Mr. Tweedy

Life has been good over the past ten days.  I have eaten well and felt well throughout.  Despite the strong recommendations by the Federal Office of Public Health and my company’s recently changed policy, I didn’t work from home much.  I had things to do in the laboratory that would have been difficult even from my desk at work.  Instead, I set up a pandemic-proof corona cave where I can connect my laptop to a bunch of screens right next to the computer controlling the diffractometer.  Despite a lot of work, things are still not working as they should.  I’ll be back at work next week.

How good life is depends on how you look at it.  In analogy to a piece of kitchen philosophy that says, “whether you think you can do it or you can’t, you’re usually right” (true, by the way), I would argue that, “whether you think life is good or life isn’t, you’re usually right”.  This goes back to what Mrs. Tweedy said in Chicken Run when her perceptive husband noticed the defiant poultry plotting a rebellion: It’s all in your head, Mr. Tweedy.

The good life is certainly in my life.  I have said many times what a lucky person I am.  I have a happy family, a great job and plenty of friends who care about me.  Corona has passed me by almost completely, so far anyway.  The treatment that’s helping me beat cancer has not destroyed my body yet.  Who wouldn’t want to be in my position?  Ok, maybe that’s overdoing it a little but it shows how good I am at deluding myself.

In general terms, then, Mrs. Tweedy was right.  It’s all in the head, and if the head isn’t in the right place, there is nowhere for the rest of it to go.  If you start seeing the negative aspects that everyone’s life inevitable has, you’ll end up miserable.  But in the particular case of the rebellious chickens, Mr. Tweedy had open eyes and an open mind and saw what Mrs. Tweedy couldn’t believe.  With cancer, I choose to be Mr. Tweedy, and it’s served me well.

This week I can add that life is good because the side effects of the anti-EGFR therapy seem to be under control.  The pustules have largely stayed away from my face this time.  My shoulders are a mess of red spots, but I don’t see them and don’t suffer from them.  Even so, I can tell that my skin is suffering.  It’s dry and quick to rip.  I have a cut under my nose where surely I didn’t cut myself.  The tips of four of my fingers are similarly damaged, with cuts and cracks.  I have to go through minor digital contortions to type without pain.  Working in the laboratory can be tricky.  My lips are chapped.

Several times a day, I apply hand and face cream and lip balm.  This helps.  It could all be much worse.  But what if it gets worse?  What if more skin splits open, in more places?  What if I fail to catch developing cracks and madly cream them back to smooth skin?  This could become debilitating and painful.

I have three more sessions to go.  The last one will be at the end of November.  Whatever the scan after that show, I will take a long break until January before submitting to more of this abuse.  My body will thank me and my head have an easier time thinking of life as good.

No news

A week has passed in total silence.  You can take this as a good sign.  Nothing bad has happened to me.  You could also take this as a bad sign, depending on your outlook on life.  Nothing particularly good has happened either.  No news is one of the invisible tags I give to certain posts, and the entire last week would deserve it.

In general terms, Wednesday’s chemo was just like every chemo session before, nothing much to write home about.  I had three-and-a-half thousand francs worth of drugs injected, infused and handed to me as pills.  I got drowsy but felt all right otherwise.  My face still looks like my own.  Either the antibody isn’t working anymore, or my body has already learned how to deal with it.  I hope the cancer hasn’t learned it.

When it comes to the little details, every chemo session (and the couple of days on either side of it) is slightly different.  This is not always worth pointing out.  The most that can be said about Wednesday’s session is that I was much less tired than usually.

I dozed off during the therapy but stayed awake late into the night afterwards.  This was good because in the evening I had to give a talk at a workshop I would have liked to attend in person but which was moved online like so many events these days.  Being only five minutes long, the talk was the worst I’ve ever given in terms of exposure gained relative to time invested.  But it’s better than no presentation at all.  Since coming back from Thailand in late January, I’ve spoken only twice at workshops or conferences.

None of this was worth writing down.  The big news this weekend was that the Swiss government has woken up with a jolt from a month-long slumber and realized that not everything is going well in their perfect little world.  Ueli Maurer, the finance minister, expressed his shock at the recent growth in corona cases in a big interview on Saturday.  He is a total dimwit.

Nationwide, infection numbers have risen threefold over the past couple of weeks.  This increase pales in comparison to the approximately fortyfold steady increase since the middle of June.  Over the past four months, the infection numbers have known only one direction.  The government woke up last Friday and immediately fell into a sharp panic.  New measures to contain the spread of the virus were announced on Sunday afternoon.  They came into force less than 24 hours later.  Two days earlier, the virus didn’t pose any particular danger.  Now, we’re moments from being swallowed whole by the second wave.  Switzerland is an embarrassment unto itself.

The good thing is that the health system is still working fine, even in the middle of the second wave.  The exception is the canton of Schwyz where a large gathering of yodeling yahoos turned into exactly the kind of superspreader event that one would expect this to be.  Canton Aargau, where we live, has relatively low numbers and hospitals operating well below capacity.  My next chemo session is bound to be as uneventful as those preceding it.

Gross negligence

This weekend I read about a woman in Zurich who had got into trouble for disposing of old newspapers illegitimately.  She had taken a pile of papers – correctly bundled and tied with the mandatory cotton string – to the area in her neighborhood where recycling is picked up once a month.  The problem was that she was a week early.  At some point, she received a note from the police about it, which she ignored.  The fact that the police bothers to track down an old lady who dumped a few pounds of paper at the wrong time tells you most of what you need to know about Switzerland.  The rules are many and the problems few.

The development of the corona situation in Switzerland shows that, while the rules might still be the same, the problems have ballooned.  Case numbers have been rising since early June.  The only measures to fight back are mandatory masks on public transport and, in some cantons, in shops and restaurants.  Since the beginning of this month, big public events with more than a thousand attendees can be held again, as if this were 2019.  Countries and regions appear on the official risk list at irregular intervals.  The way it looks now, Switzerland should feature there in all its narcissistic glory.  The second wave has most definitely started.

Daily increase in Covid cases in Switzerland averaged over seven days relative to the previous seven days' average.

My own problems seem trivial in comparison.  The pustules in my face that I mentioned in the previous post have receded.  Ten days of recovering from chemo have left me with reddish patches on my cheeks.  My face looks normal otherwise.  I’m a bit scared of how this will change from Wednesday when I get another dose of the offending antibody, but the quick improvement last week eases my worries.

Besides these current side effects I’m still struggling with numbness in my fingertips and on the soles of my feet.  This was caused by oxaliplatin, a drug I last took in April.  For the first few months afterwards, the problems seemed to get slightly worse instead of better, but it now feels as if I’ve turned the corner.  My fingertips are much improved.  My feet feel better whenever I cover them in cream, which I should do much more often.

The third side effect is the bleeding.  This sounds worse than it is.  It primarily affects my nose and manifests itself in snot that looks like waste from a slaughterhouse.  Sometimes the nose simply bleeds, though that’s rare and quickly stops.  I blame this on the anti-VEGF antibody that messes with blood vessel generation and indeed, the symptoms seem to become milder now that this antibody has been exchanged for another one with a different target.

Last week, the old lady mentioned at the beginning got another letter, this time a penalty order from a court of law.  She had been charged with and found guilty of “pflichtwidrige Unvorsichtigkeit”, which should probably – I’m no expert in legalese – be translated as gross negligence.  It sounds much more ridiculous in German.  This transgression is punishable, as the old lady found out to her detriment, with a fine of 170 franc or two days in prison.

Every once in a while, a public official or media-savvy epidemiologist takes to the mike to state that everything is under control and that [insert the case number at the time] infections per day is nothing to worry about.  These people never explain how inaction might stop, from one day to the next, a progression that has been steady since June.  The large number of new infections is currently explained away with the high number of tests, which completely disregards that we’re now at ten per cent positive tests when a couple of months ago we were at three.  Gross negligence doesn’t do this mess justice.  I would level the charge of willful ignorance, though that’s probably not punishable by law.

A week away

Increasingly, the world looks as if it were falling apart in the most frightfully coordinated way.  It’s the total opposite of the circus clown who rides his little car around the ring.  The parts of his vehicle come off one by one to bouts of laughter from the audience.  First to go is the hood, then the left rear fender, bits and pieces scattered around until the wheels go and he’s left walking around with the steering wheel in his hands.  In contrast, the world seems to be falling apart all at once, and no one is laughing.  Infection numbers are increasing, economies tank, livelihoods are destroyed.  Nothing is as it used to be.

I have recovered from another week of fasting, though much less from the therapy.  The pustules in my face were briefly receding when I wasn't eating, but with another dose of the antibody, they have now returned and been joined by a thousand little red spots on my shoulders and stings on my scalp that are hard to pinpoint despite very little hair obscuring my investigation.  I don’t feel much pain overall but increasing discomfort.  This therapy unfolds in a much less pleasant manner than the two before.  There are four more sessions to go before another evaluation of progress (or progression).  This will be a veritable challenge if my skin gets worse every time, but I'm happy to suffer if the result is right in the end.

We are lucky that we have been affected by the virus in only the mildest way.  We won’t be able to see the grandparents in Argentina this Christmas, but beyond small irritations such as this, the virus hasn’t caused us any harm.  Our jobs keep us busy and in full pay.  Our children are happy and free of worries.  Their childcares are running as always.  They have even started to disburse compensation for the time they were forced to close during lockdown in April and May.  My cancer therapy has never been delayed or rescheduled.  Our friends and relatives are anywhere between fine and just hanging in, but all are healthy.  Only the news and stories from some friends pierce holes into our bubble.  It’s a strange state to be in.

Our children are still small.  They live simple, straightforward lives of wonder, discovery and amazement.  Every day brings them inexplicable experiences.  They see things they’ve never seen before, even if they don’t venture far from their home.  They try to make sense of what they don’t understand, and learn.  They don’t interpret what happens outside the context of their small lives.

This is blissful for me.  I’m daddy, nothing more and nothing less.  What I do and what I look like has little bearing on how they see me.  If I get loud because I don’t like what they do, they accept it and quickly forget the pain I caused them.  They don’t question what I do.  I’m one of their primary points of reference, and they come back to me.  I remain unchanged to them.

I also remain unchanged to them no matter my appearance.  Pus might explode all over my face, but they still jump at me and kiss me and want to play train.  Disfiguration has no meaning to them.  Mom and dad inhabit higher spheres than that.  This is extremely gratifying.  I can forget all side effects and ignore what the drugs do to me because it makes no difference to the children.  It’s a simple bargain.  We give them a warm and loving home that they can fill with their childish energy and occasional craziness, and they revere us as higher beings outside physical shells.

Last week was the first week of the girl’s fall break.  We had registered her for a sports program for small children.  Over five days, she got to try out half a dozen sports and played and ran until exhaustion.  We continued to go to work, free of supervisory obligations.  Every night, the girl came home happy and with more friends than she had before.

This week, we’re in Montreux, a blessed place at the far end of Lake Geneva, by the water but just underneath the Alps.  The town has everything:  a long promenade in the sun, the studio where Queen recorded a lot of their music, a cogwheel railway into the snow, plenty of hikes nearby, hicks that rev the engines of their overpowered cars throughout the night, and beautiful buildings from a time when only the wealthy vacationed here.

We walked along the lake to Chillon castle and spent hours exploring it.  For one of the country’s top tourist attractions, it was much less of a trap than I had feared.  We hiked down from the snow through mud, rocks, a most enchanted forest, and meadows recently abandoned by the cows.  It took us five hours.  The boy’s three-year-old legs were almost up to the task.  We walked up a deep gorge with thundering waters and rode a little train deep into the last working salt mine in Switzerland.  The cherry on the cake was today’s trip up to the glacier above Les Diablerets.  The girl loved throwing herself down snowfields on her belly, head first.  The boy moaned about the cold.

A bridge to nowhere at 3000 m.

Getting away is important for me, with my family but also without.  In the past, business trips once a month helped me refocus, relax and reappreciate what I have at home.  Late last year, business trips helped boost the stubbornness (not strength!) I need to continue my fight.  These trips have come to a complete halt.  I haven’t been away for work since January.  To make up for this and also compensate for a workshop that had been planned for November but has long been canceled, I have put together a weekend in Berlin with a friend.

All looked good a few weeks ago.  Since then, the German state where my friend lives, quiet and unassuming but apparently secretly seditious, has imposed quarantine on returnees from Berlin.  This week, Switzerland did the same.  I hadn’t booked a flight, and the hotel can be canceled without penalty.  Not traveling causes me no pain, but I take it as another indication that the world is falling apart.