Moving Right Along

Peg Tale #1012A: The Bartender's Story

Here's something a little different.  This post is an original work of fiction (copyright © 2007; all rights reserved, of course) which I have created, for better or worse, as part of Jack P's 2007 Hallowe'en party.  You tell me if it's a trick or a treat.

***

Yeah, that's me in that photo.  I was really something back then.  I could outrun everybody.  It's how I got the name "Blitz," which means "lightning" in German.  Oh, you knew that, huh?  Right.  I guess a lot of people do.

But yeah, back then I won every track meet.  I could do it all, sprint, relay, even long distance.  I used to joke that I could outrun my own exhaustion, that it wouldn't catch me 'til long, long after the race, by which time I'd have caught my second wind.

So fast.  You had to see me in action to believe it.

Lots of people did.  I'm sure there's still stuff you can watch on the 'net.  I broke so many records, even while still in high school.  They gave me a full scholarship to Pemberton -- yeah, that Pemberton -- just because of my speed, though my grades weren't bad, either.  I had the look, too, that clean-cut, Anglo, preppy look.  I could outrun everybody, even the Africans, and they liked that.  All the folks 'round here did.

I was headed to the Olympics.  That photo is me winning one of my qualifying heats.  And then it all changed.

It was so stupid.  I still kick myself -- figuratively speaking, of course.  I went out mountain biking with friends up on Devil's Ridge.  Lots of shale and loose dirt up there, steep hills, sudden cliffs.  Tons of fun; you never know where you'll end up, not really.  And that's the game, control in the face of randomness, that little thrill of knowing you could end up ass over teakettle at the bottom of the mountain, or you could master it, every rock, every slide, up through your arms, all untethered but sure.  And on a good day, you could pretend it wasn't luck at all but skill, pure skill.

I had skill, but I also had bad luck that day.  Broke not just one but both my legs and an arm, completely shattered a couple of tibia, and lost my front teeth to boot.  Brilliant.

I wasn't in the hospital too long, but I wore those casts awhile.  The Olympics came and went.  School started without me.  When I got back on my feet, my real feet, something had changed.

The speed was gone.

Oh, sure, I could walk like I'd never been hurt, and I could run like a normal person, but that's just it.  Suddenly I was only normal.  And then Pemberton didn't want me anymore.  They were real sorry, of course, but, you know.  Terms of the scholarship and all.

That's when I started drinking.  And then I became a bartender.  Seemed like a natural progression from one interest to another, right?  Most nights now, though, I stay out of the bottle myself.  I've seen too much to go back down that road for anything more than a taste, not for comfort, not even for sweet oblivion.  Because there is no comfort, and the only real oblivion is death.  And even with everything that happened, I'm just not ready for that yet.

Yeah, it's a surprise to me, too.

So here I am in this place one night 'round about '47, I guess it was.  Uh-huh, it had to be, 'cause the Olympics were in '48, and then again in '52, and this all started right before then.

Anyway, I'm tending bar, and it's a real quiet night.  Hardly a soul in the joint, not even a single regular.  So I'm polishing the glasses, checking my watch, dreaming of days gone by, wind in my hair, sun on my shoulders and the earth flying up to just kiss the bottoms of my feet as I rocketed over it, so lightly the touch of the ground never even registered in my memory, no sense of other people, just me and my strength and my pure, pure speed.  Good times, the sweetest.  I've never really felt like myself at any other time.

This guy comes in, and I've never seen him before.  He has some kind of accent I can't place.  Seems pleasant enough, maybe a little cold, but okay, nothing remarkable in any way.  He's wearing a goreplex jacket against the autumn night and a fool's-wool hat, in ordinary colors, in ordinary sizes and styles.  The only thing that betrays any sense of him, of who he is when he's not at work or going to work is this softer-than-a-cloud pair of cream-colored, polar-fleece-lined pleather gloves, which he takes off to reveal hands that have worked hard, like with tools, you know?  Fire and files.  Things that cut.  Things that make lasting wounds.  And these hands, they're rough, but they're immaculate, not a speck of dirt on them, and the nails have been cut with professional precision.

I serve him vodka tonic with a twist and two olives, though he asks me to take out the pimientos first.  Then I get back to work.

Then he asks me about the photos.  Just like you, right?  Wants to know how I feel about it all, if I miss running, if I miss winning.  And most of the time, except when it's slow like tonight, and slow like it was that night, people ask me these questions, and others, and I just shrug and smile and keep working.

I don't particularly feel like my story should be free entertainment included for the price of a drink, you know, though a fair number of new customers don't agree and have to be set straight by Ruby, the owner.

Ruby?  Yeah, she's cool.  She doesn't let people use me, you know?  She makes sure people get that I'm a person, not a telebot.

Naw, I'm not sure where she is tonight; it's her night off.

But anyway, where was I?  Oh, right.  Jameson.  That was his name.

Jameson, there's something about him and that night that makes me loosen up, that makes me want to tell him stuff.  He listens while I tell him that I do miss it, that I feel like I've misplaced myself and don't know how I'm going to live out the rest of my life not being able to run, no, not being able to fly, just plodding along pounding the dust like every other average schmoe, occasionally watching a few others, the ones who are still special, streak ahead, prinking my face and shoulders with their sweat as they pass.

He listens, nods, stares down into his drink a long time, then looks at me with water-clear eyes and asks, "What would you say if I told I could give that back to you?"

"I'd say, what's the catch?"  I laugh.  "No, I take that back.  I'd say you're insane.  Or a quack.  See, I've been to every physiatrist, every therapist, every radiologist, you name it, anybody with a rep in the business, and none of 'em can say what happened or why I'm not me anymore.  The closest I've got to hearing something that makes sense is from this little geezer in the Rockies who told me the structure of my tibias has changed and now they're heavy with scar tissue.  They're not so heavy I can't walk.  They're not even so heavy I can't run, if you call what most people do running -- and I don't, not compared to what I used to be able to do.

"He said it's like what would happen if you took a bird and plugged some of his hollow little bones with resin, not all of them and not a lot, just a tiny little bit in one bone on each wing.  If you did that, he couldn't fly.  The scars in my bones mean I can't fly anymore, either.

"And there's no cure.  You couldn't fix a bird you'd done that to without killing him, and you can't fix me.  End of story.  Now if you'll excuse me --"

Jameson nods to indicate that he understands.  He looks at his hands, then off into space for awhile.  I think our conversation is over, and it's late, so I start cleaning the tables and putting the chairs up.  Jameson just nurses that vodka tonic down to a dribble in the glass. 

I come back behind the bar.  "Will there be anything else?" I ask, brusquely, even though he hasn't finished.

He focuses on my face like he's been away a long time and is just coming back into the room.  "Blitz -- may I call you 'Blitz'?"  I shrug.  "Well, Blitz, have you ever heard of a man named Roland Copernicus?"

"Sure.  Everybody in track and field knows his story.  He was born without tibia at all, had his feet and lower legs amputated in early childhood, but learned to run on those funny looking prosthetic legs that are really just big springs.  He was fast, really fast, almost as fast as me.  But they wouldn't let him compete in the regular Olympics, because they actually thought his springs gave him an advantage over other runners.  Never mind that tons of amputees were running on those very same springs for years and never beating regular runners.  Never mind that he was the first to beat times only people with 'real' feet had hit.  The Committee just wouldn't believe him when he said it was a handicap not an advantage, that he had to work three times as hard as other people just to run at all on them, even though he offered to let them test him however they wanted just to prove it."

"Yes, this is the man I'm thinking of.  Sad story.  They never let him run, and his prime as an athlete passed, and then someone else came along, a veteran of the oil wars who was just as brilliant but in one lifetime had run on both organic feet and the springs, unlike poor Roland.  This was Col. Michael O'Brien, as you may remember, and he had film of himself and recorded times from both experiences, from his past life as a whole-bodied champion athlete and from later, after his unfortunate violent alteration.  Also, because he'd gone from school to the military and had undergone extensive testing for various reasons, and then again during the rehab after the bomb took his feet, there was a significant body of evidence just about this man's journey alone which proved what Copernicus had been trying to get the Committee to hear years before.  He proved incontrovertibly that he burned three times as many calories bouncing up and down on his springs as a 'normal' runner of his caliber did shooting forward without impediment on bone-and-flesh feet, but he beat their times anyway.   In the face of this evidence, and with the growing political sense in the world of the early part of this century that we should be making opportunities to include more people in public sport, not building walls to segregate competitors out into their own discreet classes, the Committee had no choice but to change the rules.  And Col. O'Brien went to the Olympics -- and lost to a young man from Kenya, as I recall."

"He got bronze.  It's not gold, but it's not losing, either.  He was something."

"Yes.  He was.  It is too bad about the cancer that killed him and so many other former military of that time, but at least he got to realize his dream."

"Yeah.  That he did."

"And now, thanks to him, anyone who can run can realize his Olympic dream."

"Yeah.  He really made a difference."

"So, my young friend.  What are you going to do to realize your Olympic dream?"

I snort.  "You kidding?  Ancient history.  That's all over for me."

"Not necessarily.  Only if you really want it to be."  And that's when he hands me his card.  Ernest Jameson, and then a ton of abbreviations, and then the title Chief of Sports Habilitation Medicine, Pemberton Hospital, and a Pemberton College eLine address.

"Sports 'habilitation'?  Shouldn't that be 'rehabilitation'?"

"No.  What we do is very special.  We do not typically restore abilities.  We give people abilities for the very first time."

"Sounds cool.  What's it got to do with me?"

"You, my friend, are a very unusual case.  You have had extraordinary abilities in your lifetime.  However, in a way, that lifetime is over.  That body is gone.  You have a new body, and it does not suit you.  It looks almost exactly the same as your previous body, and it is made of most of the same things.  However, it does not allow you to live your real life, your extraordinary life.

"Your case interests my department very much, but even more it interests some private acquaintances of mine.  If you say yes, you would be my department's first habilitation subject who is also, in a way, a rehabilitation subject.  And perhaps we will show people something new about what it is to be a human."

Something tingles in the back of my head.  Is it a warning or excitement?  I'll never know.  If it's a warning, it doesn't do its job, though, 'cause next thing I know I'm asking, "Yes to what?"

"Ah.  Before I tell you, may I trouble you for another drink?  Same as the last one please."

"Sure."  I mix it, picking out the pimientos with a toothpick same as last time.  Limp, wet, and red, they remind me of something.  A bloody nose.  Teeth knocked out.  I shudder and quickly flick them into the compostbot.  "Go on," I say, sliding the fresh tumbler over to Jameson.

"We propose to rebuild you."

"'Better than before.  Stronger.  Faster."  I sing a phrase of the Six Millon Dollar theme song and snort.  "Yeah, right."

"You laugh, but that is exactly right."

"Oh, please, I've heard this before.  Nobody can do it.  You're a quack, just like I thought.  Finish up and get out."

"Pardon me, a little more patience, please."  He holds up a hand in the universal "cool it" sign.  "Tell me, what has been proposed to you before, exactly?"

"Oh, the usual -- radioactive bone density therapy, transplants, wacky neuromuscular injections, plastic implants, even nanites.  Lots of suckers go through this kind of stuff every year, give their money to criminals with slick stories, suffer pain, risk infection and even death, and most of 'em are lucky to walk afterward, let alone run.  I don't know who you are buddy, but if this is the scam you're running, I doubt very much Pemberton has anything to do with it.  In fact, why don't I just dial them a little eLine right now and see if they even know who you are?"

"Nothing would please me more," Jameson smiles.  He taps his card, which I've left on the bar.

"That's okay.  I'll look up the number myself."  I pull out my ePad and punch in Information.  The bot connects me with the main Pemberton hub, which then shoots me through to an answerline.  A picture of Jameson, smiling diffidently above a tie and white coat, fills the screen, while a female bot-voice cheerily tells me, "You have reached the offices of the Sports Habilitation Department at Pemberton Hospital and the office of Dr. Ernest Jameson, Director of Sports Habilitation Medicine at Pemberton College Medical School.  If you would like to make an appointment, please punch 1 on your ePad.  If this is an emergency, punch --"

I hang up.  "Okay, it's a real program, and you're a real guy."

"Indeed."  He mock-bows at me over the bar and takes a sip of his second drink.

"So?  What's your racket?  How do you propose to 'rebuild' me?"

"With your consent, of course, we will remove the parts of your body that no longer serve you and replace them with parts that will.  We will simply amputate --"

"Whoa!  Amputate?"

"Certainly.  Amputate, but replace.  We will amputate your legs above the bone scars and then fit you with several sets of replacement legs.  You will have legs for everything!  You will be able to wear sandals, even heels.  And you will have legs for running.  Springs.  Like Copernicus wore, and O'Brien.  And with patience and hard work, you will fly once more."

"You seem quite sure of that."

"Why not?  You are young and healthy.  You have not even reached the age of most people's athletic prime yet.  You can do this.  If it is something you really want, if you really want a chance to be yourself again before you die, the self who could outrun anyone, the self who could 'outrace exhaustion,' I have every confidence that we can help you do it."

"Yeah?  And who's going to pay for this?"

"The funds have already been assured."

I raise an eyebrow at that, but something in me doesn't want to ask any more questions.  Something in me flutters for the first time in a couple of years, awake again, a dream, a hope, a memory of a certain way of breathing.

But then something else comes crashing in.  A voice, a thousand voices.  Voices of my parents, who died fearing God and cautioned me my whole life against arrogance, and also against tempting nature.  Voices of my friends who hate the whole personal surgery movement of the last few decades and are always ridiculing people who elect to alter themselves, to look younger, to try a different gender just for a giggle, even to try being crippled for awhile just to see if they are up to the challenges.  Bored people.  Self-involved people.

And I think about my body, and my feet.  Okay, so my legs feel leaden now, but they are my legs, the set I've been given.  It's not like they differ from the way natural legs are supposed to be, and it's not like I can grow another pair if this plan doesn't work out.  And oh -- to not feel the ground again.  Not ever.  I can't remember loving it before, the touch of the earth, not when I used to be able to leave it behind at will and just come back when I was ready.  But now it is so important to me, the anchoring reminder of each step, that reminder that I am alive whenever I am least sure.

I take away Jameson's empty glasses.  "Closing time," I tell him.

"Very well," he replies, disappointment in his voice.  He stands and pulls on those soft, pale gloves.

He's almost to the door when I stop him, calling "Can I...think about it?"

"Of course," he replies with a grateful smile.  "I have left you my card.  Just don't wait too long, yes?  The Olympics will be here before you know it, and we have other potential subjects."

I look down at where his card lies on the bar and pick it up with numb fingers, reading it again without really taking it in.  When I look up, he's gone.

Months.  There are whole months after I said yes that I wish I could forget, just so I could pretend that I didn't choose this, that it just happened to me, but every moment is printed permanently in my mind.   The only part I have no memory of is the surgery itself -- a success, they told me, when I woke up without my feet and lower legs.

"What did you do with them?" I asked through the painkillers the first time Dr. Jameson accompanied the surgeon in to change my bandages and check my wounds.

"They have been photographed, radiographed, and cremated."

"May I have the ashes?"

"Of course."

"May I see the photographs and the radiographs?"

"It is not recommended."

Waiting for the swelling to go down, I had a lot of time to think, and to grieve for my choice, my loss, but I have to tell you that mostly I was excited.  It seems so wrong now, but I was.  I'd gone through with it!  There was no turning back!  And I was going to run, to fly, again.  I had to.  There was no point otherwise.

I had no idea how hard it would be.  The muscles in my hips, my thighs, my knees -- all had to learn new ways of moving to accommodate the new prosthetics.  It was tedious.  It was often painful. I thought I'd get my springs and then just rocket off, same as I used to, feel the wind and not feel the ground, but that's not how it went.  I could both feel the ground and not feel the ground, impact on my remaining joints feeling through phantom sensations like impact on the ground but not accurately.  I could feel the framework of my sockets at every move, chafing and pushing against the flesh of my shins.  I sweat into hot synthetic socks in plastic liners, not sneakers or the air.  My gait was wider.  I couldn't shoot straight forward like an arrow off the blocks but had to bounce, up and down, up and down, forward, ever forward, but up and down, up and down.  And my missing parts prickled all the time with pins and needles, not broken glass like Anderson's Little Mermaid who gave up who she was to be someone she couldn't, but a constant, uncomfortable reminder of what I had given up in order to be more myself.

Once I got the right fit, though, and once I got the hang of it, slowly replacing old muscle memories with new instincts, there was no stopping me.  Hell yeah, I flew.  It was different, and I was different, but the speed.  The speed was there.

It was strange though.  As hard as I'd worked to regain what I'd lost long ago when the casts came off, I worked even harder now to gain a new skillset with the same goal, to be fast.  I was doing the same thing only going about it differently.

Sometimes I wondered how fast I'd have been if I'd ever worked this hard with the legs I'd given up, them with the heavy, scarred bones.  Sometimes I wondered why I hadn't worked this hard, why I'd never met anyone who'd even suggested I should.  I'd have to shake those thoughts off like water, though.  It didn't pay to have regrets or wonder "what if."  I was deep in the land of What Is Now, and there was no going back.

I got to the Olympics.  You see that photo under the first one you pointed out?  Yep, that's me, too.  No, a lot of people don't realize at first glance.  It's the spring feet, and also something about the way my muscles changed after I started using them, all through my body.  I think I was more fit in that photo than I had ever been before.  It was not an easy fitness, though.  It came from labor, not genes or luck.  It didn't rest as easy on me.  I could fly again, but it was no longer effortless.   I could outrun my exhaustion again, but our finishing times were a lot closer.  It was right there at my heels, or where my heels would've been if I'd still had heels.

On the amateur circuit and in the qualifying heats, I beat everybody.  I left the Africans in the dust once again.  Pemberton didn't offer me my scholarship back, though.  And people told me "Good for you!" in a different tone of voice.  I couldn't put my finger on it, but it was different.  It was like they weren't quite the same kind of proud of me that they'd been before when all I'd run on was nature.

But, yeah, the Olympics.  I got there.  And I was proud.  I'd really worked for it, you know?

And what I didn't know was just how much was riding on it all.  I found out later, from the cops.

You know how Jameson had told me that "the funding" for my transformation had been "assured"?  What he didn't tell me was who had funded it, or why.

People had been running in the Olympics on spring feet for decades now, but no one believed they could take gold.  It was just too hard.  But Jameson was a gambler, and one night over cards, he and Lermontov the Russian gangster, another doctor, and a guy known only as "the Swede" by anyone who knew him at all had been speculating aloud on whether it could ever happen.

"It would take a remarkable athlete," said Jameson.

"It is a pity we cannot know exactly how remarkable is an athlete before a race," laughed Lermontov.  "We can guess, but..."

"I wonder if we could build one," said Jameson.

"What, a robot?" asked the other doctor.  "Of course we can.  But they are not allowed to compete in the Olympics."

"No, no, if we could build an athlete we knew could win.  Someone like O'Brien, but even faster.   Someone who started out faster than anyone else has ever been."

"The trick," interjected the Swede, "would be finding someone like that who's had their legs cut off.  It doesn't happen every day, you know.  Well, not around here."

Because I had gotten so close to the Olympics back when I had all my original parts, I had briefly gotten on the international radar, and most people had heard of me.  So now some perverse trick of luck and vodka made Jameson think of me and my story, and my loss.  "What if we could find someone who had been faster than anyone else but lost the ability -- through some tragic event or other -- without losing their legs?  What if we could persuade them to have their legs off and to try running on springs?"

The Swede snorted.  "They'd have to be very much faster than anyone else has ever been to win.  They'd have to be a Blitz Goldstein or something."

Jameson smiled, and that's how the whole thing started.  The Swede and Lermontov put up the money.  Since no one believed that a runner on prosthetic springs could take gold, and no one believed that anyone who had two working legs would be crazy enough to have them cut off for any reason less than catastrophic injury -- which I maintain is a matter of perspective -- they planned to place a lot of bets which would more than recoup their expenditure.

If they lost, though, they'd be out more money than they could raise, and the people they bet against weren't your sherry-tippling Victorian whist players.  Naw, their circle was a bunch of heavies and toughs on a world underworld scale, not nice people at all, not the kind of people you ever want to owe money to.  If they lost, they'd probably lose their lives.

A lot of people think those guys, the people the Swede and Lermontov had bet against -- and Jameson, too, as was later revealed, or so the police think based on what happened to him -- got to me, put the screws to me, and made me throw the race.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The problem was me.  All me.  I may have changed legs, but I was still the same person.  And that person liked to play games with speed and control, the kind of games that can get you hurt, even killed.  Even with what it had cost me in the past, I still wasn't over that.  And I was feeling good.  I was feeling strong, elated, special almost like a superhero.  I had worked for this moment in my life.  I had sacrificed.  I could do anything.

So the Olympics that year were in Monte Vista, and as everybody knows, Monte Vista has a velodrome.  Anyone can join; you just pay your euros, hop on a bike with no brakes, and race around and around and around a track 'til a whistle blows and somebody wins.  Day before the race, on a little bet of my own, that's where I was.  I didn't win; that hadn't been the bet.  The bet, which I'd made with another runner on my team, was whether or not I could do it at all with one of my sixteen pairs of fake feet.  And I could, you bet I could.  I just got banged up a little bit doing it.

And getting banged up meant bruises, and swelling.  And that meant my running prosthetics didn't fit quite right the next day.

And everybody saw what happened as a result.

There was a pebble in the track, and I hit it.  I'd trained for everything.  It shouldn't have been a big deal.  But some combination of factors, the placement of a particular bruise with the way my spring foot hit just that edge of just that rock, made me trip.  And then I couldn't right myself.

Down I went.  Ass over teakettle.  Broke my damn knee doing it, too.  And that was it for my racing career, for real this time.

Worst part about it, of course, was what happened to the runner who tripped over me.  Out of the race, end of a dream, pure bad luck.  Boy, do I know how that feels.

Things got real quiet in my life after that.  No one knew what to say to me, or even about me, except those talking heads in the media, of course; they always know better than anyone else what should have happened and what could have happened, and they aren't afraid to say so.  Lermontov and the Swede were never seen again, and Dr. Jameson disappeared mysteriously, too.

The cops contacted me some months later.  They'd found a pair of hands tied together with rope at the wrists floating in the Pemberton river.  They'd been fingerprinted, of course, but I knew whose they were from the forensics photos.  The gloves were a mess, but I could see that they'd been a real nice pair once, the finest pleather, now dirty as hell but formerly pastel-colored and lined with polar fleece.  And the hands themselves, well, I got to see those, too.  There were photographs of them untied and undressed.  All the scars, all the things that had happened to the skin from working with metal and carbon fiber, from fabricating things that would help other people live their dreams, had been softened gorily by a lot of time spent in water.

I lost my breakfast when I saw those hands.  They didn't look like they'd come off easily, or cleanly.

The cops wanted to know if I knew anything about how they ended up in the Pemberton River.  I had nothing to tell them.  And I couldn't tell them anything about Lermontov or the Swede, either.  Hell, I'd never met either one of them, and was only hearing about them and their betting, and Jameson's, for the first time from the cops themselves.

I'm not sure they ever found out the whole story.  I never did, either, of course, but we all think we can imagine.

Huh.  I haven't thought about all that in quite awhile.  I mean I have, but I haven't.  I don't like to dwell on stuff I'm ashamed of.  I have a lot to be ashamed of, I guess; not sure if it's more or less than the average person, just more obvious, more public.  But I have this job again; that's something.

Ruby's been real good to me.  She's the only person who's always treated me the same, no matter what.

I guess I should close soon.  Doesn't look like there'll be anybody else tonight.  Don't want to waste the power bill.  But I've got to ask.  It's pretty damn raw outside.  What on earth brought you in here to talk to me about all that on a night like this? 

That's right; I want to know your story.  I'll bet you've got one; everybody's got one.  Like for starters, how'd you lose that eye?

I'll just pour myself a beer -- just this once, just so you don't feel rushed finishing that screwdriver -- and you can tell me all about it.

What'd you say your name was?  Borgeson?  That's Swedish, isn't it?

***

Happy Hallowe'en!

Photographic Evidence That There Really Is a Monster Under My Bed

Click to enlarge.

Full disclosure in the interest of good science:  This photo has been edited to make me look like someone who sweeps the floor every once in awhile.  The monster, however, is shown just as he revealed himself to me, without enhancement of any kind.

Well, it seemed like this year's must-have, bad taste Hallowe'en gift for amputees, but sadly it isn't even that cool.

I have often said, and hope I will be proven correct in saying, that someday I firmly believe that technology will have advanced to the point where we can grow new limbs and organs for ourselves to replace others we have been forced to relinquish.  How excited, then, do you think I was when I discovered via a quick survey of the Hallowe'en merchandise at the West Concord 5 & 10 that this technology was already within my reach?

And for only $1.99?

Bargain!  Right?  Right?  It's even the correct leg!  Yes, it's missing a knee, but my interest at this point was strictly clinical, not practical.

The way this works is you soak it in "a large container" of water for "several hours" and it's supposed to absorb the water and get bigger.  Once upon a time, in search for a suitable companion to the plastic triceratops who sits atop my film scanner, I picked up this little fellow at the Concord Toy Shop:

As you can see, treated similarly this lovely green stegosaurus will grow to 600% its packaged size!  600%!  Wow!

I unwrapped my prospective replacement limb with trembling fingers.

I must say, I liked the turn of its ankle!

I dropped it in a gigantic blue glass bowl filled with tap water and set it aside overnight.

After 24 hours, I went to check on its status.  And that's when disappointment set in.

Oh, I guess it's a bit bigger, but it sure ain't no 600% bigger.  This is more like a replacement pinky finger with toes than a grow-your-own replacement limb.  (sigh)

Seriously, I could still pick it up with salad tongs.  Big deal!

I was, however, impressed with the realistic shriveling of the skin.  Though a bit more yellow, this is very much how my left foot would look if I were to soak it in the bath for 24 hours.

(sigh)  I guess I'll have to continue my search for over-the-counter parthenogenesis.  Meanwhile, it's a darned good thing my prosthetic still works.

In other experiments this weekend, it was also proven that one out of one housecat queried prefers wind-up sushi to a wind-up hopping eyeball.

It was an excellent weekend for mad science, wouldn't you say?

*****

REMINDER (or information, if you didn't already know):  Jack P has had a great idea for a Hallowe'en game.  I'll be playing.  How 'bout you?

(Thank you, Goldfish.)

One of the bennies of dating a Harvard muffin is access to really great cancer talk.

As you already know if you came here from esteemed correspondent Jeanne Sather's blog The Assertive Cancer Patient, the day before yesterday, my true love (now aka "Harvard muffin") forwarded me an e-mail, which read in pertinent part:

October 17, 2007

7:30–9:30 pm
104 Harvard Hall

While treatments are better for cancer and survival rates higher, there are significantly more newly diagnosed cancers than ever before. Devra Davis, cancer epidemiologist and environmentalist, and author of a new book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, will discuss how the toxins in our environment are contributing to this surge in cancer, how scientists are influenced by the companies who fund their research, and her vision for a healthier environment. After the talk, The Secret History of the War on Cancer will be available for purchase and signing.

Devra Davis is the director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. The event is sponsored by the Harvard Extension School’s Environmental Management program.

Attendees should RSVP to George Buckley at [email protected] by noon on Tuesday, October 16.

http://www.extension.harvard.edu/2007-08/news/davis.jsp

My little Harvard muffin invited me to join him at this talk, to which he was invited because of a class he's taking in epidemiology this semester.

Pardon me while I seem to digress for a moment.  I promise it will make sense in a minute.

You may not remember this, but October 17, 1989, was the day of a giant earthquake in the Santa Cruz Mountains which rocked the San Francisco Bay Area.  I was then living in the Santa Cruz Mountains.  As it happened, I had just been diagnosed with malignant melanoma the day before (October 16) in Los Gatos, and then that morning in San Jose had been ordered to my first surgery ever, scheduled for the very next day, October 18.  Thus on October 17 my friends at work had taken me out drinking at lunchtime.  Thus it happened that I was sitting on the toilet drunk off my ass and terrified for my life on the top floor of a small San Jose office building when the big one hit.

Oh, the glamour that is my existence in this world.

So maybe even knowing that background you still won't get this, but the fact is, going to listen to this woman speak seemed to me like a perfect way for me to spend the 18th anniversary of that particularly bad, weird day.  To my delight, it proved to be an extremely useful and validating experience.

Dr. Davis had a lot to say, and most of it is in her new book, the aforementioned Secret History of the War on Cancer.  Though I shall happily share with you here some excerpts from my notes on her talk, you should understand that I could not possibly write down everything she said, and strongly recommend that you get your hands on a copy of this book.  (We would have purchased it ourselves, but sadly brought no cash.  We will be rectifying this shortly, and after I read it, I may have further notes to share.)

Dr. Davis, a Harvard alumnus, began her talk by telling us a little about herself.  Turns out she grew up in Donora, Pennsylvania.  She explained the significance of this, that this was a town in the Rust Belt where once upon a time in the 1940s 18 people in one day dropped dead of air pollution.  She told us how both her parents died of cancer, her father who had once surved a benzine explosion at age two and then spent his whole life working with chemicals in one capacity or another and/or simply living in that town leaving the world at age 55 of multiple myeloma, her mother some years later of stomach cancer.

She told us how as a child, one day she came home from school in a nearby city (Pittsburgh, I think she said) and asked her mother if there was another town called Donora in Pennsylvania.  Her mother got quiet and asked her why she was asking that.  Davis told her that they'd heard in school that day about a town with the same name as their town that was supposed to have terrible pollution.

"Well," said her mother, "do you know how sometimes we have to drive around with our lights on even at 2:00 in the afternoon?  And do you know how we have to clean the walls of the house every month because they turn all brown?  Well, I guess nowadays you'd call that 'pollution,' but we always just called it 'making a living.'"

All this is not only part of the subject of her first book, When Smoke Ran Like Water, but also why Dr. Davis grew up to be an environmental oncologist.  Now, looking around and seeing how all cancer-related research money seems to be going toward treatment and none toward figuring out the causes of cancer, and why cancer has become this unchecked, ballooning epidemic for all humanity, she has written a book about some of the stuff we do know, why we don't know more, what she feels we ought to be paying more attention to, and what we ought to be demanding of science, government and industry to start putting this whole dynamic in check.

One reason this seems to her especially urgent, she says, is that in the developing world, as chemicals and more technologically advanced manufacturing processes increase, so do the rates of cancer, and yet there is no advanced diagnosis or treatment for cancer, no chemo or radiation therapy or gene therapy or thousand-dollar-a-pill pharmaceuticals in any of these places.  And these places are most of the world.  So while it has always been urgent that we look for and address environmental causes of cancer, now it is more urgent than ever.

That's just one reason, though.  Others closer to home seem fairly obvious.

Dr. Davis talked (and talks in her latest book) about all the things that are known to cause cancer, how long we have known about them, and why we have "forgotten." Radiation, for example, was a known danger by the early 1900s when famous people who worked with developing it into something useful had already died of their exposure to it, people like Mme Curie and a cherished assistant of Thomas Edison.  Dr. Davis went on to list these known cancer causes as reported in 1936 by the International Congress of Scientific and Social Campaign Against Cancer, a group of serious scientists around the world:

• hormones
• X-radiation
• solar radiation
• coal tars/soots
• benzene
• cobalt and uranium mining

One member of the Congress, a Dr. Ruffo who had his own clinic in Buenos Aires, had already drawn a connection between cancer and, guess what, yes:

• tobacco
• suntanning

White people need 15-20 minutes of sunlight a day in order to use Vitamin D; people of African descent need more; however, as early as the 1930s, it was known that excessive solar radiation would cause skin cancer.

So if the world already knew all these things in 1936, how did the world seem to forget?  That's when the story turns ugly.  (And it's probably nothing you don't already know unless you just fell off the turnip truck yesterday.)

As I understood her explanation, one big deterrent from attention toward all these things was militarization.  When war came to Europe, that's where all technological attention got focused.  This also was a time when large businesses came into their greatest wealth and power ever.

Dr. Davis told the story of an organization called the Women's Field Army, headed by Marjorie Illig (a radiologist "until marriage," according to her biography) and a Dr. Clarence Cook.  This was a radical organization which advocated things like birth control and took up the cause of cancer in the 1930s and '40s.  At this time, most women who got "women's" cancers (e.g., ovarian, uterine, breast) simply died of them.  Part of why was their inability to talk to their [almost universally male] doctors even when they could feel something going very wrong with these particular areas.  The Women's Field Army began campaigns to educate women and help them feel more comfortable bringing these issues up with their doctors, who were then supposed to know what to do about it, get them into treatment and save their lives.  And many lives were saved as a result of their efforts.

There are some weird little side stories here, though.  The pap smear had already been invented by the late 1920s and proven accurate and an effective way to save lives by 1942.  However, it was not implemented in this country until the late 1950s, and not in England until 1988.  In this country, specifically within the American Cancer Society, Dr. Davis says a huge fight raged.  It was part of the Red Menace madness.  Many feared that the pap smear represented taking control out of the hands of private medical practice and giving way to the rise of socialism.  Meanwhile, women died.

I am not clear on what the excuse was in England.

Meanwhile, remember how the WFA was founded in part by Dr. Clarence Cook?  Well, after WWII, Dr. Cook went to work for the tobacco industry, which in collaboration with both the AMA and the American Cancer Society happily funded many studies about cancer and its causes -- as long as tobacco was excluded.  You could say that Big Tobacco and these two supposedly philanthropic organizations bribed doctors not to look at tobacco.  This went on for decades, well into recent years, well into my lifetime and probably yours.  This is now common knowledge, but it's not the only instance of this kind of chicanery.

Dr. Davis talked about how many published statistics are misleading, and why some don't exist.  She talked about the town Reveilletown, LA, a polluted factory town until the 200 inhabitants were paid to move away -- paid as long as they signed documents promising never to complain if they got sick and never to provide any data about their health and where they'd lived to any data gatherers.  There's a similar story to be found in Mossville, LA, another town that no longer exists.  The CDC has studied the blood of surviving residents of that town and found high levels of dioxin, but this is the only data available because the company that caused the pollution there paid well to prevent other data from ever being collected.

Apparently, there are lots of stories like this, many lost forever.  These are just two in one very poor state.

Davis told a sad story of being asked by a mentor, Sir Something-or-Other, a Great God of Cancer Science whose name I failed to write down (but I'm sure it's in the book), to reconsider data on a paper she was writing, data which linked certain statistics about pollution and cancer.  And she did reconsider, and she did edit her interpretation of the numbers and tone down her conclusion.  He was a Great God, after all; surely he must be right and she would bow to his experience and understanding.  Then the Great God died and she found out that he'd been on the Monsanto payroll for years.  And now she has to wonder for the rest of her life whether his advice came from genuine concern for truth in reporting, or whether it was influenced by his hidden masters.

Then there are statistics such as the recently released one that deaths from cancer in the U.S. have gone down two percent a year for the last ten years.  This is big news.  You know what else is big news?  Cancer diagnoses are up.

Fewer men are dying of smoking-related cancers.  Yay, right?  However, more men are being diagnosed with cancers not related to smoking than ever before.  Non-Hodgkins lymphoma is up, especially in Italy and Japan, and in this country among farmers, men who work with solvents, and people who work with chemicals like napthylene (sp? the stuff in moth balls).

For women, smoking-related cancer diagnoses are up, cancers not related to smoking are up, and women today are being diagnosed with breast cancer at 1.5 times the rate of their grandmothers.  Only one in ten women diagnosed with breast cancer has gotten it as a result of genetic material passed on from one of her parents.  All the rest are happening for other reasons, but hardly any effort or money is devoted to studying those other reasons.  Almost all breast cancer money goes toward treatment, which is very, very lucrative, especially, as I know from reading the Breast Cancer Action site and other materials beyond those included in this particular talk, when a company can make money both from toxic chemicals such as pesticides and very expensive cancer medications.  (Astra Zeneca, I'm looking at you, you and your sickening "Honey, we'll get through this together" advertising campaign perpetrated last October.  As Jeanne would say, "Gag me on a pink ribbon."  But I digress.)

Another thing to bear in mind:  less than 15% of the population of the United States is over 65 years of age, but this is the population in which 85% of all cancers are diagnosed.

One of the slides Dr. Davis showed us at the beginning of her talk was about identical twins.  Identical twins are not in fact perfect clones of each other, but as close as we have to matching sets of DNA.  She showed the DNA of identical twins at age three, and you could already see some differences between the strands, but not huge.  Then she showed the DNA of identical twins at age 50.  These strands show radical differences.  You would never guess they were from twins.  Her belief is that environment and experience account for the differences.  Her belief is that people are getting so much cancer at age 65 and older simply because they have lived the longest and thus been exposed to the greatest number of pollutants.

As yet another tiny example of the overwhelming amount of data she sees as proof that many cancers are caused by exposure to environmental contamination, much of it completely avoidable, Dr. Davis told the story of a friend of hers who developed bladder cancer at age 19.  In fact, the patient's whole family was riddled with cancer.  Thing was, the patient was adopted and shared no genetic material with any of these people.  The only thing they had in common was the polluted town where they lived.

There's also the way we overuse and misuse certain technological assets of our current world.  Cell phones really can cause brain cancer, and standards for the cancer-causing emissions which sink two inches into the cranium vary drastically from nation to nation.  As Dr. Davis says, cell phones save lives.  However, the way they are being used, especially by young people who live with them practically glued to their heads, is not safe at all.  (Hint:  Use earbuds.)

Per one of Dr. Davis' slides, according to a paper published in the Journal of the American College of Radiologists (and she cited "J Am Coll Radiol 2007; 4:272-284"), the amount of radiation emitted in the United States in connection strictly with diagnostic tests each year is equal to that emitted by the explosion at Chernobyl.  Furthermore, one CT scan of a baby's head can submit the child to the equivalent radiation from between 200 and 6000 chest X-rays in one go.  Children are ten times more vulnerable to the ill effects of radiation than adults.  And yet, we have no federal standards for the training and certification of CT technicians, and no national database on radiation doses.  Records are not kept from birth of the specific amount of radiation to which each child has been exposed just from diagnostic testing.

Dr. Davis made the point in her talk that we are receiving ten times more tests in our lives than our predecessors, and yet we are not ten times more healthy.  In fact, the overuse of certain kinds of tests may be making us sicker.  (Annual mammograms, anyone?)

I could go on and on with the statistics she quoted.  Really, at this point, I think you get the idea and should just go buy the book.

As part of a handful of proffered solutions, Dr. Davis encouraged what she calls "girlcotting."  Boycotting is saying no to things, she said.  "Girlcotting" then would be saying yes.  She bases the word (which she may or may not have coined; I don't know) on the fact that it is women who do the shopping for households, and women who are taking more and more interest in ingredients and saying not just no to horrible household chemicals but yes to genuinely safer alternatives.

She encourages parents to really not let their kids use cellphones without earbuds, and to find out before allowing children to undergo CT scans exactly how much radiation the children will be exposed to and if equivalent or better data cannot be gathered by a single X-ray or an MRI.

Dr. Davis urged against the use of anti-microbial soaps.  They contain Lyban which combines with chlorine in our tap water to create chloroform, which is highly toxic.

She told us there are lots of ERs now where they automatically give you vitamins, antioxidants and selenium, when you come in with a trauma.  She reminds us that there is much we can do with exercise and nutrition (though I have to say I think that's more about overall health and ability to fight disease rather than cancer prevention, because I've known a lot of non-steroid-using gym rats who eat their organic broccoli religiously to get all kinds of cancers).

On one of her slides, besides her own website Dr. Davis also listed the following useful links:

PreventingCancerNow.org or EnvironmentalOncology.org if your browser won't take you there
Toxipedia.org
ewg.org

Visit them for even more information.

Many smart students asked many smart questions.  How, for example, can doctors not know things like the potential damage that can be done with too many radiation-based diagnostic tests?  How can doctors not know or think about how much radiation a person is getting during such a test?  Why are they ordering so many?  Dr. Davis pointed out that medical training is highly specialized and that there are a range of options via which a person can get radiation-based diagnostic testing, from an ER where it's all about saving a life right now and to hell with the long-term consequences of the method to a strip mall full-body scan joint where you pay your X-hundred dollars and then they CT your whole body, no prescription necessary, just to find out if there's anything you should be worried about.

Another question was about doctors now being in bed not with the tobacco industry but with Big Pharma.  Dr. Davis referred us to a book by Marcia Angel on this topic.  She told us there are absolutely no systems in place to prevent this same kind of abuse from happening over and over again, none whatsoever.  However, I think I understood that she expects this may change as increasingly high numbers of doctors themselves suffer cancer.  The cryptic note I wrote at this point was

1 of 4 die of cancer
1 of 2 are drs.

I think what I meant to write was that one in four of all deaths recorded are attributed to cancer right now, and that one of every two cancer deaths is that of a doctor, but that seems kind of high.  Still, there is something going on here, and as more and more doctors themselves experience the joy that is cancer treatment, something is bound to change.

Dr. Davis closed the formal portion of her talk with a quote from Spinoza, "If you want the future to differ from the past, you must study the past," and a photo of a German statue outside one of the concentration camps entitled The Defiant Inmate, which she also used at the close of her first book.  The statue shows a concentration camp prisoner standing straight up, looking up, with his hands in his pockets, a pose which would apparently have gotten a real prisoner shot all by itself.  I don't speak German, but if I transcribed it correctly, the inscription reads, "Den totem zur ehr den lebenden zur mahning," or "We honor the dead to warn the living."  My understanding was that she meant to make the point that nothing will change unless all of us stand up like the defiant inmate and individually and collectively demand it, and unless we take a good, honest look at what has been the so-called War on Cancer started even before Nixon officially named it in 1971 in part to distract attention from his failure at war in Southeast Asia and commit ourselves at last to making it real, one by one, demanding answers not marketing campaigns and cover-ups, purchasing only safe, healthful foods and products, and demanding that significantly more of our collective resources go toward determining causes of cancer and eliminating them even if it inconveniences the most powerful people and companies in the world -- and even if it inconveniences us personally.  (I might be editorializing a bit, but I'm pretty sure this was her point.)

Then, as part of the second-to-last smart question anybody asked her before the lecture broke up, my true love, since Davis had mentioned both pollution of a particular Chinese town and cell phones, told the assembled company of his experience in a movie theater in China a couple of years ago where every single Chinese person in the audience was sitting with a cell phone glued to his/her ear, while the movie was playing, throughout the entire show.  In light of such real-life scenes among others, he asked her what hope she really had for us making things better over the course of the rest of this century.

"Well," she told him, "I'm a Jew, and I live in Washington sometimes.  You can't do either without being an optimist."

And I think that's as good a place as any to stop.

Questions?  Comments?  Feel free.

Meanwhile, even though they'll probably never see this, I want to thank both Dr. Davis for a clear and rousing synopsis of her work to date and the delightful and enthusiastic Dr. Buckley, whose class we crashed, for letting us sit in on it.

Today we celebrate my true love, aka "Harvard Muffin."

We moved to the Boston area in 1995.  We'd been living together two months, going out for six, friends for a year.

Our first day here, while we walked around the Back Bay oohing and aahing and completely overwhelming ourselves on greasy food, overpriced tchotchkes, incredible bookstores, secondhand smoke, and elaborate northeastern brick architecture of the late 1800s, I told my true love how a great uncle of mine had gotten kicked out of Harvard for selling test answers only to have his father buy him a place at another area university, Boston College or Boston University, I couldn't remember which, by virtue of some whopping fat donation, enough to build a library or something.  (This was according to my mother by way of goodness knows which hyperbolizing relative(s), or even how many.)

"Wow.  So, do you think you can get me in?"

"Um, no."

I went on to remind him that I am a five-time college drop-out with no degrees, and that even if anyone old enough to know the truth of this story were still alive, I don't speak to that side of the family.  So sorry, honey, I had to tell him, but I've got no pull, and even if I did, well, ew.

What I didn't realize at the time was that my true love had always wanted a college degree, and not just any college degree, but a really good one.  Ivy league.  Brandied, tweeded, and oak paneled.  My true love had started college a long time ago at the proper age, but had gotten discouraged and also dropped out.  This did not ultimately prevent him from achieving a high level position as a computer engineer with a six-figure salary.  It has always, however, prevented him from feeling like a success.

My true love started taking classes at Harvard Extension a few years ago, just to see what they were like, and what he would be like in that environment.  He LOVED it.  He knew he wanted a Harvard degree, but felt sure that he could never get into Harvard University.  (They only accept something like one percent of all applicants.)  However, the extension school uses the same professors and resources as the university, only offers them to students at greatly reduced prices.

Anyone with the course fees can take classes at Harvard Extension School, just like anyone can take classes through UCLA Extension.  I've heard Hilary Duff has taken classes at Harvard Extension.  Not just anyone can get a degree through Harvard Extension School though.  Though I doubt very much that the standards are as severe as those for the regular university, there are still standards, and people who wish to become degree candidates must apply and submit thorough background information about themselves just like anyone applying to any reputable college.

My true love got the application and sat on it for a few semesters.  He took it out and looked at it, and then put it away many, many times.  Finally, this year, he pulled himself together, filled it out, and turned it in.

I was extremely proud of my true love.  For him to apply meant really facing up to things from his past that don't please him, plus putting aside his fears of rejection, plus he had to go and meet with people and ask them questions about how to apply and what kind of strategies to use, he had to dredge up every bit of his academic record from two decades and both coasts of the U.S., he had to fill out forms, and he had to accept constructive criticism from me about his essay.  None of this was easy.  In fact it took some balls.

My true love is turning 40 on Sunday.  (yay)  Meanwhile, on Tuesday he received a packet in the mail from the Harvard Extension School.  Do I have to tell you what was in the packet?  Well, I'm going to anyway:  yes, an acceptance letter and a bunch of materials on resources now available to him as a full-fledged, enrolled degree candidate.

Oh, and there was also a note somewhere in all that about how he made the Dean's List for 2006-2007, something no one had ever bothered to mention before.

I am bursting with pride and happiness for this man!  Bursting!  And though I personally tend to be somewhat less impressed by the Harvard brand than he and Frasier Crane, I am thrilled that the extension school has the intelligence to realize what a fantastically gifted, brilliant guy he is, an absolute asset to any community of intellectuals.

I regret that I do not have more photos of him to show you; he is camera-shy.  But it's probably just as well.  If you saw how cute he is, you'd only try to steal him from me.

I don't love him more just because he's now an official Harvard muffin, and I didn't love him before just because he was smart enough to take classes there and get good grades.  Also, it should be noted that I don't only love him on Thursdays.

I am wicked proud of him, though, more than anything else just for trying, for choosing something he really wants and really going after it, for recognizing that he deserves it even without such validation as being told he'd made Dean's list, and even though it was possible that he might not be permitted to have the experience he most desired -- and all at the age of not-quite-40.

And I am relieved Harvard Extension accepted him so I don't have to go over there and kick their privileged asses crimson with my little rubber foot.