Category Archives: CounterCurrent

The Squamous Chronicles. Finish one and start another.

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8/27/13.  As of today, I have 3 more x-ray treatments culminating in a dose of 63 Gray to the throat. The pain has required narcotics pretty much continuously and the attendant constipative delights that go with that. Pills are difficult to swallow and the gag reflex is heightened. The final chemo was yesterday so I am done eating platinum.

I began hormone ablation treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer two weeks ago. While the throat cancer is substantially beatable, the prostate is a different story. Here is the deal fellas. While you can gauge with PSA numbers, it is the Gleason grading system that tells the tale. And to get that you must do a biopsy. In order of increasing severity, the Gleason score goes from 2 to 10. I pulled a 9.

Hormone ablation is delicate way of saying chemical castration. The spread of prostate cancer can be controlled somewhat for up to 2 years by shutting down testosterone production. This they do by injecting a synthetic peptide, Degarelix, into belly fat to control the dosing to the pituitary gland. Had my first hot flash a week ago. It was a eunuch sensation.

Interesting anecdote.  My medical oncologist described an MD patient who had been using sunscreen on the radiated area of his throat. He soon experienced an increase in surface burning of the throat on continued x-radiation. Turns out he was using a sunscreen that had titanium dioxide that was scattering/absorbing radiation on the affected surface. He stopped and the accelerated damage ceased.

Schneier on Security

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Schneier on Security is one of my favorite non-chemistry blogs. The particular link here is to a post on the NSA and It’s apparent commandeering  of the internet for its own, opaque purposes. Bruce Schneier developed the Blowfish encryption algorithm.

While I have previously criticized Libertarianism and its peculiar conflation of civilization with Austrian economic thinking, I am enough of a civil libertarian to be deeply alarmed by post-911 security paranoia with its narrow readings on the 4th amendment and attending case-law.

Ask yourself, how much of your life do you want to be subject to structural snitch features that trigger silent alarms when your face is recognized in a building, when you called the front desk of a business or agency, or when you download particular information from the internet or just do keyword searches on Google?

You can bet that hordes of NSA folk as well as contractors are working feverishly on what else they can do with this metadata and location data accumulating in datacenters.

Many friends have said half joking that they feel sorry for spooks who have to sift through their chatter and insignificant browser searches. But what if an NSA spook were standing over their shoulder while they did it? How would they feel then? Maybe fellow citizens who approve of this kind of activity should be flagged for participation and the rest of us left alone. Would they feel the same about it?

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The Squamous Chronicles: A flea market of side effects.

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So, here I am wide awake trying to recall what the Ambien molecule looks like. I’ll probably have to look it up.

Later this morning is my 3rd chemo treatment of 6. Something is knocking me down. The x- radiation plainly has been doing what it does best- giving a 3-D sunburn. The throat is developing mucositis and Is crazy sore. Blistering should start soon.

I’m using magic mouthwash, comprised of lidocaine, benedryl, and Maalox. This pharmacy concoction has the snotty rheology of melted ice cream.  The throat issue is definitely interfering with getting enough calories for body weight maintenance. Have lost ca 10 lbs to date. I’m gonna get a talkin’ to from the dietitian today.

Other than sore throat, the next unpleasant drug side effects are those from the anti-nausea meds. The anti-emetic meds prevent one from hurling through a sore throat. They are also very effective at constipation. So, one gets to know the offerings at Walgreens.

The Squamous Chronicles, part deux: Into the beam we go.

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My adventure with Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma, HNSCC, soon enters a third phase.  A week from this writing I’ll don my custom prepared plastic mesh mask and they’ll strap me onto an x-ray machine. Oh yes, one other thing. There’ll be a weekly dose of cis-platin coincident with irradiation. Turns out that there is a synergistic effect with radiation and platinum poisoning cis-platin chemotherapy. No doubt it is related to the fact that platinum is a heavy atom with a lot of electron density ripe for scattering. Platinum ligated to DNA during irradiation is a bonus as well I suppose. Your own DNA as a ligand for platinum. A funny thought for someone in the catalyst business.

The first phase was the identification of a swollen lymph node and its subsequent removal from its cozy perch on my right carotid artery. Here I learned first hand why cancer is destructive. Mutant squamous cells from some molecular-genetic train wreck are washed away from their birthplace to lodge in distant locations. In my case, the aloof cells got hung up in a lymph node. There, they invaded the node and proliferated to the point where much of the lymphatic tissue became necrotic, likely from blood starvation. The node was not especially painful. Well, until the biopsy needle went in. Then it became very, very angry. But I digress.

The second phase, post surgery, was the adventure of finding suitable oncologists. This is a little bewildering. It is easy to get overwhelmed by information. I went for a second opinion and soon thereafter chose the Anschutz Cancer Center at the University of Colorado in Aurora. I’ve already had medical students and residents sitting in on consultations and exams.  The medical oncologist is a research professor specializing in head and neck cancer. He sees patients on Fridays too. The radiation oncologist sees a lot of HNSCC and seems knowledgeable and confident.

More to follow.

Comments on Edward Snowdon

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I have to say that I am tickled to death over what young Edward Snowdon has done in regard to his leaking of the NSA PRISM project. Funding and compelling otherwise well intentioned civil servants to sift through the transmissions of US citizens and allies under the false idol of “national security” represents a sort of cancer of civil society. The future is not for the faint hearted. Unfortunately, the faint hearted are in charge.

The assertion that X number of terrorist attacks were prevented by internal espionage activity is patronizing rhetoric uttered by functionaries who are powerless to actually prove it. Obviously we have enemies. We’ve earned it. The US is not a target simply because “we love freedom”, a slogan so infantile that it is a wonder that Bush II was able to utter it with a straight face. We are a target because of decades of foreign policy overreach.

The US federal government and allied corporations are so brain addled over Middle Eastern politics and security that congress is deadlocked over what amounts to a new form of the guns v. butter problem.  Congressional members, I’ll say Republicans in particular, live in another world distorted by wealthy patrons.  In their view, civilization is something that markets do rather than the other way around. This is a natural viewpoint if you control a lot of wealth- or hope to.

Simplistically, we input defense dollars into the military machine and privately owned petroleum comes out the other side. So, the stockholders of Exxon, Chevron, etc., are protected from risk on foreign territories by the US armed forces. US taxpayers pay for this but petroleum companies seem to carry little of the burden.

What we have gotten in return for our foreign petroleum adventures is pushback in the form of guerrilla warfare, commonly called terrorism. The term “terrorist” has been transmogrified into some form of supernatural evil. Really, a terrorist is a criminal. Killing people and destroying property is a crime and it is immoral. It is not evil incarnate. We are not in a supernatural battle between good and evil or God and Satan.

If Snowdon’s action was to shine a little light on how the government commits espionage on its citizens, then I say good for him. In doing so he broke the law. He violated contractual agreements on disclosure and should pay a price for that. But in regard to accusations of treason based on what facts are available, I cannot agree with that charge.

The thin blue line

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I had the opportunity to take a ride in a CT scanner yesterday. It was my first such experience. It’s a great opportunity to pick up a few milliSieverts if you find yourself short in the ionizing radiation department. The particular device I refer to spins a helical beam of x-rays through you as the platform moves you through the big donut with its rotating source and detector.  Through the magic of the integrated circuit and millions of lines of software code the computer reconstructs images based on extinction of the x-ray beam as it careens through your tissues.

During this wierd little Roentgen ride I had a peculiar experience. After the iodinated tracer injection the radiologista trots around the shielded wall, clicks “go” and the sequence takes off. As the beam was scanning from head to chest I had the distinct sensation of a horizontal thin blue line in my visual field for just a beat. Because my eyelids were closed I was not seeing a focused image through the lenses of my eyes. Against the backdrop of latent images slowly fading from consciousness there appeared the line. I was not thinking about this at the time- I was focused on obeying the breathing instructions.

My theory is that the visual stimulus was the result of the x-ray beam inducing a bit of fluorescence acreoss the width of my retina.  There are plenty of pigment molecules in the retina as well as the tracer compound coursing through the retinal vasculature.

Question- Has anyone else had or heard of such a phenomenon?

Is lifting combat restrictions on women the achievement we need?

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I am torn on the matter of Defense Secretary Panetta lifting restrictions on combat duties for women. I understand the rationale for greater upward mobility for women in the military. And I grasp that women are already operating in combat areas.

The point I want to offer is this:  rather than broadening the range of the population who may be exposed to combat, perhaps we should put as much energy into demilitarizing just a little bit. If bringing women fully into combat is a solution, then maybe we do not understand the problem.

As an advanced society the USA should be striving to avoid the production of disabled combat veterans. Could it be that we should engage in less combat? Isn’t that the solution we should be seeking?

Right now the USA is so heavily armed with kill-at-a-distance lethality that we have become at ease with radio-controlled diplomacy.  When you have the US arsenal in your pocket, everything looks like a helicopter landing zone.

There is so much money to be made in plundering petroleum resources abroad and in military armaments and materiel that a persistent and refractory global sub-economy of state-protected mineral extraction has frozen in place. With every kilowatt of new load connected to the power grid and with every clever new military toy that is invented we tighten the spiral toward a global energy war.

Where does this new load come from? All of the microprocessed consumer devices certainly contribute. All of the wall-wart chargers for cell phones, iPads, laptops, etc., put stress on the power distribution system and in due course create demand for fossil fuels. This demand is manifested in several ways- 1) electric current to power the devices, and 2) all of the upstream power needed from mine or wellhead to produce ultrapure gallium, arsenic, tellurium, silicon, aluminum, titanium, boron, polyethylene, polypropylene, organic semiconductor materials, etc.

If we take the view that exposing women in our volunteer military to the horrors of combat represents some kind of progress, then I beg to differ. I would like to suggest that the folks in the DoD, the administration, and the congress have salved over a civil service inequity in exchange for equal opportunity for a spectrum of life altering traumas. In regard to military matters, our government and military elites are swept up in a food web of moral corruption so systematically ossified that I do not see how we can steer civilization away from a Malthusian step change.

A few sentences relating to Power

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Power is as power does, or the fact of power is the act of power.

Just a reminder. In the fable of the emperor’s new clothes, what is important to understand is not that an emperor can be highly delusional. The real lesson directs your attention to the ease with which those around him facilitate his delusion.  This is an insidious condition that creeps in silently like a fog that soon envelops everyone. It takes a child-like innocence of perspective to see through it. Regrettably, child-like innocence is rarely encouraged in organizations.

Power is in the ability to allocate resources. A successful business person must excel at accumulating and centralizing the power of resource allocation.

Business power stems from centralized control by a few. Representative democratic power is granted by voters.  What is behind the fascination with setting up a businessman in a legislative or executive power position? Business is inherently non-democratic.

What a Meth Lab is Not

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It is time that someone questions the use of the phrase “meth lab”. Just as a cook would object to the phrase “meth kitchen”,  those of us who spend our careers in the laboratory should push back on the use of the word “lab” in this manner.  The use of this word confers the notion that a workspace is fitted for chemical handling activity and is operated by someone who knows what they are doing. Dubbing a meth operation as laboratory surrenders too much credit to the operator. These people are moonshiners skulking around on the periphery of society.

A meth lab is not a lab. It is the workshop of a criminal enterprise where unscrupulous people manufacture a dangerous substance. Its sole purpose is to profit from the uncontrollable neurological train wreck of methamphetamine addiction. This is not laboratory work. It’s just crime.