LYMPHOMA, HOW DID I GET IT? HOW ABOUT FROM KISSING?

The year was 1957. It was the spring. The drama club of Atlantic City High School had just completed its successful production of Oliver Goldsmith’s “She Stoops To Conquer.” As a performer and a high school senior with a major role in the production—I played the father, Squire Hardcastle—I was a very happy young man. At the cast party the night of the final performance, it took no coaxing to get me to demonstrate my exuberance. I kissed every girl at the party full on the lips and some many more than once.

A day or so later, I didn’t feel well when I got up in the morning. My neck was stiff, the glands in my neck were swollen, and I think I was running a slight fever. I had already gone through my high school graduation by this time, a graduation ceremony at which I was the class speaker, and I was already back at work at my regular summer job as an assistant manager of the refreshment stands on Steel Pier.

Symptoms Disappear

The reader will forgive me, I hope, if I have the sequence of events a little confused. All that I can be sure of all these years later is that I played Squire Hardcastle in “She Stoops To Conquer,” that I kissed a lot of young women classmates at the cast party, and that I was sick shortly after. I can’t even remember if I went to a doctor at the time. I do remember that I was aware of the disease mononucleosis, not uncommon among young people even then, and that I even feared I might have it.

Perhaps a day later, my symptoms disappeared. No more stiff neck. No more swollen glands. No more slight fever. I could put this little health crisis behind me and go on with my life.

Now let’s skip ahead 51 years. I’m sitting in the waiting room of a clinic in Mount Airy, North Carolina, a clinic that is part of the Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital Cancer Center. The Mount Airy clinic, about three-quarters of an hour north of Baptist Hospital off of Route 52 and about three quarters of an hour south of where I live in the mountains of southwest Virginia, is one of the places I’ve been going to to get my blood counts checked, catheters looked at, and other services in between stays at the hospital for chemotherapy and other procedures. As I waited to be called by a nurse, I took note on the waiting room bookshelf of a book with the following title: 100 Questions And Answers About Lymphoma by Peter Holman, MD, Jodi Garrett, RN, and William Jansen (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Sudbury, Massachusetts).

Bring Book Home

Although I felt that by then I knew a lot about this disease that afflicts me and with which I long have battled, I also knew that I did not know everything. Far from it. When I left the clinic that afternoon, I had the receptionist’s permission to take the book with me. Once home, wife Harriet and I began reading. I found much new information in the book, and—yes—much that I already knew. Then I read something I didn’t know before, read it and found that it triggered the strong response of recognition. For years, I had been asking myself, How did I get this disease? It’s been an obsession of mine just as trying to fathom how I got the thyroid cancer that afflicted me in 1966 has been an obsession. Suddenly I thought I had the answer.

On page 26, after a section on AIDS as a possible cause of lymphoma, was the following: “Another virus that may cause lymphoma is the Epstein-Barr virus, which infects many people without causing illness and is the cause of infectious mononucleosis (popularly know[n] as ‘glandular fever’ or ‘mono’ and often called the ‘kissing disease,’ as it is common among adolescents and is spread through saliva).”

Is Kissing Disease Cause?

Could the kissing disease be the cause of my lymphoma? I now think that it is the leading candidate. In fact, I now see it as the likely cause of my thyroid cancer as well. The thyroid cancer was cured through surgery and through the taking of thyroid hormone in pill form at far higher levels than would be called for simply for hormone replacement.

Now that I think I have a cause for the lymphoma, will it have any effect on how I am treated? Not in the least. I will discuss this question with my oncologist, but I believe that the virus stayed in my body just long enough to cause various genetic cancer-causing defects and then was gone.

Ordeal Continues

So where am I in my treatment? Aren’t I finished with all of this by now? No way. It’s not by accident that I have been referring to what I am going through as “an ordeal.” Since I last wrote on the subject, I have had another cycle of chemotherapy, I have had a CAT scan, and I have also had many injections of a product called Neupogen, which is also referred to as “growth factor.” I have also had my stem cells harvested in a process called apheresis or the separation of the blood into its various components in a remarkable machine.

The purpose of all the Neupogen injections was to force my blood system to produce a high rate of stem cells or immature blood cells. These immature blood cells can grow to become white blood cells, red blood cells or hemoglobin, platelets or clotting factor, or other blood components. In other words, a whole new blood system can be regenerated from these stem cells, which is exactly the purpose of a bone marrow transplant. Out with the old and in with the new!

Stem Cells in Deep Freeze

Right now the stem cells of mine that were collected through apheresis are in the deep freeze at the Baptist Hospital Cancer Center. Once I am cleared for the bone marrow transplant, I’ll go through some procedures which I hope to describe in some upcoming postings. Then my stem cells will be thawed and put back in me. The hope is that the resulting new blood system will be resistant to a relapse of lymphoma for as long as possible. As I’ve previously indicated in my postings, the current state of the art in medical science cannot cure me of the form of lymphoma that I have, known as Mantle Cell B Lymphoma. It can only prolong my life. As a lover of life, I’ll take the extra days, weeks, months, years—whatever it can do for me.

Just yesterday I had still more tests—a PET scan, a lung or breathing test, and the dreaded bone marrow biopsy. I was wondering when I would be forced to have the latter, which I have described in a previous posting as akin to torture. Recently a friend of ours had a bone marrow biopsy in a doctor’s office. She described the test as not nearly as bad as we had warned her it would be. How does one account for the difference in experience? Can it simply be explained by the fact that I am the world’s biggest sissy—anyway the tallest?

The physician assistant who performed the procedure on me confirmed what I have long suspected. I have very hard bones—in fact, very very hard bones, the result perhaps of heredity and from having taken very high doses of vitamin D every day for many years to promote the absorption of calcium. An unfortunate side effect of the thyroidectomy I had 42 years ago is that I do not have a functioning parathyroid. Hence every week I need a certain amount of oral Vitamin D to help my body absorb and process calcium. At one time and for a long time, I took a high dosage of Vitamin D every day of my life.

Titanium Bones That’s Me

The unlucky young woman who performed the bone marrow biopsy on me yesterday, who happened to be several months’ pregnant, started calling me “titanium bones” about half way through the procedure. She was struggling to get her instruments to penetrate my hip bone, and I began to feel sorry for her, that is, when I wasn’t in agony from the pain she was causing me.

Why does the difficult, very painful procedure have to be performed on us lymphoma sufferers and other victims of the blood cancers? Because our oncologists need to know what is going on in our hip bone marrow both before and after bone marrow transplant. As adults, the hip bone is where almost all of our blood system is generated. When my harvested stem cells, now in the deep freeze, are put back in me, it is in the hip that they must take up residence and start to regenerate an entire new blood system.

PET Scan Results

By the way what did the latest scan—the PET—show? Am I in complete remission? No, the little cancerous lymph node in my mesentery just doesn’t want to go away. That’s one of the problems with being a relapsed patient. Our cancers learn how to put up quite a fight against the measures taken to get rid of them. On the other hand, because this was a PET scan, a nuclear medicine technique that measures not just structures but also processes, I did get quite encouraging information on just how active the little killer is at this point. Its activity has gone down by half--such encouraging news that I am now cleared to proceed with the main event, the bone marrow transplant.

The next time I do a posting to Mind Check I’ll probably be writing from the bone marrow transplant ward of Baptist Hospital. When I feel up to it, I’ll be letting everyone know how I’m doing as I go through the challenging and sometimes life-threatening procedure. It all starts for me on Tuesday, July 1. Good luck to me. I hope you all have a happy July 4th. You all know where I’ll be on the 4th.

To see other examples of my writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. If all goes well, the first of the two books I hope to publish this year will soon be off press. Full title of this first one is Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat, An Epic For Our Time.

Murdoch McLoon is an on-demand book. This means that when you order it, as I hope you will, the publishing service, which is called Xlibris, prints a copy especially for you and then ships it to you. By the way Murdoch McLoon is a story poem with the theme of one of the major issues of our day. It was written to be light-hearted and even funny in parts and gripping in still others, and I think it will be easily understood and enjoyed by everyone. To order Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat, call 1-888-795-4274, or see the website http://www.Xlibris.com, or send an e-mail to Orders@Xlibris.com.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft

POETRY CAN PLAY A VITAL ROLE IN MAKING OUR WORLD BETTER, SAYS POET IN PREFACE TO NEW BOOK

The following essay was written to serve as the preface for a new book of poetry entitled City Above the Sea And Other Poems that I expect to publish this year. It is one of two books of poetry of mine that I anticipate will be coming out this year. The other, which will appear first, is entitled Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat. Both books will be available via on-demand Internet publishing later this year from Xlibris at the Xlibris bookstore and its affiliates: http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore.

The 34 poems that compose City Above The Seas And Other Poems were written over many years, in fact, just after publication of my first book of poetry, I Will Mean (Meanings Press, Camden ME, 1975) and well into our new century, a period of about 30 years. In fact, the earliest of these poems were written about the same time as Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat, first written in 1975 and subsequently revised in 2005 and published earlier this year.

Both Rhyming And Non Rhyming Pieces

These 34 poems are a mixture of rhyming and non rhyming pieces and some of them were presented to a live audience to the accompaniment of a jazz band at a Starbucks Coffee Shop in downtown Washington DC. In terms of subject matter, they may be described as autobiographical, philosophical, political, social, or visionary—or, in the broad sense—religious. They may also be described as embodying my concept of how poetry may be written—as highly expressive, declarative, exhortative, and prophetic, as well as the basis of dramatic narrative, as in Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat.

They embody my conviction that good poetry does not have to be plaintive and full of personal angst or always striving for clever allusion or having to turn back upon itself.

Beat Movement Extols Declarations

With the advent of the beat movement in the 1950s, poetry seemed to be moving toward a more declarative approach. This was an exciting time for poetry and for me as a young man just getting through high school and college. Poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti created great excitement and were often highly political and specifically left wing. Unfortunately, as the fire of the Beat Movement began to fade so too did the spark that these poets brought to the form itself. It was this flame that I sought to keep alive in I Will Mean in 1975 without having to resort to the political and economic extremism of the left.

In a poem like “Solomon Bricker,” which is included in this volume, I attempted to depict a middle class or “bourgeois” hero, namely my maternal grandfather and to attempt to present his virtues without exaggeration. It was my grandfather’s quiet triumph that, while facing the range of challenges of daily life he was able to start small businesses and to work to make them a success against a backdrop of the cycles of business upturns and downturns.

Not Immune To Fade Ideas

Interestingly, my grandfather was not unmindful of the political and economic currents of his time and while fulfilling the role of a usually successful middle class business manager and shop keeper would occasionally succumb to the fantasies of socialism that were so prevalent at the time. This after all was the period of the rise and seeming success of the Soviet Union, a delusion that would become clear under Mikel Gorbachev.

As I assert previously, it was the best of what I saw in the Beat poetry movement as well as the best of poetry in general that I was striving to give life to in I Will Mean, my first book of poetry—the idea that poetry could tell us what to do and how to live without having us tear down the middle class for being so…well, so middle class. For me, I will admit it, the best poetry has always been close to religion. I believe that and will take that belief with me to whatever comes after this world, if anything, for me.

Role Models Are The Greats

My role models have been a wide range of the greats of poetry in English such as John Milton, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, and many many others. Most of them were practitioners of the art before the curse of modernism set in with the work of its most famous or infamous practitioners, namely Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. The greats, specifically those who practiced in the 19th century such as Emily Dickinson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning and Walt Whitman, managed to avoid the excessive and silly personifications of Victorianism, such as are found far too frequently in the works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The curse of modernism, as I call it, from which I continue to struggle to extricate poetry to this day, carried with it several assumptions. The first was that the poet could say anything he wanted no matter how wrongheaded and disgracefully immoral so long as he said it with conviction and in the name of the art of poetry. Hence Ezra Pound, the antisemite, traitor to the United States, devotee of dubious economic theories and upholder of the insidious philosophy of fascism—and this was during World War II, no less—was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949.

Obscurity Upheld As Virtue

A second conviction is that obscurity in poetry is a value to be cherished and the more layers of scholarship and research, as well as the more layers of allusions that a poetical work is overweighted with the better. For this dubious feature of modern poetry we once again have Ezra Pound as well as others to credit. During his lifetime Pound was credited with the breadth of his scholarship as reflected in his poetical work, which embodies his admiration for various pogroms, witch hunts, slaughter of the innocent, and other examples of humanity at its worse.

Inevitably the two books I have the privilege of coming out with this year will be looked at for their similarities as well as their contrasts. The most obvious similarity is in the belief in technology and the hope for the future because of it that is a strong interest of mine and which I have been motivated to put in works like Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat and City Above The Sea And Other Poems. I can’t say exactly where this belief and this hope come from other than to attribute them to the work of a mysterious universal spirit. In the last stanza of one of the short poems in City Above The Sea And Other Poems, entitled “Say There Is Beauty,” I say the following:

Invention, discovery, outrageously creative act.
The new begets a resonance,
the new clatters through space.

The new such as the concept of the computer and the concept of the Internet and the promises of the space age have the power to change our whole universe of experience, and they have. They give us hope that humankind will solve other problems that confront us such as the ill effects of global warming. It is my belief that poetry can play a central role in giving energy to the idealism that is embodied in this belief. We must believe that we can solve our problems, that we are not hapless victims. We must believe that we can make our world better. We must believe that poetry has an important role in making our world better.

For more examples of the writing of Stephen Alan Saft, please see the comprehensive site http://www.sasaftwrites.com.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft