Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Eve, 2007

Hello. Forgive me for having been out of touch, dear reader. Unsaved documents, Manhattan interludes, and life’s contingencies, all those things that make for good reading, have prevented me from blogging. Cut/paste/undo/do/don’t do/do again. Manhattan is, or, perhaps better, represents another world. The people, the subway, the skyscrapers, are so different to the Midwestern experience. A woman from Illinois oogled a gargoyle and exclaimed about not seeing such things in Chicago. Brigitte, my loving mate, and a student of worldliness, is a great cultural translator in terms of how to facilitate sophistication and negotiate civility. She is my existential guide. Also, thank you dear Bonnie Q. for the wonderful mix disc. R.J., Les, as always, shout outs to you and yours. Happy Thanksgiving.

The Story of an Owl

Once upon a time there was a flock of owls that lived in a forest in a small town. At some point in time a coterie of these doves decided to form an intimate, close-knit group that shared their mutual worries, hopes, and dreams. Within this parliament of owls, which is what they liked to call themselves, a certain owl became sick, his name was Oscar.

Now Oscar was a very proud owl. His greatest asset was also his gravest limitation, he always aimed to please, but he had the impossible idea that he could please everyone. Another one of his flaws was thinking himself impervious to infirmity and above any and all predicaments that might befall him. One day, after many years of preying on mice, and priding himself on his good fortune and impeccable health, he developed a pain in his wing. After ignoring it for some time, thinking it was the result of years of ardent mice catching and overzealous night flying, he resigned himself to the fact that it was time to see a veterinarian. The owl doc, like all good practitioners, began going down the list of possible causes, appealing to blood work, urine samples, and ultrasounds for a possible answer. And when these diagnostics failed to reveal a cause, he went to the next level of tests (which all owl insurance companies dread) the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging Test). Upon getting the results, the kindly vet called Oscar into his office and informed him of some worrisome results. They had found some enlarged lymph nodes in his breast and needed to send him to an owl oncologist specialist. He was then told he would need an MRI guided biopsy to see just what was going on in theses pesky nodes.

One week later the vet called Oscar, told him there were malignant cells growing within, and that a P.E.T>/CT scan (you’ll have to look up these acronyms yourself, dear reader) would be needed. The news was not good. When Oscar saw the results that highlighted the world beneath his beautiful, shiny feathers, his gizzard and surrounding organs were lit up like a Christmas tree. In explaining why, the vet told him that the cancerous tumors within him were diffuse, meaning everywhere within his abdominal area. The vet dutifully informed the now saddened and fearful owl that that he would need to begin chemotherapy immediately, and although this has been a long preface, what this tale is really about is the progression of the treatment to date. In fact, it’s about what the owl had to tell his group now, the day after his sixth infusion.

As I said, this owl had the most beautiful, shimmering feathers one could imagine. He was a preening, prideful owl, who loved to strut his stuff, perhaps a bit too much, but what can one say, every owl is different, and this owl loved his look. No mirror ever passed him by, and he always loved what he saw. On a sunny day in late July Oscar underwent his first chemo, and all went fine. After his appointment he flew to the shores of Lake Superior, slept by day, hunted by night, and enjoyed the healthful air and balmy/salubrious breezes of the summer air. Chemo number 1, you see, was not that bad. Oscar rode the night breezes, preened his proud feathers, and snoozed in the shade in blissful peace.

Number 2 was much the same, with the exception that his full-throated who-who was not what it once was, and his lustrous plumage was starting to loosen. Although he was told the effects were cumulative, he scoffed at the idea, knowing that he was different and that he would prove the exception to even the owl doctors’ wisdom. I mean, who, make that who-who, could know more. But Oscar was stubborn, prideful, obstinate and oblivious, undoubtedly the result his failure to de-mythologize his existence at an early age. Infusion number 4 served to contradict this disease of reckless romanticism by refusing to conform to Oscar’s expectations. During the second of the three-week treatments, Oscar’s temperature began to rise. His body began to shake, his bones began to ache, and the sweat poured from his feathers, drenching the straw below his perch and mightily worrying his fellow owls. After making it through a feverish night, Oscar reluctantly called his vet (please excuse my intermittent use of doc and vet) at which point he was ordered to the emergency room and given a 3 hour infusion of antibiotics. The throat was sore, the toes were numb, and the bones ached, but he decided if this was as bad as it got, no problem. Now one of his owlish problems from the beginning was his insistence on carrying on as if he wasn’t sick. Where other sick owls had pared down their activities to accommodate their infirmities, Oscar was adamant on living life as usual. Where he had always been the lead hunter as they tracked down mice and snakes, he saw no reason to change that now. If a guard was needed to alert the flock to hunters, Oscar was the Owl for the job. The trouble was, Oscar’s affliction was of a different mind than Oscar. As his beautiful feathers slowly fell out he could no longer escape the inevitable side effects of the medicine, nor could he give up his alpha-owlish qualities. He lost his speed, stamina and, perhaps most important for an owl, his shrewdness and never failing wisdom.

And so came the fourth chemo. With the exception of the numbness spreading from his wings tips to his talons, he had an easier time of it. True, it was painful for him to achieve his daily constitutionals, and the mangier and mangier look he was displaying were a blow to his owlish pride, the actual fact of a brief respite from the accumulating side-effects were a welcome relief. Number five was next. Make no mistake about it, Oscar was still intent on leading the parliament, while the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak. His throat constricted to the point that his mighty call went from an owlish pride to a dovish coo. His garbled sounds became unintelligible to the other birds and he tried to keep his larkish tears to himself. He could no longer hide the fact that he was a different bird, an ailing owl. He tried to avoid making droppings of any kind to avoid the burning and murmured sympathies of the other owls. Did I mention that Oscar lived in an owl town in southern Michigan by the name of Owl Arbor. Being a town of all owls, they would dress as such, wearing owl capes, owl knickers, and owl finery of every shape and size. One night, Oscar, preparing for an owl extravaganza, had a special velvet cape picked out especially for this grand event, but when he went to put it on his numbed talons made it such that he couldn’t button it. Oscar cried, and he knew that, yes, this was real. He was a different bird.

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Madness or genius? The most bizarre tests conducted in the name of scientific inquiry. (By Ian Sample, taken from the “Guardian Weekly” 09/11/07)

One Friday in August 1962, Warren Thomas, director of Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, raised his rifle and took aim at Tusko the elephant. With a squeeze of the trigger he scored a direct hit on the animal’s rump, firing a cartridge full of the hallucinogenic drug LSD into the animal’s bloodstream. The dose was 3,000 times what a human might take for recreational purposes, and the results were extraordinary. Tusko charged around and trumpeted loudly for a few minutes before keeling over dead.

The case of Tusko the elephant is among 10 of the most bizarre experiments carried out in the quest for knowledge and reported in New Scientist magazine last week. If there is a fine line between madness and genius, many of those involved firmly crossed it.

In one experiment in the 1960s, 10 soldiers boarded an aircraft for what the believed was a routine training mission from Fort Hunter Liggett air base in California. After climbing to about 5,000 feet the plane suddenly lurched to one side and began to fall. Over the intercom, the pilot announced: “We have an emergency. An engine has stalled and the landing gear is not functioning. I’m going to attempt to ditch in the ocean.” While the soldiers faced almost certain death, a steward handed out insurance forms and asked the men to complete them, explaining it was necessary for the army to be covered if they died. Little did the soldiers know they were completely safe. It was an experiment to find out how extreme stress affects cognitive ability, the forms serving as the test. Once the final soldier had completed his form the pilot said: “Just kidding about that emergency folks!”

One of the most gruesome experiments to make New Scientist’s list was performed by the Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov. In 1954 he unveiled a two-headed dog, created in the lab by grafting the head, shoulders and front legs of a puppy on to the neck of a German Shepherd dog. Journalists brought in to examine the creature noted how milk dribbled from the stump of the puppy’s head when it attempted to lap milk. Occasionally, the two would fight, with the German Shepherd trying to shake the puppy off, and the puppy retaliating by biting back. The unfortunate creation lived for six days.

Several attempts to unravel the mysteries of human behavior also make the list. Clarence Leuba, a psychologist from Yellow Springs, Ohio, set out to discover whether laughing when tickled was a learned or spontaneous reaction, and commandeered his newborn son and later daughter into the study.

Then there was Lawrence LeShan, a researcher from Virginia who in 1942 stood in a room of sleeping boys repeating “my fingernails taste terribly bitter” to see if it broke their nailbiting habit.

In another experiment, a doctor called Stubbins Firth from Philadelphia drank fresh vomit from yellow fever patients to prove it was not a contagious disease. He claimed to be right when he failed to become ill in 1804, but scientists have since shown yellow fever is extremely contagious, but has to be transmitted directly into the bloodstream.

A similarly flawed experiment by Robert Cornish at the University of California in the 1930s tried to bring dead animals back to life by tilting them up and down on a seesaw. The few that did stir back to life momentarily after death were severely brain damaged.

Predictably, sex also features. When investigating the sexual arousal of male turkeys, researchers at Penn State University were impressed to see that the birds would attempt to mate with lookalike dummies. Piece by piece they removed parts of the dummy and found that the males were still highly aroused when presented with a head on a stick.