Tues, Covid, Summer, Gilbert

Yesterday was rudely hot. I wilted inside working. Gilbert with his heart disease found breathing toughest.  At the end of the day I hopped on the Harley to get the mail. I picked up a fan for my office.  London Drugs only had USB desk fans.  Canadian Tire had a wall of fans.  I have air conditioning but if I have it on high it flips the breakers.  Low it helps.

I love the heat.  Outside it was glorious to stand soaking in the sun. The problem is working. Sunshine is good for improving the immune response to Covid.  Vitamin D3. Love it. I could lie on my lawn chair all day and looking. I am forward to the weekend to do just that.  I did a little last weekend. With the fan I hope to survive another day of work. I Remember working in the tropics, stifling. All one needed was a breeze. Then it was heaven.

There are moments when I just feel good for no reason. It’s warm. I’ve food and water and shelter. I’ve vehicles. It’s summer in the city. I’ve a long list of positive memories which flow through me. Outside with friends as kids, playing in the sun, baseball, hide and seek, tag. All those good time memories in the sunshine. Later it’s swimming in lakes,then fishing, and later sailing in the tropics.  

Now I’m here in the middle of this glorious season of warmth and cheer. I’m sitting during the day in a rather dark room in front of video screens and talking on cell phones questioning if this is wise.  I work.  I get paid. The evil government takes the money and abuses my trust and faith.  Criminals have coopted Canada. Billions of dollars have gone missing. Terrorists and money laundering are all the rage.  

Meanwhile I’m working.  Quieting the fear.  Each day at least once ,sometimes more, I feel what I’m doing is really important. Mostly I’m keeping the system rolling, greasing the wheels, oiling the cogs. So many bits of paper needed in the paper mill. I have to sign my name to it.  It seems frivolous at times but then there’s that one when it’s critical.

 I go through the motions.  Then a secret is disclosed. The knots unravel, the abscess is broken. The healing comes in.  It’s occasionally a deluge of pus, like yesterday.  I said the right thing. The knife made the cross incision in abscess so long hidden protected. The truth was out. The healing began.  So many years of pain and shame.  I was glad to be there and thought I’d not have said what I said thirty years ago. Yet somehow what I said was necessary. Truth and timing. Itworked perfectly. Mostly it’s baby steps.  Cleaning away debris.  Weeding.  I putter and muddle along , mostly taking for granted what is now second nature.

I remembered when all I wanted was to be a good doctor. I remembered when medicine was my first love. I remembered my youth. I’m often reflecting on that time now when I know and there’s not the daily eureka and the mystery and the uncertainty.  Now I’d like a SPECT scan and Functional MRI.  I’m tired of third world medicine in a first world country seeing all the parasites and lies.  But it has its feeling good days.  I”m an odd bit.  Near the end rather than the beginning of a career. Wondering if this is what I should still be doing.  I dream of driving a camper across the country for three months.  Like the sailing escape. Or the travelling.  What is it I would learn then.  Do I need to go back to university and study something new. I’ve achieved most of my major goals. 

I’m accomplished. Doing what I do now is second nature.  I’m more than good enough. I’m a thousands times better than the bureaucrats by any measure. They don’t even know it.  Their arrogance and ignorance are still mind boggling.  Herding cats. Now I’m just doing as they say.  I’m not going to fight the stupidity any more.  I’m worn out from that.  It’s what sucks my own energy, living in fear of government thugs with suits and fake smiles.  And lies. Low brow barbarians.  I’m tired of the lies and more lies. The threat of communist invasion wears on me. More stupid Herods, Marx and Nero’s.

I have amazing dreams these days.  I dreamed of being at Oxford with a friend from Cambridge and we’d developed a new glue that held universities together. It was just a bit of the roofing we were saving, a place where we’d brought the roof together and the experiment had worked. It remained now to heal all the holes where the rain had gone through.  We were smiling, shaking hands, thankful for our success.  

Gilbert woke me through the night, his heart worsening. He’s resting now. In the heat he had such a hard time yesterday getting his breath. I rubbed his chest asking God as I do to heal him, thy will be done. I don’t know if he would best die faster or revive. There was a time when laying on hands I’d heal. But today I don’t know. Would it be better. What am I to learn from his illness. I held him this morning till he calmed and his breathing restored.  He’s sleeping now. 

I know I’ve been blessed with healing. A Gift. My mother was that way with plants. I’ve almost willed people back to life in youth when I had faith to move mountains. Now I’m struggling with the gargantuan stupidity of politicians and money men and greed.  The bullies are so stifling.  Now it’s the communists.  Always the shallow and superficial , hardened criminals , the image ever of the Buddhists in prayer and the Communist Chinese killing them en mass with their machine guns. 

 The Quakers and Mennonites with their pacifiscism escaped to Canada. Kindly musical intelligent people. I loved their outlook on life. Acceptance.  Now I don’t know. I don’t know where to escape. I do the next right thing. I don’t drink. I don’t drug. I don’t take many unnecessary risks. Riding a motorcycle is insane but eating can cause death. My friend looks at the shelf dates. 

I see everything as rituals and what we do to meet the fear.  Existential fear.  Fear of not breathing. Fear of death.  Denial and humor.  I call on God always, everywhere. I pray. I ask for protection. I asked that God help Gilbert. I know he healed the fear but I don’t know that Gilbert will live much longer.  Thy will, not my will, be done.

Covid continues.  More and more people are taking it in stride. At the Post Office I remember the early days, the fear, the empty mall.  Now there are masked folk going about their day. On Facebook there’s anger and fear.  I see the Communist Chinese hand in the BLM.  It was the same in the 60’s and 70’s. Putin talked of his work in the peace movement , encouraging it for the sake of USSR war machine. George Soros is a traitor, destroyer.  Trudeau’s friend. You know a man by his associates. He was on Epstein’s island with Clinton.

It’s all about my pay grade. Freedom.  I am blessed with relative freedom.  I’ve had a wonderful life but asked about relationships on the weekend thought first about God. We play hide and seek always. At least I do.  I see God in the eyes of family and friends.  Now God is in my dog . I’m asking about Jesus and Lazarus. But  he’s an old dog. I’m an old dog.

 Life is very good but death holds no fear. I believe so much in the other side that I believe I’m there in my dreams. I see this other world so clearly, my boat, my mother, the sea and peninsula, the friends. It’s Greek like, Mediterranean.  I loved Robin Williams in what dreams may come.. My idea of heaven.  

There is no hell except for those who don’t want heaven.  The law of attraction.  The godless who know only lust and believe it love. 

Now I’m waiting. I really do feel I’m sort of on the bench. There’s probably another 30 good years to go for me. Maybe one or two for Gilbert.  We’re in this together.  Covid. It’s got a year maybe. But the war with China, that’s something different. I don’t want communism.  The bureaucrats I’ve know with their petty vendettas and stupidity have been a view of such a world where the loyal swagger and greed is all that matters. I remember the utter wastes of time and resources and humans I experienced working in government services.   The lowest common denominator.  

Now I don’t know.  I really don’t know. I just live day to day in this sitting in the box watching the game waiting to be called in for a part. I have these moments when I’m on the ice then I’m not.  I’m certainly no star. Just a player in a game. The Kazoo in the symphony of life. But it’s good.

I’d like to be on a beach today. I’d like to be swimming. But as I’ve done for 50 years I’ll go to work and do my part and feel self pity about all the slackards starting with our PM.

Oh well, one day I’ll ask St. Peter what that was all about. Then I’ll know the answer. I’d like that.  Heaven is a place where I learn the answers to all the questions I’ve had that I never knew the answer to.  In the meantime I’ll hoe a new roe, chop wood and carry water and be of service.  I hope. I pray.

Saturday Morning in February

I am grateful. I’ve walked Gilbert along the Brunette River.  It’s not raining.  There’s even blue sky and some sunshine breaking through the clouds. I’ve stretched on the fences along the path.  The water is down from the days of the torrential rains. I’d never seen the river so high as last week. Laura says all the crocuses and snow drops and tulips are appearing in the West End. I’m in Burnaby and they were just appearing before another dump of snow.  Now the snow is gone. I’m thinking of riding my motorcycle. As kids we’d just go for rides on our bicycles.  It was fun to explore the parks.  The motorcycle rides in the city aren’t as pleasant.  I’d have to go out to the country to get that feeling of relaxation. Winding roads and little traffic.

President Trump was acquitted this week. It’s been years of the Democrats not getting beyond the election, constantly playing legal and bureaucratic games to restore themselves to power.  I see it as free world and capitalism versus communism.  There are no communists or people wanting sharia law in America in the Republican Party. Bernie, though is a card carrying communist and at least 4 democrats are in favour of the Muslim Brotherhood, the international terrorist group. Trudeau and his family are communists.  Fidel Castro and China. I struggle with the notion of ‘One World Order’.  The central government in theory sounds good but historically they’ve been like the Tower of Babel.  Corruption and control.  

Brexit has finally happened. Another good thing. The EU was increasingly satanic. 

The UN politically is lost with their muslim anti Israel block voting.  Such despicable lies. Now the whole history of WWII is being rewritten by the Sharia Communists.  

I feel old.  I only worried about war as a youth. Give Peace a Chance.  Love.  I stood in the middle.  War for defence but not for offence.  I had no difficulty with the British Empire. In an age of empires it was certainly superior to the Dutch, French and Turkish.

As Aryan Celts we could argue the same way the blacks do and demand compensation for the Arab, Black and Chinese and Slavic invasions.  Our people reigned from Indian, through Persia to Russia and Ireland. The Kurds are Indo European people. We were the blue eye blond aryans and the black haired light dark skinned aryans.  Invasions and conquering went on throughout history until this bizarre retrospective legal ‘compensation’ business and the idea of selected ‘terms of reference’.  We can talk about the Civil War but we can’t talk about Culloden or more importantly Vienna.  The Irish Potato famine. The Soviet massacre of the Ukraine. The Turkish genocide of the Armenians. The Pol Pot genocide of Cambodia. The Chinese invasion and barbaric destruction of the Buddhists of Tibet.

I’m weary of the selected narratives of the media.  That’s One World Order.  The media with it’s very limited ‘choice’ of stories’.  The funny Reuter displays of a hundred media personnel parrotting the same story in the same way.  Propaganda.  

Meanwhile I’ve continued to seek God.  Each day I begin with prayer and meditation asking to know God’s will and to have the power to carry it out. I allign my breathing and being with the OM, One Mind.  I am the bubble make me the sea.  I’m seeking the inner reality of Jung’s Collective Unconscious. I’m repeating the name of Jesus, what a beautiful name it is.  It means God within and Christ means God will come again. Ive taken to repeating the part in the St. Patrick Breastplate prayer , Christ in front of me, Christ behind me, Christ to the right of me, Christ to the left of me, Christ above me, Christ below me, Christ within me, Christ in the words and thoughts of everyone I meet today and Christ in my words and thoughts. I’ve asked daily to be a better God to be a Channel for Christ as in the St. Francis prayer, make me a channel for your peace.  I’ve tried to impart whatever knowledge and care I can to comfort and help those people who come to me. I feel oddly like I’m on the bench waiting for God to play me. I’m past the age of retirement but have no desire to do anything else immediately. I love the people I work with. They really are stirling  characters and overall I feel like I am contributing. It’s important work not like I’ve done in the past. At times in my career I’ve felt very strongly drawn and driven but now I’m kind of coasting.  The College of Physicians and Surgeons Assistant Registrar said ,”It’s just a job”.  I was told not to be a doctor but to act like a doctor. I’m encouraged to be a ‘drug pusher for the multinationals’.  I used to believe my role as physician and psychiatrist was to help people be the best they could be but mostly people just want me to sign their papers so they can get money or get out of work. Fewer and fewer want me to treat even their symptons .There’s so much secondary gain and the whole industry has shifted sideways. Doctors are no longer professionals in the Osler sense but defined as ‘health care workers.”  One of the beurocrats hired by the Minister of Health told me medicine was a ‘consumer product and that I was just there to assist in their consumption. Another told me it’s all ‘just entertainment’ and that I should be entertaining.  I struggle with paying taxes because billions of Canada’s money is now going to promote abortion and euthanasia.  I preferred when we just killed as Canadians in the old politically incorrect ways of war.  This politically correct killing of the helpless and defenceless is disheartening.

I have days when I’m so overwhelmed with doubt i just want to die.

The masculine in me fought the killing.  I look back on a life of fighting the corruption and unethical and immoral abuses mostly of government.  Bad men and bad women in government. The hijacking of the good apparatusof law and order by communists and killers. Now we have Sharia and 15th century Muslim military religion coupling with western legal institutions. I see invasion and parasitolgy. There seems no symmetry.  Such aggressive threatening jihadism and arrogance. ISIS is pure.  But that’s all just the propaganda.
 On an individual basis I’m delighted with my Persian Zorastrians friends and Muslims who are akin to the Chstmas and Easter Christians. I’ve all these moderate friends and colleagues and we huddle in the midst of raving lunatics all promoted and protected by government apparently intent on reviving either the Brown Shirts or the Bolsheviks or the Jihadists.

I think of sex changes as a way to get out of the front lines. I’d like to sit by a campfire and worry about marshmallows. I’d rather be raped again than be shot at again or to face the Burocratic Borg of the Corrupt Establishment with their unholy alliances and authoritarian stupidity. I think without testosterone I’d not frighten these castrated government leaders in medicine.
 I think in a skirt I’d not be attacked.  Sadly transgenders are most attacked. The world is simply not a safe place. Better to trust in Jesus.
I like skirts. I’ve just ordered another kilt. It’s healthy not to have your balls bound in tight pants.  I liked the David Bowie big baggy pants I used to wear.  I should get back to dance. When I was in the world of dance I was far from the life and death of fentanyl and AIDS. Now there’s a new virus.  I am of an age where in so many societies and throughout the ages I was considered a survivor and wise but here today I’m mocked with ‘shut up, boomer’.  Women constantly  tell me that since I haven’t a womb I should shut up. All the diversity cult tell me to die. I ate Chinese take out last night and thought of my brother. We sat and ate and talked in Yan’s.

I dream of getting on my boat and heading out to sea. The world was no better with me gone for 25 days alone at sea.  I’d gladly be back on my boat in the ocean breezes following the tropical winds.  But it’s all hard work. What I really like doing is lying on the couch with my nearby refridgerator and the Ethiopian coffee and the netflix tv and this ipad and keyboard. T camper is calling to me.  Thank you God and Brother Lawrence for this time and place, Thank you for every time you help me get my head in the same room as my ass. Be here now. Hallelujah.

I ask God what I am to do. Ill muddle along. There’s no burning bush.  Gilbert’s licking his privates. Laura is coming later. I got us Carmen Tickets. Tomorrow we’ll go to church. I don’t know they’ll have an answer. I love that the kids are having children and raising little humans.  I love the living.

Gratitude Monday

Thank you Lord for this day.  Thank you for the weekend and the rest. Thank you for Gilbert my dog and George the cat, two caring companions whose antics amuse me constantly. George just ran ‘thundering cat’ through the home past blind Gilbert who twirled about followed him for a bit wondering no doubt what all the fuss was about.
Thank you for the planet , the air and the sun, the trees and the green and all the animals and creatures who are cohabitants on this galactic Noah’s ark spinning about the sun as the sun revolves its way about the arm of this wondrous armpit of a universe.  May we meet friendly aliens soon.  Help us to build a space ship to take us to Mars and beyond.  Guide us out of the waste of political correctness and lawyers and beurocrats and politicians quibbling to the science of intergalactic travel and inter dimensional movement. Let us be explorers again not hoarders.  Help us to focus on what is most important and not live lives of ‘quiet desperation’ in fear constantly looking over our shoulders for religious police, political police, professional police and all manner of men with guns representing those who steal a lot or those who steal a little.
Help me in my meditation to gain enlightenment.  Help me to push beyond where the Tibetan monks where when the Chinese communist thugs genocided them and forced the Dalai Lama to be homeless and wandering.  A good man. A wise man.  Help the South Africans who in the only way they knew tried to bring enlightenment to a country crippled by tribal cannibalism and greed. Help Zimbabwe overcome it’s military dictatorship of men and women who like Stalin liked shiny things and like Mohammed like sex slaves and children brides.  Help all these perverts and adolescents lift up their heads and look to the heavens.  See God in all his Glory there in the unseen with in and in the future of the human race as travellers not stagnant pond scum squabbling over who has the shiniest thing.
Forgive Hollywood for the crime of waste. Forgive all those who live by covert aggression. Forgive the courts for their refusal to lift up their heads remaining focused on increasing delays upon delays.  Help us all move apace with the world and not waste more and more time delaying and delaying for beurocratic sake.  Please God hold committees personally accountable so that they’d will no longer be able to dilly dally while the rest of us pay their abhorrent wages.
Help our government have new meaning.  Let not Canada be the place remembered for universal abortion, universal euthanasia, universal heroin , universal political correctness, universal marijuana, death of freedom speech, sharia law for all, the niqqab for women and jihad for men. Help us be more than just a brand of maple syrup, sickly sweet for fear of offending anyone.  Help us regain the lost blue of our past flag before the communism was thrust upon us with the corruption of Quebec, it’s mafia and biker gains and its red and white and a maple leaf that doesn’t stand for all of Canada only Quebec and Ontario.  If the flag is not to change then let western Canada join the US for it’s high time we stopped paying for all the waste of central government with it’s chronic abuses.
Lord protect me. Christ before me, Christ within, Christ beside me, Christ above me. Christ below me. Lord of light. Lord of Lords. Lord of all creation, thou who is more than all I can imagine, thou who is loving and kind and true, show me the way which will help me out of this mess that is fake news and trillions of banker scat and waste and endless war. Help me to see the good wherever I go. Help me focus on the right and good and not so be overwhelmed by the darkness. Help me lift up my eyes. Help me find within me the way to levitate. Help me to materialize love and know that all is light and that all is energy and that we are not just the grave but birth and love as well
As Christmas comes restore my hope.  As Christmas nears help me to feel the air and move between the molecules in the infinite spaces that exist between the atoms within. Help me to know the galaxy of particles and space that the nothingness, the nada of St. John is so much greater than the stuff of creation. Let me expand my consciousness and know thee as thou doth know me. Help me overcome the fear and know that as you care for a tiny bird so you care for me. Son of man . Son of God be my personal saviour. Save me today from the liars and the false accusers, from those who would use these poor souls to wield axes and swords and guns above the heads of us who merely chop wood and carry water. Help me as a doctor face these devils and tyrants and those who would not be well but seek wealth and hate instead but come as wolves in lambs clothing.
Help me Lord face the unknown patient who my lawyers tell me is a dangerous enemy and I would embrace for it is in the touch that healing comes.  Don’t keep playing your legal game for huge profit of claiming that catching the one justifies destroying the city.  Wake up to the idea that you are the problem with your medieval ideas of justice and retribution as you are made to play favourites for the elite and that whatever else you do is secondary to your primary goal to protect their priviledge.
I would not care if you would leave me alone to do my work but you insist that I am a projection of yourself and I am not and you do not know me and cannot know me because you are not in the street today where the dying is happening because of the war that is waging in this land. There is war here and the war is expanding because of your fear and your hatred.  You are choosing the evil and I am choosing the good. I am doing good and what you are doing is not helping the good. You have chosen evil. You had the choice and you chose evil.  I have the choice and I choose good.
Be the gone Satan.  Satan is the ancient name for all that is wrong. Not some personified devil but a metaphor for this who cannot see beyond their fear and the shiny things. The reflections of the light for the light itself is blinding.
I’m begging you Lord be with me today. Guide me.  Help me.  Help me overcome the call of the aetheists to sloth and gluttony and hedonism and deceit and murder. Help me avoid the lies of these who would deny their fellows killed millions in the name of the godless.
Help me today follow you and help me healing and heal.  Please Lord help me always to see the glass half full. Help me to be quiet and caring and hold true to the course with you God of Light and truth as my Lodestar.  Be thou the Lord Star of my Life.
Yea thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death you are with me.
I am afraid seeing the stranger of their unknown physical diseases, the viruses and bacteria they bring in sickness to me, as I’m afraid of the memes they introduce to my mind , the sickness and paranoid and now I am told that my very government who I thought worked with me to help us all is instead poised ever with a knife in my back to stab me with joy and pleasure claiming that they are doing their jobs and insisting they know best but I am to go into this awful meeting with all the fear and trepidation that doctors carry into that initial contact with disease and unknown and know that you are so quick to kill all honor, all truth, all life for the STATE is a greater killer than all men alone and kill as surely as epidemics and I face the insane and the diseased and the addicted and have known their violence and untruth and I must go there day after day now knowing that no one has my back but you My Lord and Savior. I beg you be with me today. Help me be strong and face this day.  We have done so long and so well to make it look easy and yet it’s never been. The sacred successes have caused those who sit on the sidelines to swagger and glory in their own cowardice shame and inactivity living their lives as critics far from the front backed by their guns and authorities while we go out alone and face our fears and hope that this person is there to get well and not looking to use a doctor for their financial meal or to to eat us as cannibals among us.  Please Lord help me face the terrible dangers of these unknowns and walk on.
I am thankful that the utter incompetence and terrors of our media and government turn me to you Lord Jesus. I am desperate for God because there is so much failure in the institutions that were supposed to serve us. There are no resources. I am ever begging and crying out for help for others and know that I am increasingly alone and that we seem to be losing to those who make profit on death, the abortionists, the euthanasia mongers, the drug pushers, the boards of tobacco companies the corrupt bankers and the the evil elite that seem to be winning in the dichotomy of those who must surely be doing all they can at the top to help us all for surely there is good and evil even in the elite.
Help me always to see the world in colour and not only in the black and white of paranoia and identity politics and the chronic insanity of the sordid partisan press of today. Help me discern truth.
Guide me Lord. Thank you that I am able to see the light that is you. Thank you for all that you do for me. Holy Spirit come.  Holy Spirit be with me today.  Help those I would help and protect us on this battlefield where we are the first cross from those who bomb hospitals and would kill doctors and the wounded as well. And help us all from those who would steal from the wounded as they are legion today.  Help me today in my work. Guide me.
Help my dog be well too, Lord for he is little and I know you care most for the small. I am so very small Lord. I am humble and meek and know I am nothing without you. But with you what can I fear. Help me connect with you within in and without.  Please Lord let me see you everywhere and everywhen today and always.
Thank you Lord Jesus.  God of gods, holy God of Holy God.  Being without end.

Cancer and Life at Hay Bay

Death is always with us.  We maintain an illusion of life in which we know that death and life abound but somehow we are permanent.  Yet this life is by its very nature impermanent.
Each night I sleep.  I enter this death like equation where to my subjective self I leave the objective world of community and enter a dream like state, another world, as memorable as memories themselves.
Cancer is a disease of threatened death.  Immunologically we think of it as the body turned against itself, some auto immune phenomena, that is either a lack of recognition of the good self and hence destruction; or a lack of policing of the bad self and hence destruction.
This phenomena of cancer has been associated with environmental disease as in those poor ladies who painted watch faces with radioactive paint till they succumbed of cancers or the mining men who breathed in asbestos.  That's the environmental stressor model.
Then there's the genetic angle.  Genes mutate and cancer is a mutation associated with age or the bombardment of the genetic code by various waves of unseen energy and particle some travelling through the ozone layers while others come from more proximal microwave emissions.  The Russians so certain of the science of the latter  spent millions bombarding the American embassy with hoped for disease causing EMF.
There are viruses too that trigger cancer, infections such as Herpes Simplex II which was so thoroughly associated with cervical cancer that it gave rise to the Pap Test as the principle preventative protective strategy.
Ever since I became a doctor cancer has been being cured with greater success though the greater length of life has resulted in this miracle being obscured by the apparently increased death in the elderly from cancer.  The wear and tear of the Australian beach crowd has with time created a whole group of melanomatous skin cancers with each year of excessive sun exposure and recurrent damage to the skin till cancer arises from the suns bombardment and aging.
Meanwhile, everywhere cancer is still being cured.
Psychiatrists have long held that physical illness of chronic disease and even some acute illness is ‘anger turned inward’.  One is by definition either outwardly homicidal in attitude or inwardly suicidal in attitude.  As with all the physical attributes psychologically there is a balance, a right place between the polar extremes.  At that point the homicidal and suicidal tendencies of Freud’s forces of life and death drives, eros and thanatos,  balance.
Chronic disease follows the upset of the golden rule, that fundamental equation, ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’.  One must show a healthy balance of self care.  Too much narcissism and self centeredness results in hypochondriasis or real disease and the attraction of illness if only by shadowing doctors who work always around disease.
The other psychiatric and philosophic aspect of the cancer which is considered from a communications perspective is that ‘ cancer is that which you can say in no other way’.  Communication theory sees us as essentially ‘communicating units’ and all we say and do are expressions of seeking and giving help.  A child cries and a mother comforts him or her.  Disease is a way of seeking help or solving a puzzle.  Gods come to us in disease is a saying that relates to the idea that when we are well and outwardly rewarded we do not tend to turn inward to consider the meaning of existence or to communicate our questions about existence or even our individual lives. Disease is doubt.   Faced with cancer there is an inward turning.
When I am wounded in battle my sword arm, until that moment so strong, is suddenly cut and no longer answers to the command of my ego.  What is the relationship between fate and free will, I ask myself. How is it that my enemy has found this weakness I did not know myself or what was I thinking to let down my shield.  Why does the zen master say one's enemy is a friend who teaches us our mistake. Why does the psychiatrist call disease the great teacher?
In the Bible the wound of note is the struggle between the angel and man which eventually lead to the naming of Israel.  These ideas are not new.  All philosophy and religion have been given to answering some questions about disease and death with cancer, the big "C" being the metaphor for "satan incarnate' or 'living death', the primo disease.  One surgeons seeing it called it 'disease run amok".
There are similar stories of wounds and myths around the world.    The crack in creation is where the light comes in.
In sickness we are forced to consider the aloneness of sickness and life. I am born between piss and shit and I die, ashes to ashes.  Cancer is but  a slow death or a speeded up life.  My minister friend with cancer told me he'd only begun to really live when he was first diagnosed with cancer. He described an intensity of life he'd not known since childhood and how he'd been mostly a spectator for many years and now was pulled fully and completely into the game of life.
There’s no sudden and acute motor vehicle accident death or death by beheading in war.  Cancer a slow struggle, a marathon. The fight against the slow death is likened to Sisyphus.  Kierkegaard said , Life is suffering unto death".  It's a simmer rather than a boil.   It’s a ‘siege’ by comparison to a charge.
The recovery changes a person.  It’s a near death experience on a daily basis with a whole reconsideration of the means of dealing with the external exigencies of reality. If a person ‘solved’ life’s problems one way cancer may well demand a whole new set of tools to overcome it.
Cancer is that which I can say in no other way is a consideration that if I can find another way of communicating then I might no longer need the cancer.  The pessimist becomes the optimist and the cancer disappears.  The independent soloist turns to the community for aid and surrenders to the care of others who experiment with their various ideas of cure and success.  Witches brews and chemotherapy all contribute to the natural self healing of the individual who once was a neut like creature capable of regrowing tails and limbs, a genetic code which exists within, which hasn’t been lost, which we are again awakening with the help of the lab in stem cell research.  Stem cells differentiate into whole new body parts.  We have the stem cells still.  We all are self healing.  Medicine and surgery simply assist.
It’s not like we plant the seeds but more that we weed the garden. All the seeds are there to grow resplendent but we must prune and care for the flowers we wish.  Cancer is it’s own robust weed.  There’s something incredible at the cellular level when we contemplate cancer. It’s dandelions on a golfers green.
We are always messing with creation. We are dictating to the universe that we want this order, this life we have created, not this other mutation. We are ‘stewarding’. We are leading. All self doubt is left behind because to cure cancer we must give it our undivided attention and solve the rubrics cube in a race against time.  Meanwhile all that is past is demanding equal attention as it did when one was well. The war goes on but my sword arm no longer lifts the sword. If I don't pay attention I can find myself kicking my feet like a kangaroo while dragging my sword arm behind me.  For 80,000 years I learned to slink off to the cave where I nursed my own wounds or formed a pact with a medicine man or woman and hopefully a child or wife or husband fed me in my monastic vigil and struggle with God. We are herd animals, not lizards. There's comfort in companionship.  I never admit it but I still like when a friend brings me soup when I am sick.
I want to live, I say and God, or the Great Unknown asks me ,how much or am I sure. It’s a Job like place this narrative of Cancer. .  The siege is on and the enemy is at the door.
I am here with my brother who was diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer.  He only learned when he was first diagnosed with pulmonary embolism. . Breath is the sacred nectar of life the rhythmic wonder of existence.  He was literally breathless when he began this journey.  The healing care and brilliance in Napanee and in Kingston has been stupendous to behold.  As a doctor I've been so thankful to know my brother has had the care of the oncology team there.  Pulmonary embolisms, blood  clotting oddly in lungs is so often a harbinger of cancer so the Sherlock Holmes began and found this pancreatic mass where it did not belong. The anomaly was called 'cancer'.
To date my brother hasn’t had any symptoms attributable to the cancer itself except fatigue. His loss of appetite, nausea and malaise have come with nerve sensation loss from the treatments.  It’s the same as if a terroist cell has taken up a presence in the centre of the city infiltrated key areas and is planning on setting off bombs and destroying all from within. No one knows they are there, except the police and soldiers who enters with the intent of getting them out. The only thing the city notices are the apparent wars started by the police and soldiers. It's so easy then to blame the cure for the disease.  We hear it all the time in politics.  There is a politics of disease.  The internet is rife with insanity and special interest groups, pseudoscience and marketing.  My brother, always wise, trusts in what is really known.  He trained as a scientist at the University of Manitoba.  He understands the depths of what the loving doctors are telling him. He has worked well with the Kingston oncology team and the Napanee outreach.
Now a year later and my brother’s cancer has not gained to any degree.  The battle has waged.  The weeding and pruning have taken place. The seeds of new plants have grown while some of the old have been demolished. There is new life but there is also death.  Having survived that first day of breathless near death he’s gone on to succeed a year against a Borg like phenomena whose kill ratio is 9 out of 10.  Only the A plus student solves the puzzle and lives to five years. (But then maybe the good die young.) He's one fifth of the way along that life journey. It’s been a sharp learning curve.  My brother is a genius though. He was the smart one in the family. I was the slow learner by comparison.  I don't doubt his capacity to live. Cancer is a minor matter compared to the challenges he's faced so far and overcome.  His family are a testimony to his love and skill and merit.
The central question of life is ‘fate’ and ‘free will’.  Buber described the idea of “I and it’ and then the move to “I and thou’.  The "other" is the whole world.  Here the "other' is cancer. "I and Cancer".  There is to immunology the central theme of ‘self’ and ‘not self’.  I have a white blood cell response to a foreign bacteria that invades my body.  My basic immunological system has ‘boundaries’ and the foreigner is removed.
We all have cancer. Our bodies are restoring the homeostasis daily by the minute and hour.  The self healing structures are removing mutations and clearing the diseased cells away.  Our treatments expedite this.  We assist the self healing process.  We fight the invader and we strengthen the host.  The terminology of medicine is full of ambiguity.  We call a person the ‘host’ as if they have invited cancer for dinner and are now having their own personal party but can't alone throw the cancer 'bore' out of the party.
 I have gratitude for today. I am here at Hay Bay and have known another day with my brother. He’s an amazing man, his marriage and home and children a reflection of he and his wife’s dreams.  I love seeing his love in action, all the years I’ve watched him devote himself to his family in a world where individualism and selfishness are the halcyon call of our Kardashian and Myla Cyrus day.  I don’t even think he’s ever snapped a ‘selfie’ of himself.  He’s a quiet man in that way.  At the same time he can talk a person deaf with tale upon tale, a trait we both share with our beloved Irish mother.  On the surface he might at times chatter but with him still waters run deep, not stagnant.
He’s angry as all cancer patients are.  There’s a grieving process that Elizabeth Kubla Ross described regarding dying.  As cancer is the offer of a slow death or a chance of recovery , the horns of the dilemma are met with all the range of appropriate emotions. We daily grieve to some degree the lost dreams of yesterday. I never was the astronaut I wanted to be as a kid and became instead the prosaic doctor. My brother would have loved to fly but walked instead and now must even crawl awhile to get a head.  We're not stationary in our family.
I am grateful to be here.  So much of family and medicine is being present.  The world as a whole run away from disease thinking fearfully living a life of trying to avoid all distress.  Cancer is like lepracy.  Disease is stigma.  The struggle is personal. It’s not a public matter. It’s a private matter. The parasitic people would still like to take advantage of another's misfortunes.   Family and friends gather.  We are there as much for protection as our own learning.  Socrates is speaking.  He never did need to take the hemlock. He did not wish to be exiled so did, but he could have left.  I can live or I can die. My brother has chosen life and I'm glad to be a cheer leader if only that.He has my rapt attention. I am honoured to be welcomed by this great artist and he creates his masterful Houdini trick of escaping cancer and death for this time, for another day at least. We both accept that 10 or 20 years from now we may wish to succumb but not now, not when we are both so young. My father lived till 94. My mother said she was tired and wanted to go at 89.  A son should outlive his parents.  My brother has the will and gifts.  He loves life.
Having worked in medicine some thirty years with tens of thousands of patients and so many facing cancer, disease and old age, along with the gun shot wounds, I’ve been never certain what the outcome will be.  The house always wins in the long run , but countless winners gladly take their millions even from the lotteries.  It’s never over till the fat lady sings. It’s also not over unless the bullet has your name on it.  A WWI soldier who survived Vimy Ridge taught me that. He was my patient in his 80's.
The success of this generation is in the longevity. We are all living a decade longer and all the killers of a while ago are cured.  Even these new diseases of deadly destruction are being beaten with alacrity. I know so many cancer survivors.  
Even the old go on and on so that there are nursing homes galore and the courts are all about physician assisted suicide not because people are dying but because they refuse to.  Life is so good that the historic killers of war, disease and starvation aren’t doing their former job to the satisfaction of politicians. Our society, thanks to science, technology and wisdom is living longer and better than ever before.  And not just millions, but billions more than ever before.
The media is sick.  That is a central source of societal disease.  Fear mongering negativity and deceit.
The successes are amazing. But yes, when we are a hundred, we may wish to remain asleep. Neither my brother or I am there yet.  Now we celebrate life .  But at a hundred I wouldn't care so much if he left me.  I would have liked for my mother to have stayed another year or two but even Dad was ready to leave at 94.

(I found this draft written 6/23/16, a year before my brother's death.  When he died he was ready though said always he'd have liked more time with his family. )

Napanee Vacation: Death, Cancer, Life

Death is always with us.  We maintain an illusion of life in which we know that death and life abound but somehow we are permanent.  Yet this life is by its very nature impermanent.  And each night I sleep.  I enter this death like equation where to my subjective self I leave the objective world of community and enter a dream like state, another world, as memorable as memories themselves.
Cancer is a disease of threatened death.  Immunologically we think of it as the body turned against itself, some auto immune phenomena, that is either a lack of recognition of the good self and hence destruction or a lack of policing of the bad self and hence destruction.
This phenomena of cancer has been associated with environmental disease as in those poor ladies who painted watch faces with radioactive paint till they succumbed of cancers or the mining men who breathed in asbestos.  That's the environmental stressor model.
Then there's the genetic angle.  Genes mutate and cancer is a mutation associated with age or the bombardment of the genetic code by various waves of unseen energy and particle some travelling through the ozone layers while others come from more proximal microwave emissions.  The Russians so certain of the science of the latter  spent millions bombarding the American embassy with hoped for disease causing EMF.  There are viruses too that trigger cancer, infections such as Herpes Simplex II which was so thoroughly associated with cervical cancer that it gave rise to the Pap Test as the principle preventative protective strategy.
Ever since I became a doctor cancer has been being cured with greater success though the greater length of life has resulted in this miracle being obscured by the apparently increased death in the elderly from cancer.  The wear and tear of the Australian beach crowd has with time created a whole group of melanomatous skin cancers with each year of excessive sun exposure and recurrent damage to the skin till cancer arises from the suns bombardment and aging.  Everywhere cancer is being cured.
Psychiatrists have long held that physical illness of chronic disease and even some acute illness is ‘anger turned inward’.  One is by definition either outwardly homicidal in attitude or inwardly suicidal in attitude.  As with all the physical attributes psychologically there is a balance, a right place between the polar extremes.  At that point the homicidal and suicidal tendencies of Freud’s forces of life and death are balanced.  Chronic disease follows the upset of the golden rule, that fundamental equation, ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’.  One must show a healthy balance of self care.  Too much narcissism and self centeredness results in hypochondriasis or real disease and the attraction of illness if only by shadowing doctors who work always around disease.
By contrast one can spend time mostly in the love of others, altruism and selflessness.  My brother is a husband and a parent and worked for the government which treated its civil servants psychologically as they did their military servants, expendable and hierarchically, socially stressful places despite their apparent union benefits.  There is stress from the juggling of the roles too and fulfilling the duties of society.
My brother has stayed. He’s a brick. I’m  He is the Rock of Gibraltar . He's the army to my navy.  He's the artillery and I’m calvary. He’s taken a tremendous amount of bombardment by staying whereas I’ve charged and retreated from the bullies that abound in our present day 'uncultured' society
The other psychiatric and philosophic aspect of the cancer which isconsidered from a communications perspective is that ‘ cancer is that which you can say in no other way’.  Communication theory sees us as essentially ‘communicating units’ and all we say and do are expressions of seeking and giving help.  A child cries and a mother comforts him or her.  Disease is a way of seeking help or solving a puzzle.  Gods come to us in disease is a saying that relates to the idea that when we are well and outwardly rewarded we do not tend to turn inward to consider the meaning of existence or to communicate our questions about existence or even our individual lives. Disease is doubt.  Happily ruling Wall Street with hookers and cocaine and simulated battles or impressing the ladies with ones muscles and tattoos in government circuits one can remain shallow and fatuous.  However faced with cancer there is an inward turning.
When I am wounded in battle my sword arm, until that moment so strong, is suddenly cut and no longer answers to the command of my ego.  What is the relationship between fate and free will, I ask myself. How is it that my enemy has found this weakness I did not know myself or what was I thinking to let down my shield.  Why does the zen master say one's enemy is a friend who teaches us our mistake. Why does the psychiatrist call disease the great teacher?
In the Bible the wound of note is the struggle between the angel and man which eventually lead to the naming of Israel.  These ideas are not new.  All philosophy and religion have been given to answering some questions about disease and death with cancer, the big "C" being the metaphor for "satan incarnate' or 'living death', the primo disease.  There are similar stories of wounds and myths around the world.    The crack in creation is where the light comes in. In sickness we are forced to consider the aloneness of sickness and life. I am born between piss and shit and I die, ashes to ashes.  Cancer is but  a slow death or a speeded up life.  My minister friend with cancer told me he'd only begun to really live when he was first diagnosed with cancer. He described an intensity of life he'd not known since childhood and how he'd been mostly a spectator for many years and now was pulled fully and completely into the game of life.
There’s no sudden and acute motor vehicle accident death or death by beheading in war.  Cancer a slow struggle, a marathon. The fight against the slow death is Sisyphus.  Kierkegaard said , Life is suffering unto death".  It's a simmer rather than a boil.   It’s a ‘siege’ by comparison to a charge.
The recovery changes a person.  It’s a near death experience on a daily basis with a whole reconsideration of the means of dealing with the external exigencies of reality. If a person ‘solved’ life’s problems one way cancer may well demand a whole new set of tools to overcome it.
Cancer is that which I can say in no other way is a consideration that if I can find another way of communicating then I might no longer need the cancer.  The pessimist becomes the optimist and the cancer disappears.  The independent soloist turns to the community for aid and surrender to the care of others who experiment with their various ideas of cure and success.  Witches brews and chemotherapy all contribute to the natural self healing of the individual who once was a neut like creature capable of regrowing tails and limbs, a genetic code which exists within, which hasn’t been lost, which we are again doing with the help of the lab.  Stem cells differentiate into whole new body parts.  We have the stem cells still.  We all are self healing.  Medicine and surgery simply assist.
It’s not like we plant the seeds but more that we weed the garden. All the seeds are there to grow resplendent but we must prune and care for the flowers we wish.  Cancer is it’s own robust weed.  There’s something incredible at the cellular level when we contemplate cancer. It’s dandelions on a golfers green.
We are always messing with creation. We are dictating to the universe that we want this order, this life we have created, not this other mutation. We are ‘stewarding’. We are leading. All self doubt is left behind because to cure cancer we must give it our undivided attention and solve the rubrics cube in a race against time.  Meanwhile all that is past is demanding equal attention as it did when one was well. The war goes on but my sword arm no longer lifts the sword. If I don't pay attention I can find myself kicking my feet like a kangaroo while dragging my sword arm behind me.  For 80,000 years I learned to slink off to the cave where I nursed my own wounds or formed a pact with a medicine man or woman and hopefully a child or wife or husband fed me in my monastic vigil and struggle with God. We are herd animals, not lizards. There's comfort in companionship.  I never admit it but I still like when a friend brings me soup when I am sick.
I want to live, I say and God, or the Great Unknown asks me ,how much or am I sure. It’s a Job like place this narrative of Cancer. .  The siege is on and the enemy is at the door.
I am here with my brother who was diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer.  He only learned when he was first diagnosed with pulmonary embolism. . Breath is the sacred nectar of life the rhythmic wonder of existence.  He was literally breathless when he began this journey.  The healing care and brilliance in Napanee and in Kingston has been stupendous to behold.  As a doctor I've been so thankful to know my brother has had the care of the oncology team there.  Pulmonary embolisms, blood  clotting oddly in lungs is so often a harbinger of cancer so the Sherlock Holmes began and found this pancreatic mass where it did not belong. The anomaly was called 'cancer'.
To date my brother hasn’t had any symptoms attributable to the cancer itself except fatigue. His loss of appetite, nausea and malaise have come with nerve sensation loss from the treatments.  It’s the same as if a terroist cell has taken up a presence in the centre of the city infiltrated key areas and is planning on setting off bombs and destroying all from within. No one knows they are there, except the police and soldiers who enters with the intent of getting them out. The only thing the city notices are the apparent wars started by the police and soldiers. It's so easy then to blame the cure for the disease.  We hear it all the time in politics.  There is a politics of disease.  The internet is rife with insanity and special interest groups, pseudoscience and marketing.  My brother, always wise, trusts in what is really known.  He trained as a scientist at the University of Manitoba.  He understands the depths of what the loving doctors are telling him. He has worked well with the Kingston oncology team and the Napanee outreach.
Now a year later and my brother’s cancer has not gained to any degree.  The battle has waged.  The weeding and pruning have taken place. The seeds of new plants have grown while some of the old have been demolished. There is new life but there is also death.  Having survived that first day of breathless near death he’s gone on to succeed a year against a Borg like phenomena whose kill ratio is 9 out of 10.  Only the A student solves the puzzle and lives beyond five years.  He's one fifth of the way along that life journey. It’s been a sharp learning curve.  My brother is a genius though. He was the smart one in the family. I was the slow learner by comparison.  I don't doubt his capacity to live. Cancer is a minor matter compared to the challenges he's faced so far and overcome.  His family are a testimony to his love and skill and merit.
The central question of life is ‘fate’ and ‘free will’.  Buber described the idea of “I and it’ and then the move to “I and thou’.  The "other" is the whole world.  Here the "other' is cancer. "I and Cancer".  There is to immunology the central theme of ‘self’ and ‘not self’.  I have a white blood cell response to a foreign bacteria that invades my body.  My basic immunological system has ‘boundaries’ and the foreigner is removed.
We all have cancer. Our bodies are restoring the homeostasis daily by the minute and hour.  The self healing structures are removing mutations and clearing the diseased cells away.  Our treatments expedite this.  We assist the self healing process.  We fight the invader and we strengthen the host.  The terminology of medicine is full of ambiguity.  We call a person the ‘host’ as if they have invited cancer for dinner and are now having their own personal party but can't alone throw the cancer 'bore' out of the party.
 I have gratitude for today. I am here at Hay Bay and have known another day with my brother. He’s an amazing man, his marriage and home and children a reflection of he and his wife’s dreams.  I love seeing his love in action, all the years I’ve watched him devote himself to his family in a world where individualism and selfishness are the halcyon call of our Kardashian and Myla Cyrus day.  I don’t even think he’s ever snapped a ‘selfie’ of himself.  He’s a quiet man in that way.  At the same time he can talk a persons deaf with tale upon tale, a trait we both share with our beloved Irish mother.  On the surface he might at times chatter but with him still waters run deep, not stagnant.
He’s angry as all cancer patients are.  There’s a grieving process that Elizabeth Kubla Ross described regarding dying.  As cancer is the offer of a slow death or a chance of recovery , this horns of the dilemma is met with all the range of appropriate emotions. We daily grieve to some degree the lost dreams of yesterday. I never was the astronaut I wanted to be as a kid and became instead the prosaic doctor. My brother would have loved to fly but walked instead and now must even crawl awhile to get a head.  We're not stationary in our family.
I am grateful to be here.  So much of family and medicine is being present.  The world as a whole run away from disease thinking fearfully living a life of trying to avoid all distress.  Cancer is like lepracy.  Disease is stigma.  The struggle is personal. It’s not a public matter. It’s a private matter. The parasitic people would still like to take advantage of another's misfortunes.   Family and friends gather.  We are there as much for protection as our own learning.  Socrates is speaking.  He never did need to take the hemlock. He did not wish to be exiled so did, but he could have left.  I can live or I can die. My brother has chosen life and I'm glad to be a cheer leader if only that.He has my rapt attention. I am honoured to be welcomed by this great artist and he creates his masterful Houdini trick of escaping cancer and death this time. We both accept that 20 or 30 years from now we may wish to succumb but not now, not when we are both so young. My father lived till 94. My mother said she was tired and wanted to go at 89.  A son should outlive his parents.  My brother has the will and gifts.  He loves life.
Having worked in medicine some thirty years with tens of thousands of patients and so many facing cancer, disease and old age, along with the gun shot wounds, I’ve been never certain what the outcome will be.  The house always wins in the long run , but countless winners gladly take their millions even from the lotteries.  It’s never over till the fat lady sings. It’s also not over unless the bullet has your name on it.  A WWI soldier who survived Vimy Ridge taught me that. He was my patient in his 80's.
The success of this generation is in the longevity. We are all living a decade longer and all the killers of a while ago are cured.  Even these new diseases of deadly destruction are being beaten with alacrity. I know so many cancer survivors.  
Even the old go on and on so that there are nursing homes galore and the courts are all about physician assisted suicide not because people are dying but because they refuse to.  Life is so good that the historic killers of war, disease and starvation aren’t doing their former job to the satisfaction of politicians. Our society, thanks to science, technology and wisdom is living longer and better than ever before.  And not just millions, but billions more than ever before.
The media is sick.  That is a central source of societal disease.  Fear mongering negativity and deceit.
The successes are amazing. But yes, when we are a hundred, we may wish to remain asleep. Neither my brother or I am there yet.  Now we celebrate life .  But at a hundred I wouldn't care so much if he left me.  I would have liked for my mother to have stayed another year or two but even Dad was ready to leave at 94.

Napanee Vacation: Death, Cancer, Life

Death is always with us.  We maintain an illusion of life in which we know that death and life abound but somehow we are permanent.  Yet this life is by its very nature impermanent.  And each night I sleep.  I enter this death like equation where to my subjective self I leave the objective world of community and enter a dream like state, another world, as memorable as memories themselves.
Cancer is a disease of threatened death.  Immunologically we think of it as the body turned against itself, some auto immune phenomena, that is either a lack of recognition of the good self and hence destruction or a lack of policing of the bad self and hence destruction.
This phenomena of cancer has been associated with environmental disease as in those poor ladies who painted watch faces with radioactive paint till they succumbed of cancers or the mining men who breathed in asbestos.  That's the environmental stressor model.
Then there's the genetic angle.  Genes mutate and cancer is a mutation associated with age or the bombardment of the genetic code by various waves of unseen energy and particle some travelling through the ozone layers while others come from more proximal microwave emissions.  The Russians so certain of the science of the latter  spent millions bombarding the American embassy with hoped for disease causing EMF.  There are viruses too that trigger cancer, infections such as Herpes Simplex II which was so thoroughly associated with cervical cancer that it gave rise to the Pap Test as the principle preventative protective strategy.
Ever since I became a doctor cancer has been being cured with greater success though the greater length of life has resulted in this miracle being obscured by the apparently increased death in the elderly from cancer.  The wear and tear of the Australian beach crowd has with time created a whole group of melanomatous skin cancers with each year of excessive sun exposure and recurrent damage to the skin till cancer arises from the suns bombardment and aging.  Everywhere cancer is being cured.
Psychiatrists have long held that physical illness of chronic disease and even some acute illness is ‘anger turned inward’.  One is by definition either outwardly homicidal in attitude or inwardly suicidal in attitude.  As with all the physical attributes psychologically there is a balance, a right place between the polar extremes.  At that point the homicidal and suicidal tendencies of Freud’s forces of life and death are balanced.  Chronic disease follows the upset of the golden rule, that fundamental equation, ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’.  One must show a healthy balance of self care.  Too much narcissism and self centeredness results in hypochondriasis or real disease and the attraction of illness if only by shadowing doctors who work always around disease.
By contrast one can spend time mostly in the love of others, altruism and selflessness.  My brother is a husband and a parent and worked for the government which treated its civil servants psychologically as they did their military servants, expendable and hierarchically, socially stressful places despite their apparent union benefits.  There is stress from the juggling of the roles too and fulfilling the duties of society.
My brother has stayed. He’s a brick. I’m  He is the Rock of Gibraltar . He's the army to my navy.  He's the artillery and I’m calvary. He’s taken a tremendous amount of bombardment by staying whereas I’ve charged and retreated from the bullies that abound in our present day 'uncultured' society
The other psychiatric and philosophic aspect of the cancer which isconsidered from a communications perspective is that ‘ cancer is that which you can say in no other way’.  Communication theory sees us as essentially ‘communicating units’ and all we say and do are expressions of seeking and giving help.  A child cries and a mother comforts him or her.  Disease is a way of seeking help or solving a puzzle.  Gods come to us in disease is a saying that relates to the idea that when we are well and outwardly rewarded we do not tend to turn inward to consider the meaning of existence or to communicate our questions about existence or even our individual lives. Disease is doubt.  Happily ruling Wall Street with hookers and cocaine and simulated battles or impressing the ladies with ones muscles and tattoos in government circuits one can remain shallow and fatuous.  However faced with cancer there is an inward turning.
When I am wounded in battle my sword arm, until that moment so strong, is suddenly cut and no longer answers to the command of my ego.  What is the relationship between fate and free will, I ask myself. How is it that my enemy has found this weakness I did not know myself or what was I thinking to let down my shield.  Why does the zen master say one's enemy is a friend who teaches us our mistake. Why does the psychiatrist call disease the great teacher?
In the Bible the wound of note is the struggle between the angel and man which eventually lead to the naming of Israel.  These ideas are not new.  All philosophy and religion have been given to answering some questions about disease and death with cancer, the big "C" being the metaphor for "satan incarnate' or 'living death', the primo disease.  There are similar stories of wounds and myths around the world.    The crack in creation is where the light comes in. In sickness we are forced to consider the aloneness of sickness and life. I am born between piss and shit and I die, ashes to ashes.  Cancer is but  a slow death or a speeded up life.  My minister friend with cancer told me he'd only begun to really live when he was first diagnosed with cancer. He described an intensity of life he'd not known since childhood and how he'd been mostly a spectator for many years and now was pulled fully and completely into the game of life.
There’s no sudden and acute motor vehicle accident death or death by beheading in war.  Cancer a slow struggle, a marathon. The fight against the slow death is Sisyphus.  Kierkegaard said , Life is suffering unto death".  It's a simmer rather than a boil.   It’s a ‘siege’ by comparison to a charge.
The recovery changes a person.  It’s a near death experience on a daily basis with a whole reconsideration of the means of dealing with the external exigencies of reality. If a person ‘solved’ life’s problems one way cancer may well demand a whole new set of tools to overcome it.
Cancer is that which I can say in no other way is a consideration that if I can find another way of communicating then I might no longer need the cancer.  The pessimist becomes the optimist and the cancer disappears.  The independent soloist turns to the community for aid and surrender to the care of others who experiment with their various ideas of cure and success.  Witches brews and chemotherapy all contribute to the natural self healing of the individual who once was a neut like creature capable of regrowing tails and limbs, a genetic code which exists within, which hasn’t been lost, which we are again doing with the help of the lab.  Stem cells differentiate into whole new body parts.  We have the stem cells still.  We all are self healing.  Medicine and surgery simply assist.
It’s not like we plant the seeds but more that we weed the garden. All the seeds are there to grow resplendent but we must prune and care for the flowers we wish.  Cancer is it’s own robust weed.  There’s something incredible at the cellular level when we contemplate cancer. It’s dandelions on a golfers green.
We are always messing with creation. We are dictating to the universe that we want this order, this life we have created, not this other mutation. We are ‘stewarding’. We are leading. All self doubt is left behind because to cure cancer we must give it our undivided attention and solve the rubrics cube in a race against time.  Meanwhile all that is past is demanding equal attention as it did when one was well. The war goes on but my sword arm no longer lifts the sword. If I don't pay attention I can find myself kicking my feet like a kangaroo while dragging my sword arm behind me.  For 80,000 years I learned to slink off to the cave where I nursed my own wounds or formed a pact with a medicine man or woman and hopefully a child or wife or husband fed me in my monastic vigil and struggle with God. We are herd animals, not lizards. There's comfort in companionship.  I never admit it but I still like when a friend brings me soup when I am sick.
I want to live, I say and God, or the Great Unknown asks me ,how much or am I sure. It’s a Job like place this narrative of Cancer. .  The siege is on and the enemy is at the door.
I am here with my brother who was diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer.  He only learned when he was first diagnosed with pulmonary embolism. . Breath is the sacred nectar of life the rhythmic wonder of existence.  He was literally breathless when he began this journey.  The healing care and brilliance in Napanee and in Kingston has been stupendous to behold.  As a doctor I've been so thankful to know my brother has had the care of the oncology team there.  Pulmonary embolisms, blood  clotting oddly in lungs is so often a harbinger of cancer so the Sherlock Holmes began and found this pancreatic mass where it did not belong. The anomaly was called 'cancer'.
To date my brother hasn’t had any symptoms attributable to the cancer itself except fatigue. His loss of appetite, nausea and malaise have come with nerve sensation loss from the treatments.  It’s the same as if a terroist cell has taken up a presence in the centre of the city infiltrated key areas and is planning on setting off bombs and destroying all from within. No one knows they are there, except the police and soldiers who enters with the intent of getting them out. The only thing the city notices are the apparent wars started by the police and soldiers. It's so easy then to blame the cure for the disease.  We hear it all the time in politics.  There is a politics of disease.  The internet is rife with insanity and special interest groups, pseudoscience and marketing.  My brother, always wise, trusts in what is really known.  He trained as a scientist at the University of Manitoba.  He understands the depths of what the loving doctors are telling him. He has worked well with the Kingston oncology team and the Napanee outreach.
Now a year later and my brother’s cancer has not gained to any degree.  The battle has waged.  The weeding and pruning have taken place. The seeds of new plants have grown while some of the old have been demolished. There is new life but there is also death.  Having survived that first day of breathless near death he’s gone on to succeed a year against a Borg like phenomena whose kill ratio is 9 out of 10.  Only the A student solves the puzzle and lives beyond five years.  He's one fifth of the way along that life journey. It’s been a sharp learning curve.  My brother is a genius though. He was the smart one in the family. I was the slow learner by comparison.  I don't doubt his capacity to live. Cancer is a minor matter compared to the challenges he's faced so far and overcome.  His family are a testimony to his love and skill and merit.
The central question of life is ‘fate’ and ‘free will’.  Buber described the idea of “I and it’ and then the move to “I and thou’.  The "other" is the whole world.  Here the "other' is cancer. "I and Cancer".  There is to immunology the central theme of ‘self’ and ‘not self’.  I have a white blood cell response to a foreign bacteria that invades my body.  My basic immunological system has ‘boundaries’ and the foreigner is removed.
We all have cancer. Our bodies are restoring the homeostasis daily by the minute and hour.  The self healing structures are removing mutations and clearing the diseased cells away.  Our treatments expedite this.  We assist the self healing process.  We fight the invader and we strengthen the host.  The terminology of medicine is full of ambiguity.  We call a person the ‘host’ as if they have invited cancer for dinner and are now having their own personal party but can't alone throw the cancer 'bore' out of the party.
 I have gratitude for today. I am here at Hay Bay and have known another day with my brother. He’s an amazing man, his marriage and home and children a reflection of he and his wife’s dreams.  I love seeing his love in action, all the years I’ve watched him devote himself to his family in a world where individualism and selfishness are the halcyon call of our Kardashian and Myla Cyrus day.  I don’t even think he’s ever snapped a ‘selfie’ of himself.  He’s a quiet man in that way.  At the same time he can talk a persons deaf with tale upon tale, a trait we both share with our beloved Irish mother.  On the surface he might at times chatter but with him still waters run deep, not stagnant.
He’s angry as all cancer patients are.  There’s a grieving process that Elizabeth Kubla Ross described regarding dying.  As cancer is the offer of a slow death or a chance of recovery , this horns of the dilemma is met with all the range of appropriate emotions. We daily grieve to some degree the lost dreams of yesterday. I never was the astronaut I wanted to be as a kid and became instead the prosaic doctor. My brother would have loved to fly but walked instead and now must even crawl awhile to get a head.  We're not stationary in our family.
I am grateful to be here.  So much of family and medicine is being present.  The world as a whole run away from disease thinking fearfully living a life of trying to avoid all distress.  Cancer is like lepracy.  Disease is stigma.  The struggle is personal. It’s not a public matter. It’s a private matter. The parasitic people would still like to take advantage of another's misfortunes.   Family and friends gather.  We are there as much for protection as our own learning.  Socrates is speaking.  He never did need to take the hemlock. He did not wish to be exiled so did, but he could have left.  I can live or I can die. My brother has chosen life and I'm glad to be a cheer leader if only that.He has my rapt attention. I am honoured to be welcomed by this great artist and he creates his masterful Houdini trick of escaping cancer and death this time. We both accept that 20 or 30 years from now we may wish to succumb but not now, not when we are both so young. My father lived till 94. My mother said she was tired and wanted to go at 89.  A son should outlive his parents.  My brother has the will and gifts.  He loves life.
Having worked in medicine some thirty years with tens of thousands of patients and so many facing cancer, disease and old age, along with the gun shot wounds, I’ve been never certain what the outcome will be.  The house always wins in the long run , but countless winners gladly take their millions even from the lotteries.  It’s never over till the fat lady sings. It’s also not over unless the bullet has your name on it.  A WWI soldier who survived Vimy Ridge taught me that. He was my patient in his 80's.
The success of this generation is in the longevity. We are all living a decade longer and all the killers of a while ago are cured.  Even these new diseases of deadly destruction are being beaten with alacrity. I know so many cancer survivors.  
Even the old go on and on so that there are nursing homes galore and the courts are all about physician assisted suicide not because people are dying but because they refuse to.  Life is so good that the historic killers of war, disease and starvation aren’t doing their former job to the satisfaction of politicians. Our society, thanks to science, technology and wisdom is living longer and better than ever before.  And not just millions, but billions more than ever before.
The media is sick.  That is a central source of societal disease.  Fear mongering negativity and deceit.
The successes are amazing. But yes, when we are a hundred, we may wish to remain asleep. Neither my brother or I am there yet.  Now we celebrate life .  But at a hundred I wouldn't care so much if he left me.  I would have liked for my mother to have stayed another year or two but even Dad was ready to leave at 94.

Napanee Vacation: Death and Cancer

Death is always with us.  We maintain an illusion of life in which we know that death and life abound but somehow we are permanent.  Yet this life is by its very nature impermanent.  And each night I sleep.  I enter this death like equation where to my subjective self I leave the objective world of community and enter a dream like state, another world, as memorable as memories themselves.
Cancer is a disease of threatened death.  Immunologically we think of it as the body turned against itself, some auto immune phenomena, that is either a lack of recognition of the good self and hence destruction or a lack of policing of the bad self and hence destruction.
This phenomena of cancer has been associated with environmental disease as in those poor ladies who painted watch faces with radioactive paint till they succumbed of cancers or the mining men who breathed in asbestos.  That's the environmental stressor model.
Then there's the genetic angle.  Genes mutate and cancer is a mutation associated with age or the bombardment of the genetic code by various waves of unseen energy and particle some travelling through the ozone layers while others come from more proximal microwave emissions.  The Russians so certain of the science of the latter  spent millions bombarding the American embassy with hoped for disease causing EMF.  There are viruses too that trigger cancer, infections such as Herpes Simplex II which was so thoroughly associated with cervical cancer that it gave rise to the Pap Test as the principle preventative protective strategy.
Ever since I became a doctor cancer has been being cured with greater success though the greater length of life has resulted in this miracle being obscured by the apparently increased death in the elderly from cancer.  The wear and tear of the Australian beach crowd has with time created a whole group of melanomatous skin cancers with each year of excessive sun exposure and recurrent damage to the skin till cancer arises from the suns bombardment and aging.  Everywhere cancer is being cured.
Psychiatrists have long held that physical illness of chronic disease and even some acute illness is ‘anger turned inward’.  One is by definition either outwardly homicidal in attitude or inwardly suicidal in attitude.  As with all the physical attributes psychologically there is a balance, a right place between the polar extremes.  At that point the homicidal and suicidal tendencies of Freud’s forces of life and death are balanced.  Chronic disease follows the upset of the golden rule, that fundamental equation, ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’.  One must show a healthy balance of self care.  Too much narcissism and self centeredness results in hypochondriasis or real disease and the attraction of illness if only by shadowing doctors who work always around disease.
By contrast one can spend time mostly in the love of others, altruism and selflessness.  My brother is a husband and a parent and worked for the government which treated its civil servants psychologically as they did their military servants, expendable and hierarchically, socially stressful places despite their apparent union benefits.  There is stress from the juggling of the roles too and fulfilling the duties of society.
My brother has stayed. He’s a brick. I’m  He is the Rock of Gibraltar . He's the army to my navy.  He's the artillery and I’m calvary. He’s taken a tremendous amount of bombardment by staying whereas I’ve charged and retreated from the bullies that abound in our present day 'uncultured' society
The other psychiatric and philosophic aspect of the cancer which isconsidered from a communications perspective is that ‘ cancer is that which you can say in no other way’.  Communication theory sees us as essentially ‘communicating units’ and all we say and do are expressions of seeking and giving help.  A child cries and a mother comforts him or her.  Disease is a way of seeking help or solving a puzzle.  Gods come to us in disease is a saying that relates to the idea that when we are well and outwardly rewarded we do not tend to turn inward to consider the meaning of existence or to communicate our questions about existence or even our individual lives. Disease is doubt.  Happily ruling Wall Street with hookers and cocaine and simulated battles or impressing the ladies with ones muscles and tattoos in government circuits one can remain shallow and fatuous.  However faced with cancer there is an inward turning.
When I am wounded in battle my sword arm, until that moment so strong, is suddenly cut and no longer answers to the command of my ego.  What is the relationship between fate and free will, I ask myself. How is it that my enemy has found this weakness I did not know myself or what was I thinking to let down my shield.  Why does the zen master say one's enemy is a friend who teaches us our mistake. Why does the psychiatrist call disease the great teacher?
In the Bible the wound of note is the struggle between the angel and man which eventually lead to the naming of Israel.  These ideas are not new.  All philosophy and religion have been given to answering some questions about disease and death with cancer, the big "C" being the metaphor for "satan incarnate' or 'living death', the primo disease.  There are similar stories of wounds and myths around the world.    The crack in creation is where the light comes in. In sickness we are forced to consider the aloneness of sickness and life. I am born between piss and shit and I die, ashes to ashes.  Cancer is but  a slow death or a speeded up life.  My minister friend with cancer told me he'd only begun to really live when he was first diagnosed with cancer. He described an intensity of life he'd not known since childhood and how he'd been mostly a spectator for many years and now was pulled fully and completely into the game of life.
There’s no sudden and acute motor vehicle accident death or death by beheading in war.  Cancer a slow struggle, a marathon. The fight against the slow death is Sisyphus.  Kierkegaard said , Life is suffering unto death".  It's a simmer rather than a boil.   It’s a ‘siege’ by comparison to a charge.
The recovery changes a person.  It’s a near death experience on a daily basis with a whole reconsideration of the means of dealing with the external exigencies of reality. If a person ‘solved’ life’s problems one way cancer may well demand a whole new set of tools to overcome it.
Cancer is that which I can say in no other way is a consideration that if I can find another way of communicating then I might no longer need the cancer.  The pessimist becomes the optimist and the cancer disappears.  The independent soloist turns to the community for aid and surrender to the care of others who experiment with their various ideas of cure and success.  Witches brews and chemotherapy all contribute to the natural self healing of the individual who once was a neut like creature capable of regrowing tails and limbs, a genetic code which exists within, which hasn’t been lost, which we are again doing with the help of the lab.  Stem cells differentiate into whole new body parts.  We have the stem cells still.  We all are self healing.  Medicine and surgery simply assist.
It’s not like we plant the seeds but more that we weed the garden. All the seeds are there to grow resplendent but we must prune and care for the flowers we wish.  Cancer is it’s own robust weed.  There’s something incredible at the cellular level when we contemplate cancer. It’s dandelions on a golfers green.
We are always messing with creation. We are dictating to the universe that we want this order, this life we have created, not this other mutation. We are ‘stewarding’. We are leading. All self doubt is left behind because to cure cancer we must give it our undivided attention and solve the rubrics cube in a race against time.  Meanwhile all that is past is demanding equal attention as it did when one was well. The war goes on but my sword arm no longer lifts the sword. If I don't pay attention I can find myself kicking my feet like a kangaroo while dragging my sword arm behind me.  For 80,000 years I learned to slink off to the cave where I nursed my own wounds or formed a pact with a medicine man or woman and hopefully a child or wife or husband fed me in my monastic vigil and struggle with God. We are herd animals, not lizards. There's comfort in companionship.  I never admit it but I still like when a friend brings me soup when I am sick.
I want to live, I say and God, or the Great Unknown asks me ,how much or am I sure. It’s a Job like place this narrative of Cancer. .  The siege is on and the enemy is at the door.
I am here with my brother who was diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer.  He only learned when he was first diagnosed with pulmonary embolism. . Breath is the sacred nectar of life the rhythmic wonder of existence.  He was literally breathless when he began this journey.  The healing care and brilliance in Napanee and in Kingston has been stupendous to behold.  As a doctor I've been so thankful to know my brother has had the care of the oncology team there.  Pulmonary embolisms, blood  clotting oddly in lungs is so often a harbinger of cancer so the Sherlock Holmes began and found this pancreatic mass where it did not belong. The anomaly was called 'cancer'.
To date my brother hasn’t had any symptoms attributable to the cancer itself except fatigue. His loss of appetite, nausea and malaise have come with nerve sensation loss from the treatments.  It’s the same as if a terroist cell has taken up a presence in the centre of the city infiltrated key areas and is planning on setting off bombs and destroying all from within. No one knows they are there, except the police and soldiers who enters with the intent of getting them out. The only thing the city notices are the apparent wars started by the police and soldiers. It's so easy then to blame the cure for the disease.  We hear it all the time in politics.  There is a politics of disease.  The internet is rife with insanity and special interest groups, pseudoscience and marketing.  My brother, always wise, trusts in what is really known.  He trained as a scientist at the University of Manitoba.  He understands the depths of what the loving doctors are telling him. He has worked well with the Kingston oncology team and the Napanee outreach.
Now a year later and my brother’s cancer has not gained to any degree.  The battle has waged.  The weeding and pruning have taken place. The seeds of new plants have grown while some of the old have been demolished. There is new life but there is also death.  Having survived that first day of breathless near death he’s gone on to succeed a year against a Borg like phenomena whose kill ratio is 9 out of 10.  Only the A student solves the puzzle and lives beyond five years.  He's one fifth of the way along that life journey. It’s been a sharp learning curve.  My brother is a genius though. He was the smart one in the family. I was the slow learner by comparison.  I don't doubt his capacity to live. Cancer is a minor matter compared to the challenges he's faced so far and overcome.  His family are a testimony to his love and skill and merit.
The central question of life is ‘fate’ and ‘free will’.  Buber described the idea of “I and it’ and then the move to “I and thou’.  The "other" is the whole world.  Here the "other' is cancer. "I and Cancer".  There is to immunology the central theme of ‘self’ and ‘not self’.  I have a white blood cell response to a foreign bacteria that invades my body.  My basic immunological system has ‘boundaries’ and the foreigner is removed.
We all have cancer. Our bodies are restoring the homeostasis daily by the minute and hour.  The self healing structures are removing mutations and clearing the diseased cells away.  Our treatments expedite this.  We assist the self healing process.  We fight the invader and we strengthen the host.  The terminology of medicine is full of ambiguity.  We call a person the ‘host’ as if they have invited cancer for dinner and are now having their own personal party but can't alone throw the cancer 'bore' out of the party.
 I have gratitude for today. I am here at Hay Bay and have known another day with my brother. He’s an amazing man, his marriage and home and children a reflection of he and his wife’s dreams.  I love seeing his love in action, all the years I’ve watched him devote himself to his family in a world where individualism and selfishness are the halcyon call of our Kardashian and Myla Cyrus day.  I don’t even think he’s ever snapped a ‘selfie’ of himself.  He’s a quiet man in that way.  At the same time he can talk a persons deaf with tale upon tale, a trait we both share with our beloved Irish mother.  On the surface he might at times chatter but with him still waters run deep, not stagnant.
He’s angry as all cancer patients are.  There’s a grieving process that Elizabeth Kubla Ross described regarding dying.  As cancer is the offer of a slow death or a chance of recovery , this horns of the dilemma is met with all the range of appropriate emotions. We daily grieve to some degree the lost dreams of yesterday. I never was the astronaut I wanted to be as a kid and became instead the prosaic doctor. My brother would have loved to fly but walked instead and now must even crawl awhile to get a head.  We're not stationary in our family.
I am grateful to be here.  So much of family and medicine is being present.  The world as a whole run away from disease thinking fearfully living a life of trying to avoid all distress.  Cancer is like lepracy.  Disease is stigma.  The struggle is personal. It’s not a public matter. It’s a private matter. The parasitic people would still like to take advantage of another's misfortunes.   Family and friends gather.  We are there as much for protection as our own learning.  Socrates is speaking.  He never did need to take the hemlock. He did not wish to be exiled so did, but he could have left.  I can live or I can die. My brother has chosen life and I'm glad to be a cheer leader if only that.He has my rapt attention. I am honoured to be welcomed by this great artist and he creates his masterful Houdini trick of escaping cancer and death this time. We both accept that 20 or 30 years from now we may wish to succumb but not now, not when we are both so young. My father lived till 94. My mother said she was tired and wanted to go at 89.  A son should outlive his parents.  My brother has the will and gifts.  He loves life.
Having worked in medicine some thirty years with tens of thousands of patients and so many facing cancer, disease and old age, along with the gun shot wounds, I’ve been never certain what the outcome will be.  The house always wins in the long run , but countless winners gladly take their millions even from the lotteries.  It’s never over till the fat lady sings. It’s also not over unless the bullet has your name on it.  A WWI soldier who survived Vimy Ridge taught me that. He was my patient in his 80's.
The success of this generation is in the longevity. We are all living a decade longer and all the killers of a while ago are cured.  Even these new diseases of deadly destruction are being beaten with alacrity. I know so many cancer survivors.  
Even the old go on and on so that there are nursing homes galore and the courts are all about physician assisted suicide not because people are dying but because they refuse to.  Life is so good that the historic killers of war, disease and starvation aren’t doing their former job to the satisfaction of politicians. Our society, thanks to science, technology and wisdom is living longer and better than ever before.  And not just millions, but billions more than ever before.
The media is sick.  That is a central source of societal disease.  Fear mongering negativity and deceit.
The successes are amazing. But yes, when we are a hundred, we may wish to remain asleep. Neither my brother or I am there yet.  Now we celebrate life .  But at a hundred I wouldn't care so much if he left me.  I would have liked for my mother to have stayed another year or two but even Dad was ready to leave at 94.