The Hard Board

**BW was one of the most intelligent, well-read and astute thinkers I have ever known. A couple or three years ago he graciously invited me to play Words with Friends on our phones. At first he would win handily, of course. Still, I enjoyed his companionship, virtual and actual, especially when he and his wife got a place nearby in the City. Gradually, after I'd gained some experience, learning much by playing him, the results weren't always so lopsided. In the past year it was getting closer to 50-50.

Too hard

On occasion, he'd explain his low score by stating that this particular game had a hard board, meaning that the tiles he'd drawn were difficult to turn into high-scoring words. It was an acknowledgement that regardless of the innate intelligence or expertise of a player, the game — like life — is subject to the luck of the draw.

The hardest board

Our last game

About a year ago BW's body was dealt a hard board: Cancer. Despite a generally healthful lifestyle and the best medical treatment money could buy, bad genes also had a place at the table. He played all-out to win, with many ups and downs along the way. But the last move of that game was a few days ago, on March 1 (WWF informed me that "It's been 10 days" since we'd exchanged plays). And it's a down

Not an immortalist
One of several books he'd recommended to me, a book I could actually follow, was one he'd recently re-read: Immortality: the Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization. We discussed and agreed with the conclusion of that book: though there is no way —  here or hereafter —  to gain immortality, the best policy is to live here kindly, seek the welfare of others and be rid of as much illusion as possible. Qualities BW exemplified amply, gently.

While expected and prepared for, his death still pains me. I will miss the companionship of this formidable opponent and virtual/actual friend.

But, wait —  sadly, there's more.
Just a couple hours after being informed of BW's grim prognosis I got this distressing tweet from my former colleague and friend, CG:

She's a brilliant writer, specializing in food. Her restaurant reviews, descriptions of food, travelogues and the like were always fascinating, even if one didn't care for her subject (my favorite is an entry, with video, about dining on a pig's head.) After leaving our religious citadel, where she was employed as a rare "non," she got a job at a cancer hospital.

And then got cancer.

In the mouth.

In the mouth.

Hard board, indeed.

A couple years of chemo, some ups and downs, and now: "end of the line." What makes it more appalling is that she's supposed to be in the prime of life — arguably unlike BW and, certainly, me. She's supposed to get a better deal. Life is supposed to be a lot easier. And longer lasting.

How tweet it isn't
Adding to the weirdness of this experience is the fact that she's sharing her death process ON THE INTERNET! Now, I accept that we're in a connected age, but this is bizarre. Maybe outrageous. Yet, strangely, in her case, it's also inspiring. She can pull it off because her good cheer, humor and eloquence take the edge off.

But beyond the edge is the rest of the blade: She'll be gone soon. Too soon.

Why me?
I don't know if I have better or worse genes than these two hapless friends. If better genes, I'm sure I've compromised their ability to help me. I smoked for twenty years — two+ packs a day and drank heavily during several periods in my life, including the most recent seven years. High salt. High fat. High alcohol. High tension. High risk.

But easier boards:

As I've blogged about before, last October, when an echocardiogram showed that my heart was delivering only a 37% ejection fraction (40%-50% is considered below normal), it was decided that I needed an angiogram to determine the cause and treatment. This involves slipping a very thin tube into a coronary artery (don’t ask how) and taking a look around. What they saw was a vessel 99% blocked by plaque — a sign of hard living, and maybe hard genetics. As I understand my cardiologist's explanation, when this thin tube (catheter) was inserted into that coronary artery it made the blockage go from 99% to 100%. This essentially induced a "heart attack" right there on the cath lab table. Emergency measures ensued and the medical team was able to bring me back and complete the mission. I left the hospital a couple days later with three stents in that artery.  

As boards go, this was "hard." But not "too hard," thanks to medical expertise.

And a stroke of good luck 

It affirms where I stand now: soberly atheistic after decades of believing in, teaching about and advocating for a supreme benevolent force for good in the universe. I am not naïve and unschooled. I've studied the Bible, theology and metaphysics; studied and unsuccessfully practiced an unrealistic 19th century healing system based on that premise; taught it; written about it; and carefully observed my life and the lives of others (including those of my atheist friends BW and CG, as well as my believing family and other friends). I have studied and tried several different belief systems including the no less loony one I was brought up with. 

And my conclusions: We live in a material universe that has originated, evolved and is run by chance. "Spirituality" has more to do with insight into human consciousness than with any tangible substance. In sum: There is no "God."

Why not?
By far a most convincing argument against a theological ground of existence is expressed by the website: Why won't God Heal amputees? It's based on the fact that there has never been a credibly documented case where an amputated limb was restored to normality through "spiritual" means. If a god can't do that, the rest is bullshit. The "goodness" in our experience has nothing to do with any "Principle" of goodness. It's just optimal human practice.

As a blog pal and also former religionist, Liz Heywood, has expressed it: "I'm happier with Chance instead of fate." Well, I wouldn't exactly say I'm happy with chance — I'm not happy with anything that determines my destruction. But it's certainly more intellectually honest and satisfying than believing in an imaginary but impotent Friend.

I'll leave it there for now.

Farewell, precious fellow players. 
Sooner or later I'll be joining you in oblivion, if not renown.

And to my still-playing companions in this perilous and doomed game, for as long as possible, may the boards be with us.

Call me Lazarus…

**The trouble with explaining near-death experiences is that they're so much like other experiences. We've all felt faint, had fantastic dreams, been knocked unconscious or had limbs fall "asleep." NDEs can feel like some combination of these. And that's because they all involve more or less the brain's sensory apparatus, which is susceptible of all kinds of tricks rendering unreality "seemingly" real.

From what I've been told, there was a moment recently when my heart stopped pumping. It was the moment a surgeon threaded a tiny catheter, a long wire inserted in an artery in the groin, into a a main artery feeding the heart. The opening was at the time 99% occluded, meaning it was only 1% of its normal size. This apparently had been causing me some problems with chest pain and shortness of breath because the heart itself was not getting enough oxygen. The introduction of even the tiny catheter into this space produced a 100% blockage, which caused the heart to shut down, its lifeblood literally choked off. Mind you, this is only my very ignorant layman's interpretation of what I've been told, but as far as "near-death" this was as close as I've ever come.

When all the alarms went off, apparently the crew switched to resuscitation mode and eventually brought me around sufficiently to continue with the installation of three stents.

These tiny metal mesh tubes prop open the artery so that blood can flow through normally. I was flushed with a powerful diuretic, so much so that the only thing I can remember of the experience is that of drowning. Nurses in the ICU told me that my color was completely grey when I was wheeled in. There was so much diuretic that I voided over 5 liters of urine in the next 24 hours. And there was still fluid in my lungs, prolonging the experience of drowning and suffocation over the next few days that I could not get to sleep. More diuretics were prescribed and the problem eventually eased up enough for me to get some sleep.

The serious part of this experience came only a few days after leaving the ICU. Apparently, I had a susceptibility to nose bleeds in my left nasal area. When one has the kind of coronary procedure I had, powerful blood thinners help to keep the body from attacking the stents and forming clots. The problem with this of course, is that blood can no longer clot normally. In other words, a "normal" nosebleed turns into a life-threatening torrent of blood that takes extraordinary measures to stop. Three trips to the ER managed to stem the tide, for awhile but the solutions were all temporary -- and ugly. I had a bloody plug protruding from my left nostril for several days. I was sent to an ENT who introduced exquisitely painful cautery and inflatable nasal tampon.

This involved shoving a tool into my nose, around the septum and into the sinus cavity whereupon it "burned" the susceptible blood vessels causing them to scar up and thereby strengthen the area from further breakages. Then a long nasal tampon shoved into the area and inflated so as to form a strong compress against the blood vessels that had been rupturing. Aside from the area being naturally sensitive to pressure and burning, the expanded plug generated much more pain as it worked to allow the affected vessels to heal. This remained in place for five days. Five days of headaches so bad that a strong painkiller had to be used every 4-6 hours just so I wouldn't scream. (It also helped me get a little bit of sleep.) It also produced a shiny dark red "tusk" of hardened fabric that protruded from my nose like a killer booger. After the five days the object was removed and I got a few minutes of relief as I breathed normally for the first time in a week. But that pleasure was soon thwarted in favor of more precautionary measures to ensure that the area wold heal strongly and not be the site of future catastrophic nose bleeds. Yet another fabric object was insisted far up into the sinus, coated with some kind of coagulant gel, and I was asked to live with the resulting pain for another five days. Today promises to be another bright one as I have the last of these invasive object removed. My strength has been coming back and my spirits have brightened since I haven't had to take the painkillers. I can finally sit down at a keyboard and type up these even-now-receding memories of what is has been like being a heart patient for the first time, and a near-death survivor.

To be sure, there's nothing "spiritual" about this experience, either the dying or the recovery. Ten or fifteen years ago these techniques were unknown and people died quickly. Only the relentless pursuit of knowledge led to this kind of healing. All the breathing techniques, herbal teas and goop, all the positive thinking and prayers cannot substitute for this plodding path of progress. I still have people telling me I am in their prayers, that they are praying for my recovery. I don't have the heart to tell them that their prayers affect only themselves, make them feel there is some larger force acting on their requests. I don't have the heart to tell them that if prayer were such a potent tool, it should have been used BEFORE any of these harrowing events and not after.

It's true, being alone without a big Imaginary Friend in the sky, is not the most ideal world one can imagine. That kind of idealism belongs to fools who attribute their great luck to it. But it is the real world, and for all their many faults, those in the medical profession, have my respect for the relentlessness with which they pursue their chosen art. It's senseless to imagine that there will come a time when all of this concern for health will be obviated by a 100% perfect system. But having lived from the perilous perspective of Christian Science and the "alternative healing" schools of medicine I would rather any dear friend of mine have the best medical care they can find and use "spiritual means," like prayer, as a kind of pain killer and comforting reality distortion field. Any connection between spiritual means and healing is purely conjectural, driven mostly by a pathetic need to affirm one's beliefs in front of others. I'm one of the lucky ones, the very lucky ones. I had the luck of a wife's insistence on checking me into the ER in an era when so many life-saving techniques are available. A brother-in-law who dropped dead a couple weeks after having received a perfect physical exam, wasn't so lucky. Doctors didn't know what to look for twenty years ago. He's dead, fully dead, and I'm alive, though having been momentarily dead, all because of good timing. Two brothers are also alive because of the advancing progress of the medical establishment. One had a bypass several years ago, and the other had a procedure similar to mine (but without the bloody apocalypse).

Again I continue to support the right of anyone to delude themselves with whatever idealistic theories give them any comfort. What I don't want is anyone suggesting that if I took up their delusions I'd be more lucky than I am.