Chemotherapy, or: Your Miracle Aging Drugs

 Consider the alternatives, pal, consider the alternatives. 

That's what I tell myself as I remember the day's events: I was on my way home from my dose of Eribulin, the latest miracle drug, "a laboratory-made form of halichondrin B, a substance derived from a sea sponge," says the nearest reliable site. Chemos come from surprising sources--another one comes from yew tree bark.

This one, like all that I have experienced, is no beauty treatment. Partly it's the shutdown of estrogen receptors--not that you don't have any estrogen anymore; pleasant sources of the hormone include broccoli, red wine and orgasms--but the conveyor belt is slowed or closed. This results, as far I can tell from a stare into the mirror, include dryer skin--the lines in the forehead become more pronounced and hello crow's feet! Dewlaps, lines here, lines there--a plastic surgeon's dream. But I'm not in the mood for plastic surgery.

Plus there's the hair loss. Without eyelashes, take it from me, you look like a lizard. Eyebrows also do something for your face--I like them--but I guess one could always go for that penciled-in thin 1920s-30s look but, well, no.

Anyway, there was I was, heading home, with the fuller brush chemo look on my head and my missing-a-few eyelashes look when I stopped before crossing the street: a child waited on a toddler balance bike with her dad, who was explaining she couldn't cross yet because a car was coming. Especially in Germany (most of Western Europe) you don't let a child see you cross if a car's there or the light's red. 

Then the child didn't want to cross. It was fun to watch the car park. Her dad said, "Lass die alte Dame rübergehen!" (Let the old lady cross!)

Ouch. 

Fast forward: a few hours later I was having dinner with my two of my children and my son's girlfriend at the local Chinese restaurant. 

 The waitress was watching us. "Are you the grandma!" 

"No, I'm the very old mom!" I said.

 I really must do something about my skin and my hair. But I don't want to invest in surgery or La Mer Creme de La Mer face creme at Sephora or Nordstrom's or similar items. 

Hmm. Cucumbers?

 

On the Arrest of Gabriel Olds

 

When I read about the arrest of Gabriel Olds, the actor, I remembered him playing  a rapist on Grey’s Anatomy—pushed in a wheelchair, he’s somehow threatening the person pushing him.

I’m not sure this memory is accurate, since I can’t find the scene on YouTube, but he’s done a lot of television. I, however, have often thought of him as the son of one of my favorite poets, Sharon Olds, and of the psychoanalyst husband who left her. Did the husband push an inhibited wife into psychoanalysis and then not like it when she got cured and wrote vivid, graphic, uninhibited poems? That was always my theory. He loved his privacy? Didn't realize the poems were more about the human condition than about him? 

I loved her poems about her children. In one, “The Clasp,” her daughter, four,  about two years older than her son, is always pushing him over, face-first. The exhausted mother and narrator—they’re all home with colds—clasps the daughter’s wrist hard for a moment, and reflects on that moment. Oh, the moment when a mom loses her temper on no sleep! I know that moment well.

In another poem she observes her five-year-old boy accidentally breaking things. Filled with energy, he looks with amazement at a sieve he’s just busted and pees on the lawn. The poems ends with a humorous jab, the house collapsing behind the kid. Oh, I know that feeling too. There are more poems about her son, one in which as a seven-year-old he plays tough guy at his birthday party, and another  about him becoming a man.

Could this well-observed child, son of two Upper West Side professionals, really be a rapist who lures women in with his charm and violently assaults them? It doesn't sound likely. Unless the kid sustained a serious head injury or is on drugs.

 He has pleaded not guilty. I hope he really is not guilty.  His mug shot shows shock, horror; he can't believe his situation.

Losing the Eighties--or not?

Dr. Ruth, Richard Simmons and Shannon Doherty gone all in one week? Feels like the eighties are dying.Dr Ruth was my absolute favorite--so honest, so outspoken, so entertaining, and so humorous: 

 

 

 

How we looked forward to her radio program, "Sexually Speaking." I even knew someone who knew someone who went to school with Dr. Ruth's kids--and said they always had the best snacks in their lunchboxes. Even stuff like Hostess cupcakes. 

I can't work up as much grief about the other two, though they did define the era. I also can't help but wonder wistfully what life might have been like if a certain real estate magnate had quietly moved to a Scottish golf course and remained there.

Instead:

Bang bang bang bang bang!

Hey! Lemme get my shoes on!

Lemme pump my fist!

Post-Debate Chicken Soup

It's good for you and soothes the soul, especially if you're thinking He With The Worm Supposedly Removed is the next POTUS. Or the Orange Narcissist.

Supposedly Biden had a virus. He should eat some of this soup:

Ingredients:

Chicken thighs or pieces--I used organic chicken thighs ("Bio" chicken in Germany. I've also tried making this with a "Suppenhuhn," literally a "soup hen," meaning a somewhat "mature" or elderly hen that would be too tough to eat if baked.)

If you want chicken melting off the bones into lovely little pieces that flavor the soup, forget the Suppenhuhn. I got a frozen one at my local Rewe--defrosted first, and it did make a very good broth, but in the end the chicken didn't break up--might as well have been rubber. Tossed it. 

Pack of "Soup Greens"--another German specialty. Everything you need! A leek, a few chunks of celery root, carrots and parsley. Of course you can buy all these separately and substitute other vegetables if you wish. 

Water--a large Dutch oven is the way to go. Arrange the chicken pieces at the bottom, fill 'er up with water. And here is the very important part: add nothing else. Yet. I'll tell you when.

Chicken or veggie bouillon--about a tablespoonful. To taste. 

Juice of one whole lemon. Essential.

Your first job is to bring the chicken to boil and then keep at a high simmer for a long time. Two to four hours. The other ingredients--yes, everything--come much later, and don't add the parsley until the last minute. Details below:

Once you've put the chicken and water on the burner, cover the Dutch oven for about five minutes, then tilt the lid slightly so that a little steam escapes and the water doesn't boil over. 

About every fifteen minutes, skim the scum off the top. This is ideal: 

Skim that scum, rinse the sieve, repeat, repeat, repeat. Easy to multitask--write, iron, vacuum and just come back to skim the scum until finally it disappears and you have chicken broth and fat and no scum. Cover again, tilting the lid again, and keep cooking till the chicken starts to get soft and it looks like it's about to slide from its bones. 

Meanwhile--you're rinsing the carrots (no need to scrape them; the nutrition is better if you don't, but do rinse and cut off the ends), likewise rinse the leek and celery root and parsley. Set aside the parsley and chop everything else and add it to the soup. Stir. Cover, tilting lid again. 

At some point add the lemon and stir. If you can poke at the chicken with a wooden spoon and break it up, do so. Add the bouillon. Slice the parsley--best way is just one stroke, not a lot of chopping, and medium-sized pieces. Add. 

Pour your soup into a pretty bowl. This is important too. Consume. Yum!

I usually have about two servings. When the pot cools down, put the rest in freezer bags--you'll have three or four. So good for those times when you're trying to keep body and soul together.

 

 

 

 

Trumpty Dumpty Had a 34-Count Fall

Few can resist that Trumpty-Dumpty phrase--John Lithgow produced amusing rhymes in his 2020 poetry collection, Dumpty. The banner headline of today's New York Times, TRUMP GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS, pleases me. 

I never expected the conviction, and a large part of me knows the king of the weasels is already squiggling through loopholes, but for this moment, I am pleased.

I was all set to write about mothproofing--something I'd talked myself into thinking would be less of a big deal here in Berlin. I'm surrounded by concrete. Yes, I'm a two-minute walk from a park, but the only greenery around here is my houseplants. A window ledge of cacti, another with a rubber tree and similar foliage--nothing moths enjoy. 

So I'd delayed finishing the mothproofing, though I had a very few Nexa Lotte strips tucked in among my wool and silk scarves. 

Then I heard something flapping around at midnight. A moth so fat he could barely fly was flitting around my bathroom; he looked like he'd just enjoyed a four-course meal. 

And I'd just bought a raccoon coat at the Boxhagenerplatz flea market! Oh, did I hurry off to DM the next morning to scoop up more Textilschutz-Säckchen and Nexa Lotte.

Wouldn't it be lovely Trump responded to his conviction as moths respond to Nexa Lotte and Textilschutz-Säckchen? 

I can dream!

Student Protests: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Yesterday, walking through the "Roads Not Taken" exhibit at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, I thought of Joni Mitchell's lyrics:

"Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"

Looking back from 1989, to 1848, the year the first attempt at a democratic society failed, the exhibit explores what might have happened. If Hitler had been assassinated, for instance. Inevitably, the exhibit compares the tragic outcome of the Tienanmen Square massacre with the success of the relatively peaceful protests ending the DDR.

The German DDR protesters, like the Chinese advocates for democracy, were asking for basic human rights: the right to freely discuss ideas and the right to gather together in order to do so. The right to criticize the government.

I cannot help but compare these protests with the spectacle today on American campuses. In the age of information, these students are remarkably ignorant of history and reality. The most absurd group, Queers for Palestine, have no idea how badly Palestine treats gay people. Honor killings, rape, torture, are widely accepted.

Those chanting "from the river to the sea" can't name which river and which sea, and couldn't cough up basic Wikipedia info on the history of the founding of the state of Israel. Much of it is really this dumb. 

We are in the process of watching what we've got--shreds of democracy--go. Protesters favoring Palestine believe Israel is a "white supremacist" state. The only democracy in the middle east, Israel has many Arab citizens who vote and participate in the free society that still exists. One glance at the tenets of Hamas--it believes in wholesale destruction of Israel--should be enough to discredit it. If that's not enough, the cultural hatred of gay and queer people should tip off young demonstrators that they're giving up something they won't know they had until it's gone.

The "Roads not Taken" exhibit takes its title from Robert Frost's poem--that, too, is significant: America is founded on the right to choose between different roads. Other countries have traditionally admired that idea. As Douglas Murray has pointed out, refugees are fleeing to America and other democratic countries--they're not heading for Russia and China. But now, Chinese students studying in the USA compare the political mood to the Chinese one: "One engineer had taken a Pitt psychology class that frequently touched on race, and he said that it reminded him of the political-indoctrination classes at Sichuan University," a recent New Yorker essay reports.

"Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" 

Berlin: Barreling Down the Street

Here's one of the things everyone loves about Berlin--the Ampelmännchen, or "little walking men" created in 1961 by traffic psychologist Karl Peglau. The green one saunters along like he owns the world, hat tilted back on his head. The red one reminds me of the robot in Lost in Space; arms spread, hat on very straight, he means business.

Wandering the neighborhood, I come across these gentlemen celebrating the opening of a new bakery. As baklava (or something like it) gets passed around, they make music . . . and notice the man playing a bagpipe--one boasting a bright red Scots tartan. Another thing I love about the place: blasts of many cultures everywhere you go.

And nobody's shy. They'll tell you exactly what they think:

Berlin is to be savored.

Boomer in Berlin

I dropped ten years on the first day. Yes, it's paradise. The sounds of the city. The all-night "Spätis," meaning "Laties"--they're open 24/7. Lots of them, too. Restaurants: the Uzbeki one, the Brazilian one, the pizza place. A Lidl and a Rewe a short walk away. People on the street look purposeful and stylish--or stoned and stylish. A woman ran up to compliment me on my velvet cancer lady hat--I did not inform her it was just a cancer lady hat--because she admired the way the deco butterfly went with my scarf. Which it did. 

Where I'd been living for the last twenty-odd years, that scarf/butterfly combo would have been considered eccentric. Or disreputable. All the other ladies wore S. Oliver and Jack Wolfskin and similar brands--expensive and unflattering. 

I love thrift and second-hand clothing stores.

 "But the clothes could have come off a dead body!" said one of my German lady friends. I did not say, "there are these things called washing machines." But I continued to buy everything at the second-hand store. There was only one good one in all of that small city.

But here! Flea markets galore. Second-hand stores all over the place. For furniture, too. 

A committed New Yorker, I used to mourn the loss of what I considered the best city in the world. 

Berlin isn't second-best. It's better. Paris a close second? Maybe. New York is all about the very rich, the very poor, the ugly hypodermic needle skyscrapers puncturing the air over Central Park and casting long shadows. The $19.00 glasses of wine in very ordinary restaurants. The potheads toking away on Central Park West--and everywhere else. No, thank you. Yes, I know there are potheads here--but it's still possible to escape the smell by walking fast.

I live on the ground floor in an apartment that was apparently unoccupied for a long time. Beer bottles, worn-out shoes and occasional unidentifiable detritus appear on my window sill. This evening, two drunk dudes were whooping it up right outside my window--beer bottles clinking, whoop, whoop, har-de-har-har. 

I Googled "drunk dudes outside window, Berlin--call Police?" Not a useful search term. Then I tried translating, "Excuse me gentlemen, could you be a bit more quiet? I live here and need a bit of quiet."

Entschuldigen Sie, meine Herren, könnten Sie bitte etwas leiser sein? Ich wohne hier und brauche jetzt etwas Ruhe. 

"Oh, yeah!" said one, when I asked. "I saw the light in your window." His companion smiled, apparently too plastered to speak, but they were both very sweet and offered to drink across the street. La la la la la!

The Elacestrant Extravaganza

It's the latest in cancer meds for women with estrogen-positive, progesterone negative, Her2 negative or low metastatic breast cancer. 

Another funny name of another funny pill. Supposedly it looks like Viagra:

Needless to say it doesn't have the effect I'm told Viagra has, but how would I know? I'm a Viagra virgin. Never took the stuff, never saw the stuff. Elascestrant might also be compared to "that gentle little blue pill" advertised for insomnia back in the day. Like most cancer meds, it's pretty strong stuff, but the pretty blue patina makes it seem friendly. To me, anyway. And that name--where did they get that one? Elacestrant? Sounds elastic, like a rubber band that'll snap you back to health. The Facebook page for this one sounds like the drug does do that --for some. Hoping to be among those chosen few, I'm happy to report almost no bad side effects. Any tummy trouble is resolved with chamomile or peppermint or fennel-anis-caraway tea--or a couple of bananas. And there are good side effects: I'm getting my eyelashes and eyebrows back. Fuzz is creeping across my cranium. Can't wait til I have enough to buy hairdye.

Another Fifties-Style Chicken Recipe

Bored? Want something new? This is easy and tasty. Ingredients:

Chicken drumsticks

Salt and pepper

Vegetable of your choice (I used a red bell pepper)

Elephant garlic

Can of creamed asparagus soup (or mushroom, or anything else you think might go with chicken).

If you want to get fancy, a container of cream. I didn't happen to have any around when I made this, but it turned out fine. 

 Steps:

Arrange chicken legs in Pyrex baking dish

Slice pepper and distribute pieces around chicken. Ditto with garlic

Salt and pepper to taste

Pour can of soup over all:

 Put in oven at about 200º C (about 400ºF) for an hour or less. Serve with rice or polenta:

Pleasant with white wine, rosé or beer.

The Death of Aleksei Navalny

I can only imagine it--what I imagine arises from recollections of reading the English translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1962 novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  Arctic circle cold, near-starvation rations, chains, isolation. For months, Navalny's family has been reporting that he's not getting food--he was allowed to buy bowls of oatmeal, but these were only shown to him. He was not allowed to eat them. Did he just die of starvation or was he killed? After all the man has been through--the poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent, the trumped-up legal humiliations, charges, prison--I somehow still thought he'd survive. I hoped for an outcry, a rescue, a return to civilian life; I hoped he'd be up on YouTube again.

What matters is his courage; no matter the consequences, he said what he thought. I hope he will be remembered; I hope his work will be valued; I hope his sacrifice will move Russia toward the beginnings of democracy. 

As President Biden said, “He was everything Putin is not. He was brave, he was principled, he was dedicated to building a Russia where rule of law existed and where it applied to everybody.”

The Perfect Salad

 

Ingredients:

One elephant garlic clove, pressed (or any large clove of garlic)

Lemon juice from half a large lemon

Good greek olive oil (slosh it in--a tablespoon or two)

Fresh ground pepper to taste

Bits of deli chicken slices and/or ham

A ripe avocado

Grated fresh Parmesan or Grana Padano

Most of a head of Boston lettuce (but you could use other)

First, press the garlic and add the lemon juice and olive oil. Beat all together and add the pepper to taste. Then the meat, the avocado (in small pieces), the Parmesan. Last the lettuce. Toss well. Enjoy with a glass of rosé. 

I find this the perfect meal to accompany the binge-watching of Suits. I like pretending lawyers can really pull these stunts. 

You might chase your meal with a square or two of Tony's Caramel Sea Salt Chocolonely. Mmm, mmm good.

Down By the Old Crock Pot

Haven't used the thing in a blue moon. But why not? It's there, it does everything for you, and all you have to do is load it up. 

I loaded as follows:

A piece of parchment paper (since fish otherwise tends to stick to the bottom of the pot)

A few slices of fresh fennel

A piece of frozen salmon

Salt and pepper

A slosh of white wine

A handful of cocktail tomatoes

A few slices of lemon on top:

Took about an hour and a half, since the fish was rock-solid frozen. Over rice, it was quite delicious. A glass of wine, a plate of perfect fish, and Netflix (binge-watching Suits at the moment).

                                                        What could be bad?

 

Nikki Haley on Racism: What is Right, What is Wrong

 Nikki Haley said, “We’re not a racist country. We’ve never been a racist country.”

That's true and untrue. The Declaration of Independence is remarkably forward-looking. In 18th century colonial America, women could not vote--about 60% of men, mostly white, mostly landowning landowning men could. Having any voters at all was a new, radical idea. And the idea of all citizens voting was there--it just took a while to include women and nonwhite persons.

The famously ambiguous Declaration states: "all men are created equal," a loopily insane statement if taken to mean "of the same talents and attractiveness"--unless you've read through Jefferson's letters and know something of his biography. Unless you have a sense of the personal experiences giving rise to that political remark. Briefly: he was the genius child in a highly unequal group of siblings, two of whom were either very slow learners or intellectually disabled. Keenly conscious of the inequalities in his own family, he tried to even things up, arranging for his slow brother to take violin lessons. He wanted his siblings to be intellectually equal to himself--a tall order.

His letters show a more realistic grasp on equality: there, he wanted an artistocracy of virtue and talent rather than the European one of birth and wealth.

So his goal, like Nikki Haley's, was “lift up everybody, not go and divide people on race or gender or party or anything else.”

Haley was referring to Jefferson's aspirations--not to the systemic racism that came with slavery and Jim Crow, and which has now, through the legislature envisioned by Jefferson, been vanquished. Long vanquished. 

In other words, Nikki Haley is my second choice after Biden.

Celebrating Martin Luther King

In a nuanced Quillete article, John R. Wood reflects on Dr. Martin Luther King's connections to the notion of systemic racism; having fought for basic decency for African-Americans, King wanted to tackle the economic problems of the poor, believing that whites in favor of ending crimes against blacks were not pushing for actual equality. Yet King regretted the Black Power Movement--Wood points to this:

“Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout ‘White power!’—when nobody will shout ‘Black power!’—but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power,” Dr. King declared in 1967, in the last year of his life. 

King was well aware of growing up in a middle-class family; his experiences with racism remained matters of coldness and distrust rather than brutality, and he advocated for an affirmative action policy forcing companies to hire a certain percentage of black workers and for boycotting companies refusing to employ blacks. But he never lost faith in the basic message: win people over with persuasion and love. Seek and find common ground. Identity politics and "affinity" groups based on ethnicity rather than common interests build walls, not unity. Likewise, trotting out dubious statistics about what percentage of "black people" and "white people" think "white people" are superior/part of systemic racism.

The strength and the weakness of King's message was his believe in Agape--love--and its healing power. Yes, that's the right message. But love is far more ambivalent than hatred, because love makes people vulnerable. To find the courage to love, rather than hate--that's an essential feature of any person or institution seeking to reduce racism. 

The content of a person's character--the line immortalized by Shelby Steele in the book we would all do well to read, especially today--is what we should think of when we judge people. Not immutable traits like their skin color!

It's hard to believe how necessary it is to repeat this message in 2024. Happy Martin Luther King Day; take to heart his methods and philosophy.

Lizard Eyes: Your Looks on Trodelvy

Side-effects are well-documented; some of us have them worse than others. But we're all bald, and for most of us, that means no eyebrows and no eyelashes. Which means your eyes take on the look of a lizard's--note that many lizard eyes have pupils and irises resembling human ones (apart from being surrounded by Green reptilian skin). But none of those reptiles can bat their eyelashes. Until recently, I had about six eyelashes (a young relative counted them at Thanksgiving). Now I'm down to one, and it looks embattled. A very few eyebrow hairs remain, but they're going too.

Eyeliner does camouflage some of the damage--or I think it does until I see a photo of myself. But the tumor markers are down! Ladies and Gentlemen, the tumor markers are down. I feel okay, apart from needing more naps and forgetting things, especially the day after treatment. 

You're also--more ickily--deprived of nose hair. Which means keeping a tissue with you at all times, and strategically deploying it to your nose the nanosecond it tickles, or before. Or all the time. Otherwise, it will drip like a leaky faucet and you won't notice until a few disgusted stares remind you. 

Eyelashes aren't just cosmetic--they protect your eyes and make it easy to wear contacts. I think nostalgically of the last time I used mascara.  

There's always microblading, a semi-permanent tattoo for cancer ladies, but I think I'll go for the low-tech approach--stencils and pencils. Previous experience tells me that once I'm off chemo, eyebrows and eyelashes grow back--curlier, too, like the rest of my hair. So what if it's steel woolish and dry? So nice when it's there!