Dry Ice Factory

Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 16:55:20 GMT

I'm continuing to work my way through Gwyneth Jones' Top Ten novels by Women SF Writers. This was Fowler's first novel, which I read when it was published in 1992, and it's just as rich and strange as when it first came out. To call it science fiction is to acknowledge that it was published as such. It's by no means a traditional genre novel. A strange babbling woman shows up in the Washington Territory in 1873. She becomes attached to a Chinese railway worker named Chin, whose uncle is concerned that a white woman in Chinese company will lead to trouble for the Chinese, so he asks Chin to return her to her people -- a risky business. Along the way they acquire other followers, including the innocent, delusional dreamer, BJ, and the menacing, guilt-ridden Andersonville survivor, Harold, and the crusading feminist lecturer on the female orgasm, Adelaide.

As much a story of the Old West and an American quest novel as a work of science fiction, Sarah Canary features a protagonist who is all thing to all people -- an immortal, a madwoman, an incomprehensible alien. It's full of folk lore, scientific speculation, tall tales, and magic realism. It's an extraordinary literary debut by a writer I haven't kept up with, although she's gone on to great success.

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Gimme a break

Fri, 25 Aug 2017 15:15:55 GMT

The latest MRI is bad news that's paradoxically good news. Going into it I was thinking that if it showed improvement of the tumor (which I thought was likely) I was going to press the oncologist to tell me how much longer I was going to take Avastin and what she could do to help me feel less crappy. As it was, the MRI showed that "the tumor (non-enhancing portion, whatever that means) is growing into both thalami giving me a "Parkinsonian walking and getting up problem." It had also occurred to me in the past couple of days that the tumor might be growing, since my problems of failing strength and balance and fine muscle control have been getting worse. At Crooked River last week I frequently needed help getting off the couch and out of chairs.

The paradoxically good news in this is that my oncologist, Dr Taylor, feels that the treatments are making me worse rather than better, particularly when it comes to quality of life, although she was also worried that the Avastin was encouraging the tumor to spread and go deeper into the brain.So she's recommending that I take a break from chemo, Avastin, and the Optune and let my body find its current balance and then reassess how I want to proceed. I think I've exhausted all the normal treatment options at this point, so I'm not sure what would next anyway. Clinical trials? Isn't that the Hail Mary stage of thing?

In the meantime I'll continue with physical therapy to work on my balance and strength, although she thinks my problems with strength are neurological at this point rather than muscular. I'll have an occupational therapist come out to assess the safety of the house for someone in my condition. She can also arrange for some home care from hospice, even though she doesn't think I'm actually down to my final six months, just to get a sense of what services they offer when I do need them,

I'll continue to get an MRI and visit Dr Taylor every two months and we'll see how things go. I'm soooooo ready to take a break from treatment that I have to be careful not jump to the conclusion that I feel better already. I'm still basically an invalid who needs to keep his eyes on the road and his hands upon the handrails. Let it roll, baby, roll. Until about 8:30, or whenever I'm ready to go to bed. Quality of life, that's what I'm all about! May it improve a bit during my vacation from treatment.

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Health Update

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 16:49:24 GMT

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted about my health. So here's the latest.

I had another seizure. It didn't fully develop, because I felt it coming on and ran upstairs to take a Lorazopam, which is intended to stop seizures in their tracks. This one kept coming on, moving past the shuddering in my chin and jaw that is the first sign of a seizure for me. So I ran back upstairs (evidence that my seizures are NOT grand mals) and took another Lorazopam. I also told Denys what was going on, and he called the nurses station at the Alvord Brain Tumor Center. By the time he got someone on the line, the second Lorazopam had pushed the seizure back, and I was able to tell Mandy Myers (yes, her real name, which has given us a special bond) what was going on. She didn't seem too concerned about the seizure, and basically told me that the increase in dosage of my regular anti-seizure med (a generic version of Keppra) probably hadn't taken effect yet. I was to call if I had any more seizures.

Previous to this episode my sister and I had seen a new physician's assistant at the Center, and along with increasing the dosage of the Keppra, she told me that the plan was to switch me to a new chemo called Lomustine and discontinue the Temodar. This was fine by me, since it felt like my body was done with Temodar after thirteen monthly rounds, nor to mention the daily "micro-doses" that I took on my Micronesian trip. I felt exhausted all the time, could no longer walk more than a few hundred yards at at time, and was sleeping more than half the day. I felt very uncertain of my balance and felt miserable in general. I liked the physician's assistant, whose last name is Stockhausen (I didn't ask if she was related to the composer, but I probably will if I see her again).

Hopefully switching to a new chemo will help with some of my problems. It has taken quite a while for my insurance company to agree to subsidize it, and I'm supposed to receive my first dose today. This one is a pill that I'll take once every six weeks, rather than the five days our of every 28 of the Temodar. I'll still be getting infusions of Avastin every two weeks, and I'm beginning to wonder if that's what's making me feel so worn out and weak. Or it could be that sixteen months of treatment has taken its toll on me.

Anyway I haven't had any further seizures, although I've given up caffeine because it was causing premonitions of seizures, and I've taken a precautionary Lorazopam a couple of times when it felt as though something was getting started. The PA also wants me to work with my physical therapist to build up my core strength, but the PT has been sick for a couple of weeks, so we haven't started on that yet. I've been trying to take little mini-walks every day to see whether that helps. I hate feeling this weak!

But I'm trying to be patient. In a way, none of this is a surprise, but just because you know chemo is going to knock the stuffing out of you doesn't mean you'll be ready for how it FEELS. It feels like crap, and I begin to wonder how much more treatment I can take. I guess I'll see how the Lomustine makes me feel and what the MRI in August shows.

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Life by Gwyneth Jones

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 17:30:44 GMT

I first encountered the fiction of Gwyneth Jones when her novel White Queen was published in the US in 1991. I immediately felt I'd discovered the heir to Joanna Russ and went back and read what I thought were her earliest novels, starting with Divine Endurance, although I see that Wikipedia now list four earlier novels. Her American editor was David Hartwell, and we discussed the rest of the Aleutian Trilogy, which started with White Queen, as it came out. Something about the third book, The Phoenix Cafe, with it's cavalier attitude toward men as an eternal danger to women and children, really put me off, however, and I gave up on Jones after that, although I was still curious enough about her to pick up the first book of her next series, Bold As Love at the Eastercon on my TAFF trip in 2003. I don't think it ever had a US publisher, nor did the rest of that series. I took it off my To Be Read pile not long ago, and bounced off what I found to be a very confusing story about European politics (seemingly very prescient in the post-Brexit world) and countercultural defiance. I switched to another book of hers in the Pile, Imagination/Space: Essays and Talks on Fiction, Feminism, Technology, and Politics, which I found completely fascinating. Having consulted with Claire Brialey about her own experience reading Jones, I settled on Life as the next novel to try.

Suffice it to say that I liked it a lot better than Bold As Love. In the meantime I also realized that one of the things that makes her an heir to Joanna Russ is her pessimism about the battle between the sexes and the ability of feminism to solve the problem. Life is a very complex meditation on this question. It's a story of gender and genetics, which poses the idea that genetics is what makes the difference an unbridgeable breech. She then imagines a genetic solution to this problem that is probably beyond my ability to describe, but basically it's a non-Darwinian way for genes to be selected. The upshot of this is that genetic sexes (based on Y and X chromosomes)seem to be on their way out evolutionarily.

It's also a novel about life as she is lived, following a group of friends who meet at university, fall in and out of love, and fall in and out of contact later in life. The protagonist, Anna, is a geneticist who discovers the change in the X/Y exchange and spends her life trying to prove it to a disdainful scientific establishment, where her gender is held against her. Spence is her husband -- the apparently ideal house husband and lover -- who still manages to interfere with her research with his emotional neediness. In many ways their frenemy, Ramone, is the most interesting character -- a feminist who despises women and becomes a media star as a pundit, along with her mentor, the mystical old schizophrenic Lavinia. Jones' novels are always sprawling, contradictory affairs, full of crisis and pain, and Life is no exception. Two of the female characters are raped under circumstances in which they are unable to report it without unacceptable repercussions, there's also a heartbreaking miscarriage, and Anna's career seems to be a long series of firings by petty assholes.

What kept me going through all the carnage was the fascinating characters grappling with their messy lives. In her note about the book "Life: an Explanation" Jones writes, "The story of Anna Senoz is not my life story (the scruffy and pugnacious Ramone, Anna's shadow girl, is more like me, if I could imagine myself a feminist media star). But in many ways it's the story of my life as a writer: the experiences that shaped me, the changes that swept over my world, the ideas that made me write the novels I've written, the people who have inspired me; the future I imagine." There's a personal, heartfelt, career-summarizing quality to Life that's refreshing. The science fictional content is relatively small scale, but it has a lot of layers, and I appreciate how Jones confronts the limitations of feminism while tackling the underlying problem with a grand SF concept that ultimately completely reimagines what it means to be male or female.

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Synners by Pat Cadigan

Fri, 23 Jun 2017 19:53:38 GMT

I read Synners not long after it was published in 1991, but I don't remember what I thought of it. I liked it a lot the second time. It's a novel full of furious energy and lots of ideas. What surprised me a little bit was how much it's about a counterculture, but also how realistically the countercultural life is depicted. At time it reminded me of Delany's Dhalgren on that front, with free spirits squatting in utter squalor, eating badly in filthy surroundings. It's not a very romanticized portrait.

Cadigan is also more sympathetic to the corporate drones than I remembered, especially to Gabe, who is a mid-level corporate toady just ttying to get by as best he can, which is not actually very well. Of course the corporation he serves is an amoral profit-consumed machine that makes a bad situation worse by trying to capitalize on a new neural computer interface that threatens to integrate human brains into the internet and thus expose them to hackers who have nothing but chaos and viruses on (and in) their minds.

This is a novel of many characters that weaves back and forth between the members of the large cast. I had a hard time at first keeping track of everyone and their agendas, but eventually I mostly figured it out. After that the weaving of character points-of-view and ideas about consciousness and perception became hypnotic. This came out at a peak moment in cyberpunk history, and it is loaded with tropes and ideas of the era, practically an encyclopedia of the form.

Basically one character -- a video artist who wants to be a machine -- creates a video that goes viral and and starts to cause people to stroke out. The novel has a romantic resolution to this problem that seemed a little out of tone with the rest of the story. The other problem I had with it was the attempt to create a future slang -- e.g. "stone home" this and "stone home" that -- which sounded just as phoney as any attempt to create future slang. TANSTAAFL, anyone? For the most part, however, I found Cadigan's linguistic riffs to be rich and dense.

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A Micronesia Diary: Part III

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 19:06:40 GMT

I've posted the final installment of my account of the latest Micronesian expedition.

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A Micronesia Diary: Part II

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 18:45:30 GMT

The third installment in my trip writeup. I'll post the final installment tomorrow, for anyone who is saving them up to binge read.

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A Micronesia Diary: Part I

Sun, 11 Jun 2017 19:16:19 GMT

I've posted the next installment of my Micronesian trip report.

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Micronesia: An Introduction

Sat, 10 Jun 2017 20:53:41 GMT

I'm having trouble working with pictures in Dreamwidth, so I think I'll be posting my personal posts to my old film blog from now own. I've started with my first post about the Micronesian trip. Feel free to comment here, if you're on Dreamwidth.

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Health Rollercoaster

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 17:52:09 GMT

I've been doing better at keeping up with my life here than I remembered. I was going to recap the Coachella Valley and Corflu trips, but I see I don't have to. Now I'm back from Micronesia, which I'll be writing about at greater length later. Short version is that it was an epic trip, both geographically and emotionally. However, one of the unpleasant occurrences out there, fortunately toward the end of the trip was that I had two seizures, the second of which I was able to nip in the bud with a drug called Lorazepam. I'll write more about this experience in my fuller trip report. My instant assumption was that the seizures were an indicator that the cancer had continued to spread and was interfering with normal neurological function.

Yesterday was the day of reckoning, as I got my first MRI since the one with the bad news in April or late March or whenever it was. My sister was here, having driven me up from Portland, where the Micronesian trip originated and ended. The MRI was not the only medical item on yesterday's agenda. First off were lab tests for the Avastin infusion scheduled for later in the day. Then the MRI. Then a visit with Dr Shetabi, who is a medical oncologist helping my neuro-oncologist, Dr Taylor, until she can hire more specialists. Dr Shetabi is a kindly old gent who has retired from his practice at Virginia Mason, but is temporarily helping out at the Alvord Brain Tumor Center. He wanted to know how my Micronesian trip had gone and seemed genuinely pleased that it had mostly gone very well. We talked about how I was feeling (exhausted) and about the seizures.

To my surprise, he didn't seem to care much about the seizures, other than to tell me to up the dosage of the daily anti-seizure drug I take. Then he let the cat out of the bag: the MRI showed that the cancer had been diminished since the previous MRI. That was completely the opposite of the news I was expecting, so it was kind of hard to digest. Shetabi advised us to savor the news and not get carried away by it. Time will tell whether the cancer is truly being beaten back, or whether it's just taking a breather. Still, it was hard not to feel like I'd gotten a reprieve. Shetabi thought it was the Avastin that had done the job, although I'm not sure why he thought it was that rather than the microdoses of chemo that I took daily during the trip, not to mention the emotional/spiritual boost of the trip itself. He didn't care to speculate about the cause of the seizures, but said it could have been any number of things (the long trip, the heat and humidity, etc) or combination of things.

In any event, I'm feeling a little whiplash, but I can't say it hurts. Going forward I'll continue with the biweekly Avastin infusions, and I'll get back on the Optune and on the old schedule of five days of 300 mgs of Temodar every 28 days. We'll see where I'm at at the end of the year, but Shetabi was hopeful that we'd be able to beat the cancer back enough for me to finally take a break from treatment. Other than having to get back on chemo, this was all welcome news. Dr Taylor had said we might try another form of chemo, and she'd even hinted we might try another form of radiation, like the cyberknife. Fortunately, the diminishment of the cancer in the meantime apparently pushed them in another direction, and I'm fine with that.

Despite the advice to take the news cautiously, I'll be celebrating this for a few days at least. I'm now taking a break from the Temodar until the heavier doses start next Wednesday or so.

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Further travels with a not-so-wild child

Sat, 06 May 2017 14:09:18 GMT

I haven't been keeping up with my busy life on dreamwidth. Last weekend I was in LA for Corflu, where my name was drawn out of the hat as Guest of Honor, to much acclaim. I'll be writing more about that experience for Nic Farey's fanzine, BEAM, when I get back from my next big adventure, which is a trip to Micronesia. I see I've already written about the medical considerations of this trip in "Interim."

The trip itself will include a day in Pohnpei, where we will visit the mysterious stone city of Nan Madol -- the Venice of the Pacific, the Reef of Heaven. This is a place I've wanted to visit since I first heard about it many years ago (and a place that my friend Stacy Scott has visited, when she lived on the island with her father in the '70s), and now the bucket list is finally being checked off. Pretty cool!

Then it's off to Yap Island in the Federated Islands of Micronesia, where my family lived for four years in the sixties and where I've returned with various parts of the family twice before -- in 1998 and 2002. This time I'm traveling with my brother and his family. It'll be great to see our old friend Thinnifel and his wife. Thinnifel has promised to have some of the sweet little bananas I love so much waiting for me. I just hope my defrosting frozen shoulder won't prevent me from snorkeling.

In general I'm anxious that I won't have the stamina to enjoy the trip. I'll be taking 100 mgs of chemo every night. This is considered a microdose (it's a third of what I was taking during the main phase of chemo), and therefore it's not supposed to debilitate me. I took my first dose last night and don't feel debilitated yet. We'll see what it does to me over the course of three weeks. Also, I feel weak and easy-to-tire from the year of more intense treatment I've just been through. Of course, I'm also concerned that the cancer is now spreading through my brain and will cause problems while I'm traveling. Still, the hope is that the chemo will keep it in check, and since I'm not dragging the Optune with me, that will be reassuring.

I honestly don't know what I want to do on Yap. Visit old haunts, eat sweet little bananas, listen to Thinnifel's stories, smell the old smells, soak it all in for probably the last time. Maybe I'll sit and contemplate the stone money as I did in elder days.

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Interim

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 15:03:00 GMT

I'm just back from spending a week and a half with my family in Desert Hot Springs in Coachella Valley. When my bad health news hit, my mom and sister conspired to bring me down to Mom and Dad's winter home to spend some time in the sun being pampered. So LaVelle came to Seattle, and we drove south from here on I-5, picking up my brother in Corvallis along the way. The trip down was two days in which LaVelle and Lonnie did all the driving. I was theoretically capaable, but I honestly didn't feel like it, especially with a stick shift, which is something I'm no longer used to.

It was great to hang out with my parents and siblings, who once again rallied around me in a time of distress, and then my sister-in-law made a surprise visit, so the old gang (circa 1983) was back together again. The surprise was one of the many things that we had a good laugh about -- in this case that LaVelle and I were so oblivious to all the hints and near-revelations along the way. Our family is big on teasing, and this kind of thing gets spun around through teasing a dozen which ways. For example, why didn't we ask "What the hell?" when Lonnie said he was going off to meet somebody that none of us knew.

The laughter and self-mockery was good medicine, but I suppose in my current state of mind I couldn't help but be touched by two of the health crises happening while we were down there. One was my parents' friend, Russell, who suffered a terrible stroke around the time we arrived, which left him paralyzed and unable to swallow. His wife, Letha, stopped by toward the end of our stay, and she was barely holding it together. We had dinner guests that night, my parents' Canadian friends, Merv and Lorraine, and I could see that the stoic Merv, who is having health problem of his own, was barely holding back the tears.

Th other health crisis arrived with the couple from Manitoba who has just bought my aunt and uncle's house in the park, which is right next door to my parents. We had heard that the husband was having health issues, but by the time they arrived he'd had surgery that revealed a tumor on a blood vessel that the doctors thought could take him at any moment. His poor wife was completely distraught, because she was away from their medical system, away from home, and her phone didn't work in the US, so she had no phone if an emergency struck. She asked my mom if it was okay if she came and pounded on our door in the middle of the night. Of course it was. They had bought the vacation home before they knew the severity of the husband's problem, and now they were going to have to turn around and sell it immediately. The least of their worries, I'm sure.

Anyway, those two crisis certainly put my own crisis in perspective. Between that and the fun expeditions to look for the superbloom (a week past its prime, alas), ride the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, and eat date shakes, I was feeling quite a bit better about my own predicament, at least until we started heading north. We took three days on the way back, taking Highway 395 up the East side of California for a change of view, and with our parents in tow as they migrated north to their summer home in Portland. This time I was able to help with the driving. (Another bit of teasing: because Lonnie had kept forgetting the clutch when he drove LaVelle's car and thus killed the engine quite impressively a number of times, I was always able to remember to use the clutch. Thanks, Lonnie!) The first day I drove I started to feel teary because it used to be something I did without thinking, but now I was hyperaware of what I was doing -- and thus hyperaware of the self-confidence that I had lost. I also felt completely decrepit getting into and out of car. When we got into Oregon, I started feeling teary because I wouldn't have the security blanket of my family around for much longer. Both Mom and LaVelle told me I was always welcome in Oregon if I needed a dose of family love.

LaVelle and I drove on to Seattle, and she stuck around to visit the oncologist with me yesterday. This was the first visit since the bad news that the cancer had returned, and I wanted another pair of ears with me to hear about what was next. It was a bit of an anti-climax on that front, because the main topic of conversation was about whether it was a good idea for me to go to Micronesia for three weeks in May with Lonnie and his family. We went around and around on the topic, discussing the question of how dangerous it was to leave the cancer untreated for three weeks. Dr. Taylor thought that the cancer had returned as soon as I stopped taking Temodar, and maybe that's why she came up with the idea of sending microdoses of Temodar with me on the trip (too small to debilitate me, but enough to combat the cancer). We're still working out the details of that idea, but I confess I felt relieved that she had thought of a treatment plan that would work while I was traveling. Knock wood.

When I get back from Micronesia, they'll do another MRI, and then we'll talk about the future. For now, however, the other interesting little thing that came out of the discussion was when LaVelle wondered whether my hoarse voice, which started as soon as we hit the road, was a byproduct of Avastin. Dr Taylor said yes, Avastin attacks blood vessels in the cancer, and sometime it attacks one in the vocal chords by mistake, with the result that your voice gets hoarse. Mystery solved, and it's not an answer I even considered. Once again, my family came through for me.

So, all my love to all my family. I feel completely vulnerable and uncertain about my future right now, and I can't begin to say how much their love and support helps me feel more safe and secure, whatever tomorrow may bring. I'm happy the Micronesia trip is going to happen, after it had started to look shaky. Next up on the travel front, however, is heading to Woodland Hills, CA for Corflu the weekend after next.

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