Allegory
milhayser | March 16, 2016Would it surprise you to learn that the top movie at the North American box office, a computer-animated family film made for children, is a nakedly racist allegory, a celebration of the urban police state, and an insult to the entire animal kingdom and the natural world at large?
The premise of Zootopia is simple: a country bunny named Judy (yes, she's a rabbit) leaves her parents and her hundreds of siblings behind for a life in the big city. The difference between rural and urban living is the first ugly dichotomy the film establishes: farming carrots with your family is framed as a dead-…
mementomori | December 14, 2006Necessita c'induce, e non diletto.*
-Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321
I almost dreaded walking into the exam room. Behind the door sat an elderly woman who had been diagnosed with an aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma earlier this fall. Among the scores of things I said to her during our initial counseling session was that her malignancy, unlike an indolent lymphoma, had to be completely eradicated in order to save her life.
"Either you get rid of it, or it gets rid of you," was my comment then. She understood perfectly what this meant but as all oncologists know, just because patients realize the…
mementomori | October 9, 2006Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, 1915
Last week I had the unpleasant task of informing a patient that his chemotherapy was no longer working. It was obvious that numerous new nodules had appeared on a follow-up CT scan; this matched the rise in his serum tumor marker. True, he had enjoyed an amazing year-and-a-half of essentially no symptoms from his cancer and no toxicity from his chemotherapy. Part of this was due to good luck, I thought, and part of it due to the fact that his tumor shrank tremendously on…
mementomori | September 28, 2006It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.
- Winston Churchill
It goes without saying that oncologists often rely on pictures of tumors to determine whether or not a cancer has responded to treatment. These images of tumors are obtained via x-rays, CT scans, PET/CT scans and other studies. One of the caveats in cataloging pictures of the inside of the human body is that some of us have holes, masses or lumps that we were born with or acquired as a result of a non-malignant event. It behooves the doctor, therefore, to document any…
mementomori | September 21, 2006In case you've forgotten, there is a new type of anti-cancer treatment available called targeted therapy, which attacks specific molecular targets on the outside or within the malignant cell. Such agents differ from standard chemotherapy, which disables or destroys cells that happen to be rapidly dividing, whether they are malignant or benign. On the contrary, targeted therapy medications attach themselves to one or more specific receptors that have control over discrete cellular functions vital to the growth, survival, invasion and immortality of the cancer cell. Everyone understand? No…
mementomori | July 16, 2006While visiting one of my patients in the hospital we reflected together on how he has been able to fight off his metastatic cancer for over two years, much longer than anyone would have ever predicted given how sick he was at the time of relapse.
I told him how tough he was to put up with both cancer and chemotherapy for such a long time. He focused his gaze on me and said, "It was your doing, Doc. You kept me going now for two years."
I thought on this for a brief moment, remembering all the suffering he has been tormented with for such a long, weary time. A sense of shame came over me,…