The Urine Test

In a recent edition of the Otago Daily Times, there was a reprint of an essay Chris Harris wrote on the need to find a better method of detecting prostate cancer.

At present one of the prime methods used is a biopsy in which a needle is pushed up into the man's anus, and then through the wall dividing the bowel and the prostate. Tiny pieces of his prostate are chipped off and then sent to the lab for examination. This is the examination I had back in late 2008. There were complications as a result of this biopsy which I describe in some detail in my ebook, Diary of a Prostate Wimp. [This ebook is currently available at half-price at Smashwords to support Movember, the prostate cancer month.]

The problem with this biopsy - the transrectal method - is that infection can easily occur. In fact, men are routinely given antibiotics after the biopsy because it's assumed there will be infections. It's hardly surprising that there are, because the wall between two parts of the body - one of them intended to deal with faecal matter - is pierced and broken open. It's a bit like sticking your hand in a toilet, then using your hand straightaway to put food in your mouth. If you don't get infected, it'll be surprising.

Chris Harris wrote about a new option that's being looked at to avoid this biopsy. Currently several PSA blood tests are done before a biopsy is considered, in tandem with the unpleasant finger up the bum approach that shows whether the prostate is unduly enlarged or not. Chris says the PSA test was never designed to do what it's being used for now, and writes: 'We aim to take a more direct approach by analysing small amounts of prostate cells exfoliated in urine. There is evidence that very small amounts of prostate cancer cells, between one and a few dozen, are shed normally into the urine at an early stage of the disease. Our aim is to pick out these cancer cells and extract molecular information from them to predict if a tumour is going to become a malignant monster or a benign wimp.'

It's normal for men's prostates to enlarge as they get older. Most of the time this isn't anything to do with cancer; it's a common problem many men will have to deal with - as I did. Surgery is performed to decrease the size of the prostate, thus allowing the urinary tract to function properly. (The urinary tract gets blocked by the prostate rather like a large stone in a small river bed.)

There is hope that the urine test will be readily available soon - possibly within months. In the UK, trial tests of the urine samples were accurate in about 70% of cases. However Chris warns that there is still work to be done to ensure thorough accuracy. And of course, as always, funding is a problem.

What my second ebook (Prostate Wimp) is about

I haven't mentioned my second ebook, Diary of a Prostate Wimp, on this blog as much as I should have. Other things have kept getting in the way - like the writing of the sequel to Grimhilda! which thankfully, is in its last draft (of what feels like the last of several hundred).

Anyway, Prostate Wimp came out at the end of April this year, and I've been considering some of the things that I should point out about it to readers, to give it a better opportunity in the world.

Here are some of the things the book addresses:

If you have any concerns about matters to do with your prostate (here's a list of symptoms from the New Zealand Prostate Cancer Society) talk to your doctor and don't let them put you off. Some doctors can be a bit off-hand about men's issues, and others aren't good at answering questions in sufficient detail. Thankfully I had a very good doctor.

The book focuses on what happened after I'd had a prostate biopsy. The biopsy is done initially to check whether you have any sign of cancer. The current method of biopsy is the transrectal method: through the anus, through the protective skin between the bowel and the prostate, and then chipping off tiny bits of the prostate for inspection. There is increasing concern that this is not a healthy method. Regrettably, in New Zealand at present, this is the main method. There are two articles noted in my book by an Australian journalist, Jason Gale. These are worth reading, even though they're now one and three years old respectively.
Prostate exam [biopsy] deaths from 'superbugs' spur inquiry into cancer tests
and
Prostate cancer test causing sepsis [infections] spurs biopsy concerns.
Gale is not alone in writing about this issue. I have a number of other similar articles on file, which I'll detail in future blog posts.

In the book, a medical friend of mine expresses considerable concern about the use of a blood test, generally known by the name, PSA. This gives an indication of the degree of enlargement of the prostate - something that is normal in men as they grow older. What it doesn't do is tell the medical people whether you have cancer. When my prostate was shown to be enlarged according to the test (and it was accurate on that point) I was informed by a urologist at the hospital that I could well have cancer, and I needed to have a biopsy. In fact I didn't have cancer, and the biopsy caused problems I could have done without. I detail in the book the case of another friend of mine who had considerably worse experiences than me, as a result of the biopsy and subsequent investigations.

An enlarged prostate is not necessarily a cancerous prostate. An enlarged prostate is a nuisance, and will probably require an operation (the TURP) to remove some of the enlargement. An enlarged prostate causes problems with peeing: it can make it hard to pee, on one hand, and on the other, cause you to go far more often than normal. This still doesn't indicate cancer.

However, it is still necessary to take prostate issues seriously. I'll talk more about this in a later post.

A couple of movies from 1993

The Warehouse had a sale of DVDs on the weekend, so we picked up a few to replace a bunch that were surplus to requirements, movies we'll never watch again (wouldn't want to watch again) and some that we had double-ups of for whatever reason.
On Saturday night we watched a DVD of The Remains of the Day, which we'd seen at the cinema when it first came out. Neither of us could remember much about it; in fact there was very little of that visual recognition you usually have when you're seeing a movie again. Perhaps we're losing our visual recognition as we get older, which is a bit scary!
Anyway, this movie, with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson both at their best, is a story about a butler in a large aristocratic home, Darlington Hall, owned by Lord Darlington. The Lord, though he is an honourable man, is an amateur in his political dealings; he foolishly sides with the Nazis during the war, and probably should have been charged with treason. Hopkins, the consummate butler, always there, always perfect in behaviour, claims he never hears what goes on around him: he's too busy doing his job. But in fact he's closed off to human relationships for the most part. When he employs his own father as an under-butler, he calls him Mr Stevens rather than father. It's only as his father is dying that he manages to speak as though there is some relationship there. Even when his father is lying dead upstairs he believes his duty is still to serve his Lordship first.
Thompson plays the housekeeper who gives as good as she gets from Hopkins, but also falls in love with him. In spite of himself, he's in love with her, but his nature is such that he can't admit to it, and so both their lives go awry as a result.
There's a top-notch cast including Hugh Grant, Christopher Reeves and Ben Chaplin among the more familiar faces. The direction by James Ivory is quiet and assured, and the script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala gives the performers ample room for subtlety and subtext. A great film, with much in it to be admired. 
In the same year, Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman starred in a much less well-known movie, My Life, which, if it had been done as a TV movie with a TV actor would have ended up requiring a box of tissues. It narrowly avoids this because of Keaton's solid performance in which he has ample room to both clown and play to his serious side. 
Keaton plays a man who has only a few months to live because of cancer, and like many in that position he doesn't want to die, especially as his wife is expecting their first child. He manages to stay alive long enough to see his son grow through his first months before succumbing to the continually invasive cancer. As in too many movies about illness, the cancer gets put on the back-burner too often: it has a brief dramatic appearance at the beginning (sorted out by some magic pill that works instantly) and hardly turns up again until the end. In the meantime, unlike most cancer patients, Keaton, on the surface at least, appears to be as healthy as the next man.
Before he dies he makes a series of home movies that he wants his future child to be able to view, but in the process he comes face to the face with the fact that he's never forgiven his own parents: he particularly felt that his father was never there for him because he worked so hard at his business. But he has to face the fact that he's actually no different: he's a workaholic too. 
For the most part it's Keaton who makes the movie work (Kidman has a bit of a wishy-washy role that doesn't give her room for much depth unfortunately) in spite of its forays into occasional silliness. The rest of the cast, including Bradley Whitford (from West Wing, and sporting the worst false moustache you've ever seen - it looks as though belongs in the 70s rather than the 90s), Michael Considine and Queen Latifah don't really get much chance to get to grips with their roles because they're basically underwritten. Latifah doesn't appear till almost the end, comes in with a whiz and a bang and is then given nothing to do. 

Diary of a Prostate Wimp

The book I've been writing on my experiences of how the medical world dealt with my prostate is now almost ready. It only lacks a cover, an ISBN and a CIP (the National Library of New Zealand's Cataloguing-in-Publication Data - each country has their own version of these). All these are all in the pipeline in various ways. So I may make my deadline of the end of April after all. 

I've had a brilliant editor who went through my 'final' draft with such a fine toothcomb that he found things I hadn't thought were even there. Though I must add that I also found a couple of tiny things he missed - but then he was working, as usual, on about six other things at the same time. Nevertheless the final text is correct in ways I wouldn't have achieved on my own. 

I've sometimes had some qualms about whether the information in the book is too personal, too in-your-face (especially if you're not a bloke), too intense, and too-a-variety-of-other-things. Time will tell. The book is partly based on a series of blog posts I wrote back at the time the events were happening, and at that time I began to read - but never finished - a book called Please Leave the Seat Up by Brian Turner. Brian was an Englishman who'd gone to the US with his wife to take over a branch of his company. It was going to be a highly successful time, and he would have done very well. Within weeks he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and all his plans fell apart. While I was putting my own book together over the last few months I actually read Brian's book. If I had qualms about anything in my book being too much in your face, then Brian's book showed me that when it comes to talking about health, almost anything is permissible! Not only is it permissible, it's essential to tell the readers the details, because the medical profession doesn't. 

This was one of the big things I learned about having something seriously wrong: the medical profession knows a lot of what can go wrong, but prefers to wait until it goes wrong before they tell you that it's not abnormal, and that thousands of other people have been in the same boat. The only thing is that few of those thousand people have written about their experiences and passed on what they've learned. 

Still, I often got more help and information from friends and colleagues who'd either had the same experience, or something similar. The doctors and nurses would be helpful if you asked (generally) but they tended not to provide information if you didn't ask. And how would you know to ask until you found something strange was happening? I'm not blaming the medical people - some of them were extraordinarily helpful and I thank God for them - but it sometimes feels they think that less information is better than more, even when that little bit more information might have allayed a lot of your concerns. 

I was fortunate to get through the experience; many, as I show in the book, have much worse times than I did. Prostate issues, and prostate cancer, are amongst the most common problems men can have in later life. Hopefully this book will help some men before they find themselves involved in such difficulties. 

By the way, it's called Diary of a Prostate Wimp. You'll have to read it to find out why!

Toes poems

Hopefully it's getting a bit late in the year to be worrying about having cozy toes - more likely the sandals and jandals will be coming out of hiding, if they haven't already. The last week or so has had some lovely days, and hopefully there'll be more, though as always, the weather people are forecasting something drastic for us.

Thinking about toes, I thought I'd check out my Evernote clippings to see what came up on that subject.  Surprisingly enough, while there were a few references to that common expression - kept me on my toes - most of the notes referred me back to poems I'd collected, including a link to one of my own. I can quote this one, since I own the copyright. Here's the bit about toes - it comes from a poem called Lying on my side:

Toes keep pace with the quietly shifting space:

those toes (unlike the ankles) soft and less defined,

grubs of differing heights set as extremities,

shift around each other, nuzzling in amongst each other,

comfort spaces betwixt between, sensuous with each other,

revelling in their sockless, shoeless freedom.

There's a nice bit about toes in a poem called Night Rains, San Diego, 2012.  The poem is by Tim Pfau: 

We sailed together, so clever and deft,

occasionally dipping our toes in

hurt, seasoning brightness and space with salt.

You can read the full poem on the Canopic Jar website.

Don Walls has his own website, and there are samples of his poems scattered over several pages. Aspects of my toes is a delightful short poem which you can read in full on the page that has some poems from his book Down the Lane. Just scroll down the page a little, until you find this poem.

Toes only get the briefest of mentions in John Updike's Seven Stanzas at Easter, but the poem is so good, I advise you to read it in full. He looks at the realness of the body Jesus rose in (the same hinged thumbs and toes...)

Finally, Dorianne Laux, in a poem called Antilamentation, also notes briefly a point about toes - and the way the person addressed in the poem has shoes that crimped her toes. It's a poem that suggests we should regret nothing, though I leave it up to you to discover whether that's good or bad advice from the poet.

This photo comes from a post on the KCBakes website, and discusses teal toes. Apparently teal is the official colour of ovarian cancer. There are a couple of other toe pictures there too.

A movie and a book

Having heard good reports about A Song for Marion (also known as Unfinished Song) I was surprised at how disappointed I was.  It's mostly about Terence Stamp, a grumpy old man who seems to have no good reason to be so grumpy.  The script never actually gives him a reason, so Stamp is forced to  be grumpy just because he is. Vanessa Redgrave plays his wife who loves him dearly (he seems to love her greatly too); she dies fairly early on from a cancer that's returned after remission. Gemma Arterton plays the young schoolteacher who takes a community choir that Redgrave enjoys going to, and Christopher Ecclestone plays Stamp's son; at one point he asks the obvious questions as to why his father is so grumpy, but since Stamp isn't given any reason in the script he doesn't get a response (!)

The movie swings between delineating the realities of old age, and patronising old people: why is it filmmakers think old people want to do heavy metal songs or songs where sex appears in every line?  The two best songs in the movie (one sung by Redgrave and one by Stamp) are both much more worthy of inclusion than the rubbish ones the choir is supposedly learning.  Stamp and Ecclestone bring reality to their characters (it's a pity the mending of their relationship takes place off-screen) and Redgrave is good in the short amount of screen time she gets. The rest of the cast (including Arterton) seem to have forgotten that when your face is blown up on a cinema screen there's no need to gawk and gawp and overdo every reaction.  I lost count of the number of times people reacted in an actorish way (rather like people in bit parts in the worst kind of amateur theatre); presumably the director thought this was good.  Or else the movie was made for television primarily, where such reactions aren't so overblown.

I'd been told it was a film needing a box of tissues.  Nope, it isn't.  In contrast, I finished Chaim Potok's massive novel, In the Beginning, last night.  The end of this book definitely requires a couple of tissues (well, a handkerchief in my case, since I still use those now-seemingly-despised objects).  Potok seems to take a long time to get to the end; some judicious cutting would have helped, I think, but he weaves and connects themes and images constantly throughout the story, and perhaps without the space to do so the book wouldn't have been so effective. 

It's a pretty gloomy piece: the Jewish narrator, Daniel, is injured in a fall as a baby and damages something in his nasal area, meaning that he is prone to illnesses throughout his childhood.  The operation to cure this only happens in the last fifty pages of the 450 page novel.  His father was once a soldier fighting against the Polish Cossacks, back in his home country of Poland, and he has formed a group to bring his Jewish friends and their families to America, which is supposedly a land where Jews are treated better.  He has been greatly successful in this, and works as a real estate agent in the US.  There's a great sense of Jewish community and fellowship throughout the book, as well as the huge strength of family.  However, Daniel's grandparents on his mother's side are still in Poland, along with a number of other relations.  They dither and shilly-shally about coming to the US until it is too late.  Hitler comes to power, and the Nazi concentration camps come into existence.

We discover that Daniel's mother had been married before, to her current husband's brother. Confusingly he was also called Daniel, and Potok plays with this confusion a number of times in the book.  Daniel was killed by the Cossacks, and in proper Jewish tradition, Max takes his brother's wife as his own.  It wasn't that he had to; he could have put the tradition aside.  But there is obviously great love between Daniel's parents; it's never considered to be a marriage of convenience. The older Daniel was set to be a great scholar, and the younger Daniel inherits his uncle's brains. This turns out not to be such a good thing; he is bullied often in school, and despised for knowing more than those who have to work hard to study. And as he comes into manhood, he makes a decision to study outside the world of Judaism, in order to understand the Torah in a much deeper sense. We don't know whether he truly believes that the Torah is God's word (his younger brother tells him, eventually, that he doesn't, but he keeps up the traditions all the same); rather he is concerned for the argument, the jot and tittle of debate, the disagreements between ancient Jewish scholars, the reading between the lines, the working out why the Torah appears to contradict itself and much more. We read about a good deal of this during the book. Daniel soaks up all this kind of information as he grows, reading deep into the night, and causing those around him bewilderment.

The book almost seems like a biography, though one told in fictional terms. There is no plot as such, and yet in the last pages of the book, what we have learned over many pages about Daniel and his extended family causes us to be deeply affected as we read the last few events. The book is full of vivid characters, of wisdom and a deep understanding of people, particularly Jewish people. The book is soaked in the traditions and teaching of the Jewish people, and in their longstanding complaint against God and the world as to why they are treated so badly. There are no answers to this question - different characters offer different views on it, on why it should be so, and what can be done about it.  None of these things actually alter the suffering of this people.

Reading this book is like going on a long journey: there are varied discoveries, there are people you meet and get to know for a time who then vanish completely, there is a sense of humanity and warmth, and of travelling immense distances from one event to another.  Though there were times, as I've noted above, when it seemed a drawn-out journey, at the end it proved to have been worth the effort. 

Serious and frivolous

It's a little ironic that the hashtag for Blog Action Day 2012 (or any other year, if it comes to that) is #BAD12.  Some bloggers avoid the problem by focusing on @blogactionday12, which is certainly a little better - except that it takes up a lot of room on a tweet.  And others use the hashtag #powerofwe as an alternative, though if you can read that on first attempt, you'll be doing well. 

Anyway, all that aside, it's Blog Action Day 2012 in this part of the world (we still have others telling us it's Blog Action Day 2012 tomorrow) and however we focus on it, it's an interesting exercise in Internet/Blogging unity.  

The Power of We strikes me as not the most inspiring slogan, not just because of its curious grammatical structure (shouldn't it be the Power of Us?), but because it's somehow not as strong as it might have seemed to those who proposed it.  

It's a bit difficult in English that both 'We' and 'Us' are such little words.  They don't have much strength in themselves, being easily overwhelmed by much tougher, longer words like adamantine, or, unstoppable.  But I guess both of these would clutter up the average tweet even more than #powerofwe.  #PowerofAdamantine, or #PowerofUnstoppable are both hashtags that eat up most of your allotted 140 characters.  18 and 19 characters, respectively, if my quick count serves me right, compared to 10 in the other hashtag.

I know that Power of We gives you perhaps more scope - 'we' can mean anything pretty much, when you get down to it; it doesn't hold you in any one corner, and you can be as serious or as frivolous as you like.  (You can check out my level of seriousness or frivolity here, by looking at my blogs from previous BAD days.)  I note that a lot of people are being serious, or even SERIOUS.  That's what BAD tend to bring out in you, of course; you feel that you have to write something that will inspire, or at the very least, show that you aren't a frivolous person who could write a blog post like this one I'm writing on a BAD day.  (I can write frivolous posts even on ordinary bad days, let alone those with capital letters.)

So this year, how can I be more serious about BAD?  A friend of mine has just died of cancer, and that's pretty serious, except that he was a clown by trade, and a magician, and had his own peculiar sense of humour, and has declared that there should be a considerable element of celebration at his funeral.  Serious, but frivolous (in some people's eyes).

I'm reading a great book by Francis Spufford at the moment in which he takes sin very seriously (and is right to do so) while pointing out that a lot of his readers take it very frivolously.

Human nature has a propensity to undercut serious things in life with frivolity, with humour.  Sometimes it's all you can do.  We all know what happens when someone anguishes about something that is indeed deadly serious, but they do it 24/7, never letting any lightness in on the subject.   It can seem almost blasphemous to make a joke with such a person, yet you have to.  As a species, we don't seem to be able to live on the edge of seriousness all the time.

I watched the deeply serious movie, Northfork, last night; it was almost overloaded with seriousness, to the extent that when something that seemed intended to be amusing turned up in it, you failed to laugh, because your frivolous side had been given a lot of warning to stay out of the room.

Maybe the truth is I don't seem to be able to live with seriousness all the time.  Maybe I'm too frivolous a person to be writing a blog post on the Power of We, and perhaps I should have skipped this year's BAD.  Too bad, I didn't skip it, and this is the best I can do while the aroma of a newly-baked chocolate cake fills the room, and it's warmer inside than out (somewhat), and my daft dog (a daft dog needing a bath) plumped down on me when I went and had an afternoon nap (as grandparents are entitled to do) before writing this.

Asbestos

I've more than once been asked to write something about Mesothelioma on this blog (no need to ask why, just accept the fact that's the case) and invariably fail to remember how to spell it. Never mind - accept the fact that the spelling above is correct. Just accept it!

Mesothelioma, as you'll know, is a cancer related to asbestos; that is, people who've worked with asbestos and inhaled the asbestos dust over a period of time are very susceptible to getting the illness. Just so you're really clear about this, mesothelioma is named from the mesothelium, which is a membrane that covers and protects most of the internal organs of the body. It's composed of two layers of cells: one layer immediately surrounds the organ; the other forms a sac around it. The mesothelium produces a lubricating fluid that is released between these layers, allowing moving organs (such as the beating heart and the expanding and contracting lungs) to glide easily against adjacent structures.

Now there's something you didn't know you'd find out when you came to read this blog today. Anyway, if you've contracted mesothelioma you may need a mesothelioma lawyer so that you don't find your employer or ex-employer trying to wriggle out of paying you money in compensation. That's another story. What I'm more interested in today is asbestos itself.

Asbestos is a Greek word meaning 'unquenchable' or 'inextinguishable' - a pretty scary sort of thought in itself, particulary if you've picked up the cancer connected to it. There are other other illnesses you can contract via asbestos: asbestostosis, which affects the lungs, for instance, and lung cancer itself.

Asbestos ain't fun to be around, even though it's very effective as a building material, with various qualities that make it useful. In fact, it's not so much its use in building that's the big problem (although there are hazards), it's what happens when you 'unbuild' it.

Now you might think we've only just discovered in the last couple of centuries that its use brought problems; nope, the ancient Greeks noticed that when their slaves mined asbestos they tended to get sick. Of course, there were always plenty more slaves around, so it didn't matter in those days. (Slaves were only there for use, like other tools and materials.)

There's a story that Charlemagne had a tablecloth made out of asbestos. Certainly it might have saved on the laundering, but you have to kind of wonder what it did to the food....

Mining of asbestos in modern times turned out to be not much better for the slaves - sorry, workers - than it had been in ancient days. Miners got sick just like their forebears and were probably treated only marginally better.

Strangely, asbestos is found naturally in the air outdoors, and in some drinkable water, including water from natural sources. Most people's systems cope with the infinitesimal amounts that they come in contact with, but there have been studies done in which it was found that people living near to asbestos deposits got sick; increasingly, the closer they lived to the deposits. Mesothelioma was one of the main illnesses they contracted.

When the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11, millions of particles of asbestos were released into the air. That's pretty scary.

You look around the world some days and think: this is a pretty okay sort of a place. And then you discover that the Creator seems to have left some very strange things just kind of lying around. Equally, when you think that the ancient Greeks had a fairly good idea that asbestos, for all its useful properties, wasn't that healthy for humans, you have to wonder why we moderns have considered using it in such huge quantities.

Seemingly the only way we learn is when we find we have to fork out large sums of money in compensation.

Twice the paper

Can someone tell me why, when we're all trying to do something for the environment, National Bank of NZ has decided to switch their credit card statements from one page to two? And not only to two pages, but it's now a kind of semi-glossy paper that doesn't break down as easily as the stuff they used before.

Barmy, I call it. Flying in the face of what people are thinking. Totally ignoring its effects on the environment. I've a good mind to change banks, even though I've been with this crowd for decades. I'll go to Kiwi - the homegrown bank, maybe!

The little rant out of the way, I just want to mention the topic of asbestos mesothelioma again. I've done this on here before, and probably will again. Most of the time I come across it in relation to law suits in the States. The web sites that relate to it tend to have screeds of fairly technical stuff on the disease, and a little bit about how to go about suing the company. I'd never seen it on a NZ site before, but discovered one today. I'm not sure who this company is - they seem to be part of a portal site, rather than working on their own. And the approach to writing about the topic of suing a company seems similar to the American one. Maybe it's really a US outfit working off an NZ site?

The portal is T5.co.nz and it opens with this statement: Welcome To New Zealand's Online Business Services Information Website, here you can find some exclusive to online deals, latest offers and information on Insurance companies, Broadband Prices, Dell computers, Apple Computers, and Credit Cards in New Zealand. Hmmm.

God-journals

I've been writing 'God' journals for years - exercise books in which I write the ups and downs of my spiritual life, prayers, cries from the heart, joys, agonies....all the usual stuff that's well known to the average saint. (I used to write a regular 'ordinary' journal as well, but that's kind of got superseded by blogging, where a good deal of what would have gone in the journals in the past has now got out into the public arena.)

Anyway, I glanced back into my previous God-journal this morning, and found it was about the day I had my prostate operation. And thought it might be interesting to go back and look at the journey as it was written up over four or five months from around October 2008 to March 2009. I'm not planning on publishing it online (at least, not as it is) but it's good to see what sort of thing I went through, how I felt about it, and whether my fears and hopes proved to be as extreme as they seemed at the time.

In the opening passage, which was written the day after the doctor at the hospital did a rectal exam and pronounced the dreaded word, cancer, with immodest frequency, is a series of woes and cries. God probably gets thoroughly sick of these, but since He's the epitome of patience, he puts up with them.

Perhaps He can look on them and regard them as being of as little concern (in eternity terms) as a bit of athlete's foot or hand or fingers. We have to struggle rather more to gain perspective.

The picture is of Thérèse of Lisieux, also known as The Little Flower, and the relevance is that she wrote a great deal about her spiritual life (until she died at the age of 24), and, even though she was canonized as a saint within a very few years, she discussed her dark nights, her depressions, her difficulties with faith. Probably a good companion to have on The Way - she was hugely popular in the Catholic scene when I was a child.

Losing It

I finally sat down last night to watch a TV play called Losing It that we videoed two or three months back. At the time it was shown, I was in the middle of my prostate problem period, and, as my wife said, I probably wouldn't have appreciated it much, since it concerns a fellow who loses a testicle to cancer.

Martin Clunes plays a 43-year-old advertising copy-writer, who would probably be coping normally - in spite of his tendency towards hypochondria, and in spite of his obnoxious young boss - but who struggles because of his health issues. (The testicle removal is followed by radiotherapy after the cancer is found in lymph glands.)

It's a good play, with an excellent cast, and ends on a fairly high note, all things considered. Clunes is good as always (as is only a couple of years older than the character he plays, even though he frequently looks older), and his wife (Holly Aird) is a sympathetic person who takes her husband seriously in spite of his hypochondria. Just as well she does.

The Bucket List

Watched The Bucket List tonight (the list you make before you kick the bucket, that is). Without Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman it would probably have been pretty low-key. There are some good lines, and the lines that aren’t so hot still get quality treatment because these two guys know how to put across anything and everything. And it's good to see Nicholson doing some dead-pan comedy again.
The story’s not exactly suspense-filled, but it’s enjoyable enough to watch. Two veteran actors of this calibre are always worth watching. They give life to anything.
Spoiler: It’s a bit odd that Morgan Freeman tells the story, since he dies before Nicholson, and yet tells us about the latter’s death. Writer’s license maybe, but not one that stands up to too much scrutiny.

More on Asbestos

I wrote the other day about mesothelioma, that extremely nasty form of cancer which can be caused by asbestos inhalation, and that particularly affects the membranes of the lung, though it can damage other membranes as well. I’ve been reading up a bit more on the subject now and it’s appalling to discover that the dangers of working with asbestos were established in the 1930s, and the knowledge that asbestos workers were at risk had been known since the turn of the century.
Why did it take so long then, for companies to stop using asbestos? Asbestos was used as insulation on pipes and boilers, as fire retardants, as thermal insulation in blankets, mattresses and gloves, in roofing, weatherboarding, shuttering and cladding, in plumbing and heating systems, in floor tiles and PVC vinyl flooring, as insulating board and in the brake pads of cars, lorries, buses and trams. We were surrounded by the stuff. The moral viewpoint of the companies using it in all these forms must have been tainted by the profit they were making. Why otherwise would they have continued to use it when they knew so many people would suffer?
Perhaps at first they thought their lack of concern would never be followed up on, and that the workers in particular wouldn’t have the gumption to face up to them and demand restitution for what was being done to their bodies. And they were right as far as that went. Workers were in no position to complain, even if they were aware of the damage they were suffering. The system relied on the companies being able get away with it, on one hand, and the workers being largely unaware of their danger, on the other.
Workers would have to suffer not just mesothelioma, but asbestosis, in which fibrosis progressively scars the lungs; calcification of their lungs, and the thickening of the lung’s lining - along with lung cancer - in ever-increasing numbers before society began to take notice.
Workers in a wide range of jobs would be affected, from men (and it was invariably men) working in power stations, men doing painting and decorating, men in ship yards, roofing and construction, men working in railways, as motor mechanics, joiners and laggers, as heating engineers, and of course, men producing the asbestos itself. Families would be affected in vast numbers, as husbands, fathers and sons died painful deaths.
Now, of course, since the 1980s, the problem has come to a head. It’s far too late for the men involved - many of them have long since died and the rest are virtually incurable - but legal companies around the world these days are battling for the men’s families in an attempt to redress the failures of companies to take precautions on behalf of their workers for more than a century. Even with the best of lawyers it’s a long, hard battle.

Our old enemy, Asbestos

Hands up if you know what Mesothelioma is. Okay, give up? Well, perhaps you can help with telling me what the mesothelium is. No? This just isn’t your day.

Well, one of the advantages of writing about things you’ve never heard about is that you learn something. And learning something, as Tony Buzan tells me more than once in a book I’m reading, is what the brain - that incredible instrument - enjoys. So here we go, brain! Try Mesothelioma on for size.

Mesothelioma is a nasty cancer (as if there were any nice ones) that affects the mesothelium. Okay, I know you’re going to tell me you’re none the wiser, but just wait, and I’ll enlighten you. The mesothelium is the protective membrane that surrounds the chest cavity, the abdominal cavity, the cavity around the heart, and the internal reproductive organs. Sounds like a fairly important piece of equipment. I didn’t even know I had a membrane protecting all those bits. One of these days I’m going to do a degree in anatomy and see if I can actually learn what this is that I’m walking around in.

So, what’s Mesothelioma? It’s a form of cancer that’s linked to asbestos exposure. It occurs in the sac lining of the chest (pleural mesothelioma) or abdomen (peritoneal mesothelioma), or the lining of the heart (pericardial mesothelioma). I presume the sac linings are similar to the membranes. If not, that’s another piece of stuff I carry around.

You wouldn’t think we’d be much affected by asbestos anymore, since it’s been banned as a building material for nearly forty years. But my brother-in-law worked with a man at one time who is now making a mint clearing out asbestos from old buildings. It’s a job that requires more than membranes and sac linings; these guys not only wear full-on protective clothing, but work in specially-made tunnels and other such equipment in order to avoid contact with the asbestos.

So unfortunately there is still a need for Mesothelioma treatments. And the worst thing is that this particular cancer has no effective cure. All that can be done is treat it as other basic cancers are treated - which may not be the best option.

And where there are asbestos victims, there are people to work behind the scenes in dealing with claims for the loss of work and health and so on. Belluck and Fox in New York, for example, is one company that specialises in this issue. They investigate where and when the asbestos caused problems and aim to apportion blame. Not that this much helps the victim, usually, as few people who get Mesothelioma pull through. Still, it will give some degree of compensation to the victim’s family.