strengthening continues apace

yes, here in the Man from U.N.C.L.E blog, formerly Scott Bennett's Medical Mystery Tour, I'd like to go off topic for a second and write a health update.

did I say health? if I can't say curative, can I say health?

does it mean I am in denial about the incurability of my cancer, to think in such terms?

you can tell that the real issue for me is not the hospice vs hospital wars, curative vs palliative, or even Dr. Gore's admonishment that "we are not going to beat this one"

it's my being told what thoughts are ok to have, what thoughts are not.

and, Lord knows, no one said that to me. only that holding onto reality is going to necessitate acknowledging some hard hard facts, and all but eliminating what we wish could be possibilities.

no one wants me not to pray for, dream of, imagine a miracle cure. the woods are full of those stories, fuller perhaps than of people they are true of.

but what we are experiencing right now, my Team members, is Miracle Management.

everyone will sign up for managing the disease. curative, palliative...find the best way to Manage the disease.

well, the success has been nothing short of a Miracle.

Miracle Management. I'll take it.

a substantive indicator...I stopped turning to the fanny pack of Dilaudid around my waist for boluses, chosen boosts of injected drug, over a week ago. pain relief wasn't needed, breathing was pretty much short but comfortable, they weren't helping me sleep (not that I wouldn't turn to melatonin before morphine for that), it didn't elevate my mood...more like made me twtich...

I stopped.

inset topic: Diseases of the Very Smart.

oh, yes. they are at much higher risk than the general population for some debilitating troubles.

the worst needle/ IV/ port experiences I have had have been directly attributable to one of these diseases:

namely, the Inability of Genius to See its Limits.

I get the temptation. in group after group, you're not even in the same group. the first place you go in your mind with a problem no one else ever gets to. it becomes a mater of sheer time and practicality, getting people to follow you...we all get home for dinner in time that way.

the part where you question your judgement gets pushed further and further back, until it's like Jabba the Hutt's legs.

then, one day, you really need it.

Sally was the best nurse I had, through my stay, in terms of what she knew, her patient involvement, the level of her discourse...lisa and I agreed, pretty much a genius nurse.

in a field with, throughout, next to no clunkers.

I have a permananetly installed port on my starboard side. (I never know how much to assume today's blog reader has read of earlier posts; I do some summing repetition sometimes...)

in the hospital, it was felt like a second access might be needed in case of emergent care. this means one whole hand's strength and ability would be taken away by a needle in it all the time. I fought it valiantly, and in vain. Sally came to do the stick.

it was miserable. three times, in either hand, no success.

but each time, she could not give it up. each time she worked it, moving the needle inside me and sticking again and again.

I can do this. I can do this.

a different nurse, in the morning, set it up quickly and cleanly, and the IV was never used.

real genius is knowing when, indeed, duh, you are not going to get this thing done, you need to withdraw.

one of the most intelligent ideas I've ever seen illustrated in a film was in George Lucas's first movie, THX 1138. it concerned a dystopia where "the System" controlled every moment of a person's life, including giving control drugs from birth which made you feel ok about the life you did have.

it was profoundly smart to me (though the smartest thing mentioned is still to follow) when the hero told the system...I need something stronger.

he was still willing to toe the line...but it just wasn't working for him so far. he needed a drug to smooth his growing discontent away.

eventually, he sought answers more out of the box...in this case, out of the dome that surrounded the city, that none were allowed to leave.

so he fights off the giant pain stick police robots and heads for the edge of the dome. he narrowly escapes, in a way Lucas films would later take on as a feature, and he is on his way with the giants catching up with him slowly.

out of nowhere, in their police radio brains, the giants get a message : WARNING! THE PROJECT YOU ARE ON HAS GONE 6% OVER BUDGET! RETURN TO BASE IMMEDIATELY!!

they do. he reaches the Perimeter, and sees his first sunrise.

an autocratic, compulsive, robotic, rigid rule forcing any genius to acknowledge his limits. I doubled the percentage, and immediately adopted it as a genius-like guideline. in every field, I'll say, but music.

one of the hospice nurses, who check in on me now at home, is amazing. never lets a dang thing slip. you figure, a dozen medications, some of which are controlled substances you can only get a few days worth of at a time, how would anyone keep track? in her 16 track mixing board, she deals with all of it at the same time, and hits every mark.

I need her.

but it came time to change my port access, the needle the Dilaudid was going into. to take the old out, and stick a new one in.

you're not supposed to know how not to do something. believe me, I know the headspace.

but she didn't. and after three tries, never got anywhere.

it really bothered her - which also made me worry. to do something you don't know how to do is one thing...to keep doing it while beating yourself up and kind of freaking out...another thing we engineer types are not supposed to do.

Monday she calls all on fire with this great idea.

she'd brought it up to the docs at the round table meeting in which everyone talks about everyone, and all agreed that it would be just fine if I could take my Diluadid orally, since I was using such a small dose.

no sticks. no port access. and...no fanny pack!

see, beneficial change brings up the same wariness in me that problems do. how much do I really want to mess with what's working?

but how much have I been inexorably drawn to what's Even Better.

I asked if she would call the vacationing Dr. Gore about it. within an hour she had, and received Dr. Gore's ok.

so....drum roll please...I walk this house in a Long Green Tube, as Lefty Frizell might say, but ta da! no fanny pack with a basal rate of Dilaudid. pills suffice.

I stood at my closet yesterday for a minute, holding onto nothing, deciding leisurely what shirt to wear.

I've been peeing standing up.

I've been getting things my own damn self, cleaning up this or that mess, moving better, stronger. feeling literally better every day.

moving so slowly towards resuming playing, doing singing I need to do.

today is the last day of the etoposide chemo. still no real concrete "down" feelings from it...I'm starting to associate tired drooping eyes more with recent Dilaudid than a chemo pill in the last hour. now, the traditional down days came after the end of the chemo...but...we have seen so far, and we will see.

strengthening continues apace.

phew! glad that's over!!

Top Brass. ring any bells?

it was a 50's hair cream. like Wildroot creme oil, Charlie. Charlie was how the viewer was addressed. or Brylcreem, with alternate barbershop and all female chorus ads .

but Top Brass addressed its viewer/ buyer as "Tiger", from the lips of a Jackie Kennedy dressed and coiffed woman on a tiger skin rug. you couldn't make that commercial today, between NOW and PETA.

the point is...that woman was Barbara Feldon.

she of the "Never Never Affair" cited in the last blog. but of fame that would surpass either work easily in Mel Brooks' spy spoof tv show, Get Smart!

guys, get real for me here...Maxwell Smart...is there a more confident loser anywhere? the shows turned on his catchprases, the mystery gets solved at the end of the half hour...but if Max doesn't bungle, isn't obnoxious, doesn't make you cringe...there's no show, right?

and yet Barbara seems not to see a thing. she mothers him, lectures him, makes excuses the way any good dysfunctional family member would...Max's oblivion to her love for him, as well as any emotion not found in a second grader, just made us want her all the more.

we never needed to grow up, socialize, get competent, face adolescent rites of passage...she could purr them all away.

she was all the Yanks were to know of Emma Peel...the Mel Brooks version.

if there are Get Smart books which expand CONTROL ...the U.N.C.L.E- like organization Smart, Chief, and Agent 99 (Feldon) worked for along with Sigmund and Hymie the robot...into an acronym, I never read them. I have nothing on KAOS, either.

those aren't the reasons I am losing sleep at night.

My father thought that show was the funniest thing to hit the planet. so...we got to see it.

I remember him reciting the classic "Craw" bit to us over and over again. Get Smart! has a certain spyish rhythm, but its comic pacing was much more Grossinger's, much more the Borscht Belt, much more like my father's formative experiences watching vaudeville.

Smart meets the stereotype Asian villain in one episode. he is "The Claw", and we accept his Sidney Toler aphorisms and TV approximation of an Asian accent the way we accepted Jewish indians on F Troop.

Smart does not.

"permit me to introduce myself, Missa Smalllt. I am The Craw."

"you're The Craw???"

"no, no, not The Craw, The Craw!!!"

repeated to ever increasing frustration levels.

Dad thought that was one for the ages. I would estimate, 9 and up. I don't have the 138 episode collection on DVD, almost half a year of half hour dinner shows...though I still remember 10 of the 15 total jokes used in it. The Cone of Silence. ("what??") "would you believe...?", "sorry about that, Chief"

these phrases wove themselves deliably into our language.

last footnote...a lot of conspicuous casting came from this genre.

North By Northwest, Hitchcock's irresistible tale of an innocent (though sophisticated) man drawn into a dark world of cold war intrigue, featured not only Edward Platt as a lawyer, later to play "Chief" on Get Smart!, but Martin Landau as Van Damme's oddly menacing henchman, he later of Mission: Impossible. and of course, the head of the spy "alphabet soup" in the movie was Leo G. Carroll, who played Mr. Waverly on U.N.C.L.E.

but wait...there's more!

"The Project Strigas Affair" starred...wait for it, Adam Sandler...starred both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Inspired casting, Mr. Roddenberry. and also Otto Klemperer, not captain Kirk but Colonel Klink, in Hogan's Heroes.

yes, yes, this is what you get in these pages instead of the latest health news from Team Bennett. sigh. but to some degree I've really lived my life by these priorities.

and don't you hate it when someone immediately follows an intensifier with a qualifier? like above? I really kind of hate that.