doing it around pre-school or kindergarten. I didn’t really start getting along with whole paragraphs until I was nearing 3^rd grade. Appeals to my desire to please, my intellect, a learning disability therapist and God only knows how many versions of Why Johnny Can’t Read had no appreciable effect. Distressing as this was, my mother ultimately solved it by appealing to my all-consuming infantile avarice (best embodied in my long-running response to any offer of cake: “the biggest and the most, please.”). My parents told me that I would only get new toys on holidays and birthdays but they would buy me books wherever and whenever I wanted. The predictable result is summarized by my parents’ oft-repeated statement that they “should’ve bought stock in Barnes and Noble.”

A normal, competent parent teaches their kid to read, but my parents made me so curious about the world that it got me to teach myself how to read when I was ready. In other words, they didn’t give me fish, or teach me how to fish, they taught me how to teach myself to fish and gave me an infinite supply of tackle. My reading skills basically went from zero to Jurassic Park in a year. My appetite for books is so great that even now, when I can’t really stare at pages for too long without getting nauseating vertigo I consume so much trashy literature that my mom has to force me to give away books or my shelving will collapse on itself. Anyone need a novel? I don’t do delivery…

Second, debate: no one knows my mom brought Muhammad to the mountain on this one. When I was in 8^th grade, I gave a speech at my junior high graduation. It had something to do with how my high school class would be the class of 2000, and the significance of leadership in the new millennium. My mom helped me write it. I suspect that people were very impressed that I could 4 to 1996 and get 2000. Some nice old lady came up to me afterwards and said I would be “the President someday.” I was so insulted that I went to tell my parents, but before I got there, one of my classmates stopped me and told me that his older brother was in the audience and “wanted me to join the debate team.” I said okay, and he said “no seriously, he says he’ll rip your nipples off if you don’t join.”

At the time, I had no idea how serious a threat the team captain posed to my nipples. Not only did my mother insist that I comply with the threat (thus saving said nipples), she upbraided me for showing insufficient enthusiasm about the “inside track” I was being offered. About 3 years later she realized that being a national champion involved constant travel, the complete absence of a normal social life, brought me into contact with weird, lives-in-mom’s-basement evil-genius types, and made me even more argumentative and stubborn than usual. She tactfully suggested I “move on to something else.” FYI: “tactfully suggested” in Jewish Mother sounds like “insistently, repeatedly, loudly and forcefully demanded” in Gentile Mother. Fortunately for the debate community, I’m roughly half as obstinate, willful, and stubborn as she is.

A fact that no doubt infuriates my mother to this day whenever the word “debate” is used in conversation is that she and my father made me good at it long before I ever joined a team. Aside from the small matter of literacy/illiteracy, they did two things that prepared me for a long and distinguished career as a Debate Jedi Master. 1) They never treated me like a kid. A kid’s opinion on adult issues is insignificant. By contrast, my parents always talked to me like a small, somewhat-undereducated and ill-tempered adult. When I had contrary opinions, they heard me out and paid me the respect of explaining why they disagreed (then usually they did me the service of overriding my preferences with parental fiat). One of my biggest problems in school (life) was that some teachers (bosses, cops, professors, TSA agents, landlords, significant others’ parents…) had trouble enjoying the company of a child raised in a home where disagreeing with adults was de rigeur. 2) They never set a curfew for me (until I lost my virginity; then it was 1030). Since both my parents worked, if they put me to bed at 8 or 9 like a normal kid, it would give us only an hour or two together. Instead, they came home, made dinner, and then we would eat and talk at the table (no TV in the dining room). At dinner, we would talk about the world, our family, my parents’ jobs and the economy, and as long as the conversation was in English, I was included in it as an equal.

3) She made me a culinary citizen of the world, or rather, of a globalized America. About 10 years ago “polenta” became a common feature on the menus of hoity-toity eating establishments. I started eating that stuff when I was a toddler, except in our house it was always called mămăligă (same food, slightly different consistency, Romanian name). She made it when she was too tired to cook something else. Foods from Southern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East dominated our table and refrigerator. I always assumed that other families ate this way, until I learned that it is not uncommon for parents to baby their children by serving only those foods that the children immediately like. Since children tend to like unhealthy food and that which is advertised heavily, it is unsurprising that our society suffers from twin epidemics of obesity and ignorance. My mother often cooked foods I did not like – when I complained, she told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, and ate them with my father while I watched. I since have learned to enjoy what I repeatedly and loudly rejected (notable exceptions include: brain, mămăligă eaten as breakfast cereal, gefilte fish, and head cheese). To her credit, she rarely says “I told you so.” More generally, my mom taught me to take joy in the simple pleasure of good food.

Furthermore, she taught me to cook (“so you won’t marry the first dormitory slut who makes you decent macaroni and cheese”) and to eat like a civilized person. When I held a utensil like a savage, reversed my fork (left) or knife (right) hands, or committed another gross faux pas, my mother would (depending on the severity of the offense) correct, yell, or reach across the able and whack at my hands until I rectified the situation. She took this to the ludicrous extreme of punishing me for eating French (freedom) fries with my fingers – my brother and my strenuous and sustained objections to this ultimately created an exception, and convinced my mother to eat fries like a good American as well. Although she snickers at my consistent use of chopsticks, I see it as a extension of the good manners she taught me – they, like nearly everything else, are situation-specific. Ultimately, she taught me the value of an internationalized palate and a willingness to try new things. As a result, I have spent countless joyful hours sampling the delicacies of our big, complicated blue world.

4) She made me an intellectual world citizen. My mother made a sustained effort over the course of my entire life to explain the wider world to me, while admitting when she did not have all the answers. She told me about living in foreign cultures, about the Cold War, living under Communism, living with Arab-Israeli conflict, and about how different America was from other places. I grew up hearing two foreign languages spoken every day. I grew accustomed communicating across cultural barriers, and learned to view problems from perspectives alien to my own. I learned to translate and move between my Levantine-European house and my suburban American schools. Americans who are ignorant of the wider world do not fully appreciate their country (that they die for it nonetheless says something impressive about America and Americans). She cultivated in me an abiding curiosity about global politics and history because she always pushed me to ask “why,” as in: “why do Arabs and Israelis kill each other?” Or, “why is there a a nuclear arms race?” She taught me about my ethno-cultural “roots,” and she never went on vacation without me. She turned my natural curiosity to the task of understand why and how peoples are different, why they miscommunicate, why they hate, fight, kill and destroy each other. Today, I study international relations at Georgetown and work in the defense sector – she had more than a little to do with this (but if she tells me I was “born to litigate” one more time, I may commit matricide).

5) She taught me the value of (hard) labor. One of my earliest recollections of my mother’s way of explaining our economic position is her saying “I have news for you, kid, in this world you won’t get anything you don’t earn for yourself.” She never, ever let me do a half-assed job on anything without a dose of serious criticism or a forced repetition of the task. Over time, she tattooed “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right” along the inside of my skull right near where the part of my brain that thinks is located (just left of the part that sucks at math). As a debater, a student, and at my job (where I occasionally get flak for this), my mantra has been that anything worth thinking about is worth approaching with unstinting diligence and unyielding curiosity. Whenever I protested that others were also neglecting their responsibilities, she gave me some line about others “jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge,” and then excoriated me for using their laziness as an alibi. I didn’t know it then, but she was teaching me to lead by example.

When I taught “the best of the best” high school debate students at Northwestern University, I was utterly appalled by the quality of the work they turned in. At first, I gave more help and advice. I even produced literature reviews and citation lists for them (thinking their research skills were lacking or the tasks were too complex), but got no results. Finally, I gave a long, blistering, vicious and immensely cathartic rant about how pathetically inadequate their effort was. Over the next two weeks, I administered several more individual dressing-downs and two other lectures similar in tone and content. The quality and quantity of work increased. When the program ended, around ten students (out of nearly 20) approached me to say thanks. Each one said “thank you for yelling at me, no one has ever done that to me before” (or something similar). At first, I saw this as teenage hyperbole, but around student #6, I asked “what do you mean ‘no one has ever done that to you?’” He/she told me that no one, not a teammate, not a friend, not a coach, not their parents, not a teacher - not one single solitary human being worth remembering had ever told a 17 year old private school student that his/her work was inadequate, or that he/she was being lazy, or acting stupid, or inept. A vile culture of universal positive reinforcement excised them from reality – where ineptitude, laziness and stupidity are cause for criticism and worse. Thankfully, my mother keeps me firmly tethered to terra firma even when others heap praise upon me.

6) She taught me to respect women. My mother is capital-t Tough. She (in)famously reduced an extremely pregnant (and spectacularly unhelpful) airline employee to tears in a crowded Canadian airport concourse. She was being mean, but not unfair: she worked until the day her water broke. She had her adenoids ripped out with pliers, sans anesthesia. She birthed two children – during the second birth, her leg was in a giant plaster cast because her ankle was shattered and full of screws. She lived in a dictatorship and in a war zone. She once calmly talked a man out of killing her. When she came to see me in the hospital, she was convinced that her first born child was going to die there. I thought I would probably die too, but I was pretty sure I would at least get to go home first. I was utterly stunned to learn how pessimistic she felt, because I saw my mother cry a grand total of two times during the week we were together there (the first time, I was crying too – we had just found out I had cancer).

As near as I can tell, my mother has worked two full-time jobs nearly every day that I have known her. She occupies an office where she designs the plans a multinational corporation uses to cope with the unexpected. If rioters run amok, a transformer explodes and an entire country goes dark, or an air conditioner breaks in a tropical country where a heat-sensitive server farm is located (these have happened in the 5 months since she moved here, several of them in a single day), panicked and confused people call my mom to fix it. Don’t even ask what she was up to when Katrina hit. In her second job, she cooks, cleans, and administers for a family of four. She has always done both of these jobs with skill and grace, and only rarely complains that the distribution of labor unfairly saddles her with a lot of tasks that would reduce the rest of us to quivering piles of male jelly. A doctor friend informed me that women have greater stamina and pain tolerance than men, in a tone that strongly implied that this should come as a surprise. It did not.

Not only does my mother do her gender great credit with her strength of character and work ethic, she stands up for her fellow women. She has consistently called me out when I mistreat, underestimate, or malign the women in my life. On dozens of occasions, my mother has informed me that I am being a “male chauvinist pig” (it changed from “piglet” around 14) and pinched, hit or slapped me, if warranted. She routinely goes so far as to say that she “hopes someday someone does the same to [me] so [I] will know how it feels.” When I was 18 and had my heart broken, she brusquely informed me that I “had it coming.” That was the first, but not the last time my mother has said that. Informed of my most recent heartbreak, the first words out of her mouth were “well, she was too good for you.” My repeated protestations that when I date, she is supposed to take my side – even (especially) when I am wrong have been greeted with what I can only describe as amused disdain. I would be mad at her about this, except that in nearly all of the cases that I can recall, she has been absolutely, overwhelmingly correct.

Because of her, I am friends with most of my ex-girlfriends, and have more female than male friends (the latter also has something to do with the fact that I do not really understand “sports”).

7) She taught me how to love someone. My parents have been married for 37 years, and are still obviously in love. In the 25 years I have known them, I have only feared that they would split up once (for exactly one day when I was 10, and this was because I did not understand “divorce” and my father worked about 1,000 miles from home). My father, temperamentally (placid) and intellectually (scientific, quantitative) is nothing like my mother. I used to think that it was amazing they ever got along in the first place, but what strikes me now is how they compensate for each other’s weaknesses and reinforce each other’s strengths. They have a division of labor, and each of them handles what they are best equipped for, although they collaborate on every decision. On some pretty major issues, they have diametrically opposed views. They disagree, sometimes vehemently, but they rarely disrespect or hurt each other. If they do, they quickly apologize.

My mother’s most important interpersonal rule is that “in this family, we never go to bed angry [because only God knows if we will wake up]” and no matter how much she wants to, she never deviates from it. She also never lets any of us violate it. She never treats her marriage, or her husband or her family as disposable (or even replaceable). She forgives us our mistakes, even when we hurt her. I have never doubted for one day in my life that my mother loves me. Even when I know she is angry with me, hurt, disappointed, or all of the above, I know she loves me. I know this because she tells me – usually, when I see her, several times a day. She hugs and kisses me, because she knows small gestures are important. She does unsolicited kindnesses and surprises me with things she knows I will like. She never conflates “unconditional love” with the absence of criticism or judgment – when I have overstepped or underperformed, she tells me because she loves me, and says so. She never lets me take myself too seriously, and she refuses to allow me to slip into self-pitying victimhood, even though she is charged with my care and we both know I might die.

8) She came here for me. As I got in a taxi to go back to the hospital having been told “there’s something abnormal on your chest x-ray,” I called my parents. My mother didn’t pick up, so I talked to my father. I told him not to get her upset until we knew what was going on, and he promised to keep her calm. He did such a good job that when I woke up in my hospital bed less than 24 hours later, she was standing in the doorway. She was on a business trip to Newark and took the 5AM train to Washington – before she knew what I had. This didn’t come as much of a surprise.

My mother was 11 years old when she decided to give birth to me in America. At the time, she was living in a small town in Romania, and her parents were working hard to emigrate – to Israel. Fourteen years later, she was my age and left behind her family, her friends, and her home and moved 5,600 miles away. Seven years after that, she was a US citizen and I was born. My mother and her family could have accepted life in a squalid, poor, viciously anti-Semitic totalitarian state but they refused to. She could have stayed near her family and friends, avoided learning a third language, and given birth to me in a country where war never ends. My mother refused to compromise, and refused to have children until she knew they would live in peace and freedom.

Because I know my mother already made a transcontinental voyage for me, it did not surprise me to learn that she was willing to make another, shorter one when I was sick. After all was said and done at the hospital, we had to decide whether I would stay in my adopted home and keep working, or if I would quit work, pack up, and go home to Chicago with my parents. Quitting would put my career and health insurance in jeopardy, disrupt my life, and deprive me of distractions from my condition. It was an undesirable option, but life with cancer is full of find-the-least-bad-option situations and it was a distinct possibility.

We did not have the passionate argument for which I had assiduously prepared. My mother declared almost immediately that I would keep working, and she would move into my apartment to take care of me. Allow me to elaborate on the context of this decision: I am 25, not 15. My mother has a full-time job. During the week that I spent in the hospital, my parents were supposed to close the sale of their home and move into their new condo.

Sight unseen, she transferred to her company’s Washington office, and has spent less than a week in her new home. She knew no one in DC. We share a studio apartment. To put it mildly, I am not an easy person to live with. For medical reasons, I am not allowed to scoop out my cat’s litter. I am supposed to avoid nicks and scratches, and I can barely sustain the energy required to do my job and maintain a semblance of a social life, so I contribute virtually nothing to the upkeep of our shared home (I do pay the rent). I am not a morning person, and I can be a mean bastard. I constantly need pills and injections. Even before I got sick, I was persnickety about my food. I hate having cancer, and I hate being a patient. Occasionally, I fight off the Black Dog. I keep odd hours, and alternate between insomnia and hypersomnia. I snore. Loudly and often. Every other week, I go to the hospital and get shot full of toxic chemicals. This exacerbates all of the above problems.

In the time that we have lived together (almost exactly five months) we have had less than half a dozen arguments that one might reasonably call “fights.” None were particularly bad, and all were resolved quickly. She has complained only rarely, and never without cause. A lot of this is because she knows I am sick, and is holding off on punching my lights out until I am better. But we also get along because I love my mother, I respect and admire her, and I know she came here for me, and won’t leave until she knows I am safe again. It is so hard to forget how wonderful my mother is that even as I fight my cancer, I appreciate her enough to avoid pointlessly fighting with her over nonsense.

That said, I don’t tell her how I feel enough, and everyone that knows me should know how fantastic she has been - so I am posting this to my cancer blog.

Happy Mothers Day to her, and to all the mother figures in my life (you know who you are). Everyone else should find at least one mother to thank today.

Got an hour-plus? Ready to laugh and (maybe) cry? Watch this (click link).

Tue, 06 May 2008 02:35:00 -0400

Got an hour-plus? Ready to laugh and (maybe) cry? Watch this (click link).:

I’m not one to send around cheesy and/or “inspirational” videos or e-mails… unless I wrote them… Having hedged, I’m posting this because I have been meaning to mention it in one of my cancer e-mails and forgotten about four times. It’s awesome, and combines several of my core extracurricular interests: high-end computer stuff, the joy of learning, public speechifying, and, (obviously) cancer. I have heard a lot of speeches over the years, and this easily makes the top 3 or 4, lifetime.

PS - there are shortened versions on various websites. Don’t compromise. Watch the whole thing, wait until you’re in the mood, or don’t watch it at all.

Treatment 10 5/3/08

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:57:00 -0400

This is my first designed-for-blog post, and will be brief. I was treated on Wednesday and I have been struggling to deal with the nausea and pain. Each treatment is getting more difficult than the one that preceded it. I have two more chemotherapy treatments coming. Considering the possibility of additional treatments – because of a recurrence, or something worse - is terrifying. The thought itself, the act of writing about it, makes me ill.

Two items to file under “good news”:

1) My doctors believe I am unlikely to require additional chemotherapy in the foreseeable future. You can see the treatment protocols used by the Lombardi Center physicians responsible for my care. They are from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, and show the “decision trees” that guide the process of treatment. You can see that I have two unfavorable factors (p.13) – “B symptoms” and “bulky disease,” but no others. The relevant page deals with Stage 2B Bulky Disease (p.7). I am likely to receive two additional chemotherapy treatments – since I have had 10 so far, that makes a total of 12. Once that’s over, I will most likely receive IFR. Debate dorks note: this is Involved Field Radiation, not an Integral Fast Reactor (non-debate dorks: a liquid sodium-cooled nuclear reactor that is supposed to reduce waste and proliferation risks). I was told these treatments are usually easier to tolerate than chemo. The radiation oncologists will decide about how to treat me but it will probably receive 5 15-minute treatments over 2-6 weeks, for a total of 30-36 Gy (gray unit, one gray = 100 rads).

2) One of the hematology-oncology fellows told us about a new study that suggests a rapid response to chemotherapy, indicated by an early “PET-negative” response, “was able to predict with 92-percent accuracy how effective a complete course of the chemotherapy would be. The PET scan was able to distinguish between patients who would achieve long-term control of their disease and patients whose disease would progress during treatment or immediately thereafter or would later relapse.” If you re-read my post about my February re-staging, you will see that my PET was negative. In other words, if this study is correct, there is a very good chance I will achieve “long term control” of my lymphoma.

In other news, Drake and Hen have returned to Kew Gardens.

Here he is.

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:56:00 -0400

Here he is.

And the brown lady… but they’re never around at the same time....

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:55:24 -0400

And the brown lady… but they’re never around at the same time. Perhaps their lawyers (Jewish-looking sea-gulls, no doubt) were able to come to an agreement on visitation rights.

Nightmare

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:54:00 -0400

I recently had a nightmare come true. I have discovered that being confronted with the reality of a nightmare: “you have cancer,” for example, is nothing like the nagging anxieties that accompany a long-running terror. I suspect it is one thing to be confronted by an insoluble nightmare: “your beloved dog is dead” and quite another to face a potentially-soluble one: “you need to fight off a treatable but deadly disease.” My experience with the latter has been that condensing diffuse dread into a defined challenge transforms an emotional quagmire into a task. Once the rational, purpose-driven, task-accomplishment frame of mind takes over, it is harder (but not impossible) to be terrified into quivering impotence.

Other times, as in the case of long-feared social confrontations, the reality occasionally turns out to fall far short of one one’s expectations. In my Passover update I described the “utter terror” I experience when I imagine the hoses of my catheter might “get caught on something and the catheter will be ripped out of my arm. It runs… into the vena cava (the big vein that brings blood to the heart)… I have a recurring waking nightmare where it gets torn out and I bleed out or lose an arm or something. I… have learned to sleep without really sleeping…”

On Sunday night, I was working on a final exam from my first semester of graduate school (I was admitted to the hospital on the last day of final exams in December). I was offered an A- but allowed to do additional work to make a run at a possible A. That they even made this offer says a lot about the kindness and character of my graduate program and its faculty/staff. Those of you who know me well will be unsurprised to learn that I felt compelled to pursue the higher grade. You will also be unsurprised that a) when my family arrived at my apartment in mid-hospital stay, it looked like a hand grenade had exploded inside a small International Relations library and therefore b) all of my reading materials for the exam had been filed away neatly (needless to say, untraceably) and c) in my typically ADD-perfectionist way, I stayed up until the very last possible moment working on the exam.

I fell asleep around 7AM and around noon, I leaned over the side of my bed and saw a smallish puddle of red liquid. Lest you think I am some combination of paranoid and intelligent, I saw this puddle and thought “hmm, that looks like it might be blood.” I then tried to inspect it more closely and tumbled out of bed, over my shoulder, flat onto my ass. I managed to miss most of the blood-like substance, at least. My awkward gymnastics also convinced me that I was not noticeably injured. I could not find a wound, and did not feel any pain, so I concluded that the blood did not come from me: a wounded victim of Anastasia’s mouse-hunting, a bloody nose (my mom’s nose, obviously), or something… my best defense is that I was very tired and less than 100% functional.

About two hours later, I was feeling a little better, and ready to shower. When I took off my shirt, I saw my catheter nightmare come to life.

It’s not as bad as it looks, and it didn’t hurt. The...

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:53:33 -0400

It’s not as bad as it looks, and it didn’t hurt. The catheter is still 50% functional.

Passover Update 4/19/08

Sat, 03 May 2008 22:30:00 -0400

All –

[Advance warning: I wrote this thinking that some images might help convey the experience of living with cancer. If you are easily upset by things like veins and injections, or images of cats and ducks, I suggest you cut and paste this into text or only read the first two paragraphs.]

First, the medical situation. In many ways, the news on this front is positive. As you may recall, I have to have 12 chemotherapy treatments (2 a month, 6 months). Every third of the way through (4 treatments) I am supposed to have scans to confirm that the treatments are working. I spoke with my nurse last week to ask why I hadn’t been pumped full of radioactive sugar and stuffed in a metal donut with spinning magnet doohickeys. She told me that my oncologist decided that my first re-staging scan (after treatment 4) was so good that there was no reason to re-scan this time.

This is good news (Mom says, “VERY good news!”) and in typically Jewish fashion, I have found a way of making it upsetting. Every time I get pain in my chest, or have trouble swallowing, I get a mild panicky feeling that something is growing in my chest again. There is a special kind of terror that comes from having found out about cancer from seemingly insignificant symptoms – in my case, night sweats, a very bad chest cold, trouble swallowing and breathing. It is hard not to become a hypochondriac. My oncologist half-jokingly chided me for complaining about “every little thing,” although he knows that I over-report because little things could matter in big ways. One particular reason I need to avoid seeming like a panic-stricken moron is that it increases the pressure on me to “(soft voice) see someone, a professional.” If any of you ever consider a run for president or Secretary of Defense, please consider fixing this problem: people like me can’t see “mental health professionals.” without jeopardizing our careers because we will have to tell the people who run our background checks and waive our right to medical confidentiality. Personally, I don’t like shrinks, so this doesn’t bother me too much – but a lot of people are coming home with combat stress. Their most valuable possession may be their Top Secret/SCI clearance (which opens a lot of private sector doors) and they have to choose between risking it and seeking care for their PTSD and other issues.

I decided that in this update, I would try to convey the everydayness of my disease. It’s one thing to explain to people what I have, how far advanced it is, how they treat it, how they discovered it, and other dry details. It’s another trying to relay the experience so that others can see through my eyes. I recently tried writing a letter where I attempted to explain how cancer has dramatically altered my life. I was trying to explain why even “cured” patients only “get over” their cancer in the way that one “gets over” the death of a loved one. After about 5,000 words, I realized that I was a) doing a bad job and b) nowhere near done. Keeping in mind the 1:1000 picture:word ratio, I have decided to make this note a bit of a visual show-and-tell so you all can walk in my shoes for a bit. I hope it works.

Let’s start at the beginning: every day when I wake up, I take my daily medicines: Allopurinol, Prevacid, Colase.

This picture shows my medicine basket (which includes other...

Sat, 03 May 2008 22:29:36 -0400

This picture shows my medicine basket (which includes other drugs I take for nausea, a lot of Tylenol and my prescription painkillers):