Tuesday we went to the KU Cancer Center, just for blood tests and a consultation with Jennifer, the physician assistant.  The waiting room seemed more depressing than usual; there were several people there who were so emaciated that they clearly were at the end stage of their fight.  The results of my blood work were all good.  My blood is as healthy as a horse('s).  Jennifer gave me a new prescription to fight the nausea.  After a consultation with Dr. Van, we decided that it was better to continue at 600 mg. of the Votrient, taking occasional three- or four-day breaks if needed than to reduce the dosage to 400 mg.  Although I get tired of the side effects, I'm long past the initial prognosis.  Reducing the chemo may (or may not) reduce the negative side effects, but I'm not eager to take the risk that it would also reduce the positive benefits.  I also got a new prescription for Percocet even though I still have a nearly full bottle of them.  But these scripts can't be phoned in, so I'm either stocking up before my next visit in six weeks to the Med Center or contemplating a new career as a drug dealer.  Rush, are you listening?

When I first started this blog, I wrote more about death and dying than I have lately because they seemed more imminent.  I've always thought the worst thing about death (not about dying) was that I would no longer know what was happening.  I hate being left out!  Of all the poets I've quoted, for some reason I've never mentioned an obvious choice, Emily Dickinson, a poet I love, whom I loved teaching, and writes often about death.  Her poem 280 ["I felt a Funeral, in my Brain"] ends with this quatrain:

          And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
          And I dropped down, and down--
          And hit a World, at every plunge,
          And Finished knowing--then--

The last line is ambiguous.  Is 'knowing' a gerund that's the direct object of 'Finished'?  That's the reading that connects with my lament about the end of consciousness.  Or is 'knowing' a participle modifying 'Finished' and suggesting that the question that ends poem 414 ["'Twas like a Mealstrom, with a notch"]--"Which Anguish was the utterest--then-- / To perish, or to live?"--has been answered? 

One problem with my desire to continue knowing (other than its impossibility since my consciousness will have finished) is that the world would soon become unrecognizable.  In, say, 25 years, how many of the people and events would still resonate with me?  I often think of a Rip Van Winkle scenario.  What if someone fell asleep 25 years ago (I've fudged the length a bit) and woke up in 2012?  How much of today's world would he or she comprehend.  The most obvious changes are technological: it's not just that the TV screen is vastly bigger but the set is so thin.  The newly awakened would search the front of the TV for buttons to push or knobs to turn.  Where are they?  And with HD, imagine the surprise at the clarity of the picture.  And all this is to say nothing of the content.

I did have a computer in 1987.  It was a KayPro, pre-MS/DOS. The operating system was on a large floppy disk that went into one slot, while the information was written on another removable floppy.  There was a tiny screen, as small as the screen on the first TV my family ever owned in the early 1950s.  The keyboard was snapped onto the CPU so that it all looked like a suitcase.  And it did nothing but word processing.  I remember how baffled I was the first time I tried to use it and every time I hit the backspace key it erased the letters behind my current position.  The computer was indestructable, though.  It survived an airplane trip to France in the cargo section, a reconfiguration to work on European current, and later a bus trip to Oregon.  It would be nearly a decade before there was an Internet.

And cars.  My last two cars haven't had keys for entry or for the ignition.  How would someone who woke up from 1987 get in the car?  Start it?  And the dashboard is like a computer and telephone combined.  What would someone make of the fact that I push a button, say "Call Mohamed," and I'm suddenly talking into thin air, while Mohamed's voice appears out of somewhere?  Imagine the surprise when I put the car into reverse and a screen shows where the car is backing.

And phones.  Our sleeper would search in vain for a landline (he wouldn't even know the term).  Instead, there's a tiny phone that is a computer, a camera, and a videocam, as well as a phone.  It sends and receives e-mail (another term that would baffle someone from 1987).  But who's using e-mail (or often even phones) when we're all texting? 

And so if I awakened suddenly 25 years from now, I think I would be as lost as someone from 1987 would be now.  And those are only a few of the tech changes.  Culturally?  I think I'll save my observations on those changes till the next blog.