neonleonb

I want to say something witty, but that'd just take away from the sign.

Today would be my mom's 55th birthday.

Half of my parents & grandparents died of cancer in their early to mid fifties. Of Ruth, Sam, and me, will we all escape that fate? Will treatment improve much in the next few decades? We'd better hope so.

I'm currently in Tennessee, after a last-minute trip to Boston. In case you hadn't read it on my mom's health blog, she died on Tuesday night shortly after we'd all arrived. We didn't really see it coming--she'd been in the hospital with a fever before, she'd had infections before, but this time the combination of cancer and pneumonia overwhelmed her. None of us realized it was so dire until the last minute, and we arrived at the hospital just in time to see her. She, however, was not awake, and she probably never realized that this was the end.

Her funeral is on Tuesday. After that, I'll be back in Berkeley finishing up my dissertation.

Chester, my one remaining guinea pig, had a tooth extraction on Thursday. His tooth had started growing in crookedly, so it, and the matching lower tooth, had to be pulled. On Friday morning, he was recovering well, but on Friday night he seemed a little lethargic, and when I woke up on Saturday morning he was dead. Recently dead--still soft and floppy, and not yet cold. Within half an hour, though, he began to get cold and stiff.
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It was pointed out that I haven't posted in a while. That's true.

Grandfather

My paternal grandfather died last week. I didn't know him that well, and that's mostly his fault. I asked him about his life, but rarely would he tell any stories. He was an army clerk in WWII, and he got to fly over the Himalayas in an army plane, but that's about all I heard of it. Only this weekend, meeting his friends, did I find out that he had friends. Apparently he was a pool shark and a skilled golfer, in addition to the avid TV-watcher I knew.

At least I got to see lots of family. I saw my cousin (my only first cousin) for the first time in a decade. I met relatives I didn't know I had. I walked around Pittsburgh with my grandmother and learned Pgh history with my uncle. The biggest shame was that my mother wasn't there, since she was getting treatment in Nashville.

Mother

Speaking of my mother.... I think I mentioned she has multiple myeloma, a sort of bone cancer. She first found out about it three years ago, and after a marrow transplant from her brother David, she was okay on maintenance drugs for quite a while. However, this fall, the indicators of the cancer began to rise, and since then she has been through an increasingly taxing series of treatments. She hasn't been in remission since then, despite going through the standard state-of-the-art treatments, including lose-your-hair hardcore chemo.

And now, despite her recent treatments, the protein they use to measure the cancer has begun rising again. The chemo has damaged her marrow, reducing her blood cell counts, so she needs platelets and whole blood transfusions, but still the cancer keeps coming back. Now she's looking into trials and other programs, including at hospitals outside of Tennessee. This has turned out to be much harder than any of us hoped--there are stories of people who had much simpler treatments and went into nice long remissions, and I guess she's not that lucky. But she and my dad keep fighting and trying all the options, and if anyone can beat this, she can.

Me

Meanwhile, my life goes on. I go to Pittsburgh for a funeral and end up attending swing dancing with live music. Here in Berkeley, I'll have a busy weekend, with social events, dancing, hang gliding, and a visiting potential student. Maybe I'll even squeeze in some work on my thesis.

An artistic woman saw my post about putting Louis to sleep, and she wanted to sketch my picture of him that was taken an hour before he died.



Her sketch is really good, and it captures Louis's habit of laying his head on my arm far better than the photograph does.

Yesterday, I put Louis to sleep.

Here's the last good picture of him.

Never has this user icon, of Terry Pratchett's Death, been quite so appropriate. As Death says in one of Pratchett's books, "There is no justice. There's just me." That's ironic, since one of the great joys I find in Pratchett's books is that his characters do meet their just rewards.

But today, I am an arbiter of life and death, and money. Louis, my 5.5-year-old guinea pig, has a kidney stone and will die without surgery that will cost $600-900. If it was several thousand dollars, it would be right out, and if it was a couple hundred, I'd do it without hesitation. But he's a middle-aged pig, and I'm not sure I can justify spending a month's rent on him, and frankly I don't even want to have guinea pigs when I graduate. That's a lot of cold reasoning, and I know I'm kind of horrible for it, but I think I've made up my mind to not get the surgery. It's hard to look at him and know that I've sold him out for 1 month's rent, that I have held his little life in my hands and cast it aside, that he would live, but for me.

In general, I believe that if you can't afford to care for your pet, you can't afford to get a pet, and I've been good about taking care of them. But there's obviously a line somewhere, and this surgery is in a terrible gray area, and I think I've chosen the heartless but reasonable option.

Edit: the proper quote is, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," from the Bhagavad Gita, brought to me by Oppenheimer's statement at the first nuclear test. In this case, the proper modification is, "I am become Death, destroyer of pigs."

As I was jogging this morning, I saw a small dog without a leash running around up ahead. I figured its owner was around, but I didn't see them. As I got close to the dog, it suddenly ran off into the street, its owner yelling after it to stay. Of course, it was at that moment that a minivan came driving down the street. The dog ran right in front of the van, and then ran away from the van--in the same direction the van was going.

The image that I have in my head is this: The owner was yelling, then van's driver was stopping, but not perhaps as fast as they should have been, and the dog was fleeing from the van. The dog was right in front of the van's front left wheel, scampering away, and it got maybe 2 inches from being run over--I think it was crouching a bit to avoid the wheel as it ran away. But in the end, the van stopped and the dog barely escaped with its life. It would have been truly crushed had it been caught by the wheel.

But it all ended up okay, and maybe the owner will learn to either (a) train the dog or (b) keep it on a leash. Some people might blame the driver (they should have been going as slowly as molasses in a residential neighborhood!), but they were reasonably slow, and drivers aren't responsible for psychically intuiting what might run into the street in front of them. I grew up on busy streets, and you simply stay off the road, and keep your pets off the road.

Damn, life is short.  I'm about halfway through grad school, and the beginning seems lit it was so recently.  My youth is gone!  I have a finite length of time remaining!  When I was a kid, a month was an enormous length of time, but this semester everything has flown by.  And once I'm out of grad school, well, that's about as far into the future as I've ever planned.  Can one have a life after that?  Can I have my own existence, even if I have children?  I'm not sure, and I don't even know if I want to find out.

I guess I have to remind myself that while "Life begins at 40" is obviously a lie, life certainly doesn't end at 40, or 30, or any of the other ages at which I look at people and think, "You're unimaginably old."  Because, frankly, I'm unimaginably old right now.

Or, I could put faith in Kurzweil's upcoming Singularity, the point at which technology changes the world past the point we can predict.  Of course, he goes on to make predictions, and one of them is that human death will be essentially eliminated.  (Vernor Vinge is inclined to agree; by the way, I highly recommend his new book, Rainbow's End.)  I sure hope he's right.  I think that as a Strong AI proponent, I agree that in the long run, death will be more or less eliminated.  I'm just not convinced it'll be in my lifetime.  Still, I'd be glad to be wrong.