The Curse of the Cure

It’s been many months since Yom Kippur and will be many more until the next, but the compulsion to confess, if not to atone, for I have done nothing wrong, is overwhelming. When friends came to our home to celebrate my 50th birthday I wondered if there would ever again be a similar party. Something was wrong with the mysterious innards within, but I didn’t yet know what. After all, I’d never heard of PSA, a series of letters that soon would be the measure of my existence.

In brief, doctors at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute said that the cancer in my prostate had probably spread beyond the organ itself. They couldn’t see it but with a PSA reading of over 40, statistically they were sure it had. Removing the prostate would therefore do no good. They suggested initial hormonal therapy to be followed up by radiation and then continued hormonal therapy. I agreed. That was eighteen years ago.

The side effects of monthly (then quarterly) injections of Lupron, and thrice daily ingestion of Flutamide capsules were minimal and for the first sixteen years the PSA was safely within the acceptable range. But two years ago, it soared and new medicines were tried and they didn’t work so I agreed to go on a trial of a new drug which also didn’t work and then into hardcore chemotherapy which ultimately failed and now I’m on another trial which seems to be working. (The disease had spread to my bones, from my skull to my toes. Six weeks after taking the new drug, the tumors had apparently vanished.)

But this new medicine, Cabozantinib (XL 184) has its side effects including fatigue, so that I can barely get through my daily activities without a nap that leaves me upon awakening feeling groggy beyond any capacity to work. Which brings me to deadlines. The university where I teach expects me to show up in class and perform wonders. Of course, I do. The editor of this newspaper patiently awaits each new column and is kind enough to give me some leeway. But not only does fatigue plague me, I’m mentally not as acute as I used to be. Ideas don’t come as quickly and sometimes not at all. In the classroom I can fall back on 40 years experience. But as a columnist, I’ve only been doing this for six years. Not having an idea is an occupational hazard for the columnist. Until recently it was easily resolved by poring over newspapers, in my case either the New York Times, occasionally the Providence Journal, the Forward or JTA daily summaries of events. But now I find I have neither the energy nor the sitzfelisch to read anything beyond what I’ve assigned o my students.

In the years that I’ve been writing I’ve tried to mix current events with historical and literary precedents and perspectives, giving readers a greater mutual understanding of the present and the past, always with a Jewish theme in the forefront; I’ve tried to infuse some columns with my love of science and my devotion to the idea that it’s labor, be it physical or mental, that creates value, an old fashioned idea, I now admit, but I’m an old-fashioned guy. I have expressed my love for Israel and opposition to those who would purposely or inadvertently destroy it. I have tried to write about interesting things in an interesting way, twisting a sentence here, defying grammar there, contorting words so as not to split an infinitive for the pleasure it gave me and might give the reader. You as the reader can decide how successful I was, or was not.

The deadline for this piece has passed. The ability to write on cue has also.

And so, Haverim, readers of this Voice & Herald column since February 2006, I thank you for your attention and bid you l’shalom. If the editor will allow the occasional guest column I may come up with an idea. But I can’t do it on demand anymore.

Thank you Mary Korr for asking me to write this column; thank you Nancy Kirsch for allowing me to continue; and to you readers, whether you’ve loved or loathed what took my fancy over the past six years, I thank you for your attention. If you are interested in seeing the complete opus, it’s contained in my blog

Winter Reflections: Of stars and bugs

As I sit at my desk, a bug flutters by. It and its family share my home, adding little but some small annoyance. They are each about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Yes, that dot, or maybe smaller. They seem to waft like a slow-motion knuckleball, though still too swift in their gyrations for me to catch them (except when I do) and they are easily killed once entrapped. But I look at these things and wonder, does it have a name (I’m hoping some scientist has dubbed it something like Timwakefieldius minoris). More importantly, does it have a brain? I know it has wings and I assume it has sex organs because spontaneous generation is no longer de rigueur in the scientific world. But how to cram all that and a digestive system and sensory organs into such a small space, and why—yes, yes, I know the story of David asking God why are there spiders, but I’m not David—all elude me.

Then I look up to the sky. It’s glorious in the winter. When there are neither clouds nor moon and the air is crisp I can see to the South the Great Winter Oval, an asterism consisting of first magnitude stars from six different constellations. Starting at what appears to be the top and proceeding clockwise there’s Capella from Auriga (the Charioteer), Aldebaran from Taurus (the Bull), Rigel of Orion (the Hunter), Sirius of the Great Dog, Procyon from the Little Dog and Pollux of the Twins. In the midst of all this, just a bit off center, is Betelgeuse, which forms the right shoulder of Orion. Viewed as in a gallery over my neighbor’s house this elongated circle forms an enormous object d’art. The red giant Betelgeuse throbs, big enough to cover our solar system at least to Mars, and possibly beyond. No Timwakefieldius minoris here. And yet, these glorious points of light are only the local eye-catchers. Our galaxy has about 200 billion stars (estimates vary) and there are probably as many galaxies as stars in our Milky Way. In the autumn, find Andromeda, two lines of stars that seem to come out of the square that is the constellation Pegasus (the flying horse). If you know just where to look, out of the corner of your eye (you can’t see it straight on) is the gauzy blur of the Andromeda Galaxy, a good 2 million light-years away (a light year is approximately five-trillion miles. Now multiply that by 2 million and you’ll agree that it’s not walking distance). It’s the farthest thing you can see with the naked eye.

How big is the universe? It depends on who you ask, but a good guess is that its diameter is just shy of 14 billion light-years from here. All of which makes me think that none of us is much more, and probably considerably less, than a Timwakefieldius minoris in the grand sweep of things.

The psalmist asks:

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, …what is mankind that you are mindful of us, human beings that you care for us?” and then answers his own question, “You have made us a little lower than the angels and crowned us with glory and honor.” Well, that’s one approach. Shakespeare expressed another: “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

So, who is closer to the mark, the psalmist or the bard? I know not but as old age creeps upon me, as I look at the tiny bug and at the glorious stars and imagine the unimaginable vastness of the universe beyond, I think … it must be Shakespeare. We come, we go, like the tiny Timwakefieldius minoris unremarkable in the vastness, alone in our teeniest speck of the corner we occupy of outer space. So, petty as we are, it is the petty that consumes us. Locally this is expressed in the anger directed at a young woman who wants to honor the spirit of Rhode Island’s founder and of the US Constitution by fighting to remove a prayer from a public school. To quote Shakespeare one more time, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”