Adventures in …Cancer?: If Only You’d Been Bad Asthma (Or, Leading to Up to Diagnosis — Part Two)
(You can find the first part here.) Where were we? Oh, right. The last time I talked about my cancer diagnosis, I had covered all the symptoms leading up to my hospitalization and getting over my fear of needles. A fast heart rate, asthma symptoms, and some weird crap in my x-rays pretty much made that mandatory. Here’s the run-down of what happened after hospitalization: Something must be said for the fact that my mother pretty much stuck by my side in the hospital, sleeping in what I can only describe as the most uncomfortable chairs and “beds” the hospital torture division could come up with. She stayed there with me while I proceeded to freak out internally over the fact that things were going terribly wrong. There I was, thinking I had asthma and that some nice drugs and high quality breathing treatments would put it all to rest and I could go back to my silly life. But the x-rays made that impossible, and the subsequent CT scans pretty much confirmed what the doctors must have assumed: there was some really nasty shit in my body. I don’t think the doctors ever said “tumor” directly to me. They might have said as much to my mother. Honestly, I’ve never asked her if there were things she learned from my medical records that she kept from me. I was 19 and not at all ready for the world — immature, still living at home, directionless, jobless, and feeling rather pissed on (losing a job over something that wasn’t your fault and totaling your car in the same year doesn’t help one’s confidence). So it’s likely she learned a lot of scary things that nobody dared say to my face at the time. That’s not to say that I didn’t know what was going on, of course, but being able to watch TV and read lots of Alan Gardner books in the hospital certainly helped me escape just a little. In any case, eventually the doctors had to tell me that they’d found growths around my aorta, trachea, and lungs, each of which were contributing to my various symptoms. They didn’t have to say “it’s cancer,” but I pretty much knew by that point (this after a few days in the hospital, with lots of blood tests, bad food, and medicine). You don’t have to tell a 19-year-old kid that he has cancer for him to figure out that he probably has cancer. And being as immature as I was, I didn’t really know what that meant. Cancer = death. Little did I know… It was at that point that my general practitioner had to tell me that in order to figure out what was eating away at my insides, they might have to do exploratory surgery. In other words: they were going to have to crack my chest, dig around in there, and hopefully pull out a sample while trying not to kill me. And this wasn’t a normal procedure. My doctor more or less indicated that most surgeons wouldn’t even try it. If thinking I might have cancer didn’t scare the shit out of me (it did), then imagining myself as a giant game of Operation did. Up until that point, I hadn’t had anything approaching major surgery. Jumping from “I hate needles” to “I hate them, but you can stick them in me because I don’t want to die” to “holy fuck, you’re going to crack me open and dig around inside me” in a matter of days is understandably terrifying. I remember breaking down at some point and having a total freak-out. You know the type. You just start blubbering and saying things that sound like intelligent words, but really you’re just crying and saying shit that doesn’t make any sense to whoever will listen because you don’t want to die, etc. etc. etc. Somewhere in all this, a male nurse came in and comforted me. I have no idea what he said (probably something like, “be strong, this isn’t the end, you’ll survive, you’re strong, etc. etc. etc.”). All I know is that he did calm me down a bit, which is why I will forever love nurses (and those few male nurses out there — Paul Genesse is the only one I know personally). I’m wandering a bit here. The following day, the surgeon who had agreed to crack me open like a Christmas present came in to check me out and go over the details. In my imagination, he stood seven feet tall with the build of a White Walker, though I suspect he was only a little over six feet and probably pretty average in real life. When he arrived, he started feeling around my chest and neck and discovered that the lymph nodes in my neck had magically grown to the size of golf balls overnight. Relief + terror = conflict. On the one hand, that meant he wouldn’t have to chop into me like a kid dissecting a frog for science class; on the other, that meant whatever was wreaking havoc on my body was moving at a rapid pace, like genetic rabbits in heat. But that meant having a far less dangerous surgery to get some actual material to work with for testing. Of course, I was still terrified out of my freaking mind. Even a less dangerous surgery sounded like a horror film to little 19-year-old me. When the day came to put me under, I probably shook like crazy while my mother sat there telling me it was going to be okay. And then they took me into the room, someone asked me what kind of music I’d like to listen to (I have no idea what I said — probably classical), and then I did that whole countdown thing where they tell you to start from 100, but you know you’re not going to make it further than 96, and so you count anyway because it distracts
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Retro Nostalgia: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the Hero Scientist, and the Possible Utopia(?)
There’s something truly nostalgic about SF narratives that make the scientist the hero. There aren’t a lot of those narratives left, if we’re honest. Characters use science, sure, but they are rarely the creators of science, or its purveyors. But not the old school SF movies. Oh no. In a lot of those stories, scientists are front and center. They’re occasionally the bad guy, but they’re always the ones figuring things out, discovering the new and amazing things about the world. Even in Forbidden Planet, in which the main scientist is, for all intensive purposes, the villain (well, not really — his id is the villain), the romanticism of science and the scientist is crucial to the plot. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) falls into the positive variety of these pro-scientist films. Most of us know the story, primarily because it was recently remade into what I can only describe as a film without any substance: an alien named Klaatu appears on Earth, which terrifies the hairless ape creatures; Klaatu desperately tried to make humanity listen to him, but in the end, he’s forced to use the threat of annihilation to, we hope, bring humanity in line — for self- preservation of course. Throughout this somewhat dystopian plot — aliens telling us we have to shape up or die is hardly utopian, after all — we are gifted with several reminders that the scientists are the true “rational” ones on Earth (hang in there — I’ll critique this later). There are two perfectly solid examples of this, which I’ll approach in semi-chronological order. First, there’s Dr. Barnhardt, who is effectively the “most intelligent man” in the continental United States (or, at the very least, the smartest man in D.C.). When Klaatu first seeks his help, he discovers the Dr. working on a complicated math equation on a chalkboard — perhaps one of the most common cliches of science given to us by movies (Indiana Jones, anyone?) — the purpose of which is never explained. But the reason Klaatu wants Barnhardt’s help is because the regular folks haven’t exactly been forthcoming. Let’s face it, when your first day on Earth is spent getting shot by a bunch of trigger happy young men riding on tanks, and then shoved into a hospital and kept there against your will, followed by a long-winded explanation that your puny little alien brain — which managed to get you 250,000,000 miles across space — can’t possibly comprehend human politics…well, you’d probably skip town and seek out someone who just has to be rational. And Dr. Barnhardt, it turns out, is supremely rational. He not only has science smarts — though not nearly as much as Klaatu, with all his math magic — but he also recognizes the utter stupidity of provoking an alien race into using violence as a communication method. When violence, trickery, imprisonment, and rampant fear-mongering (hooray yellow journalism) are the societal response to your presence, it makes a lot of sense to respond in kind. But Dr. Barnhardt desperately wants to avoid that. He convinces Klaatu that perhaps a non-violent demonstration would look better and then proceeds to set up a meeting between Mr. Alien and a bunch of unnamed, but certainly important scientists. In other words, the only ones who actually take Klaatu seriously as someone genuinely interested in Earth’s well being are scientists. The military just wants to shove Klaatu under the watchful eyes of unsophisticated, disinterested guards and subject him to nationalistic politics; the scientists want to help Klaatu make his point. Oh, and since I haven’t mentioned it yet, you really can’t avoid the 1951 political message here. By 1951, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were the only countries actively testing nuclear weapons, though certainly not the only ones working on them. The rise of atomic/nuclear weapons so concerned the world that it led to the Cold War (which you all already know) and to Oppenheimer (who worked on the Manhattan Project) declaring the invention of the atomic bomb a grave mistake: We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. Ironically, Klaatu’s race literally became the destroyer of worlds (he’s our second science example, actually). By the end of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Klaatu has no choice but to warn humanity that if they continue on this destructive, nuclear path, they will compel his species to neutralize (annihilate) the Earth for the benefit of everyone else. But in his final speech, he also tells us one crucial fact: science has provided the resolution to the natural inclination towards violence among intelligent life (I interpret his words to suggest that there are other intelligent species out there). Thus, Gort, the “monstrous machine” of the story, is little more than the product of scientists to curb violent tendencies — there are many like it that sit around as a giant deterrent against poor behavior, which has somehow created a peaceful society that is both supremely powerful and disinterested in violence except when the equilibrium of their society is threatened. So much for that narrative about nuclear weapons, right? After all, if the reason behind nuclear armament is to deter your enemy from attacking you, then Gort is little more than a giant, walking robotic nuke (minus the radiation). If we’re honest, this is all a remarkably utopian view of the scientist. So many novels and films have tried to imagine utopian societies and failed miserably, either intentionally or because utopias simply don’t work. But is there something inherently dystopian about creating your own self-“cleaning” agent? If Gort is a society’s solution to