Getting Doctored

I'm still in the early stages of evaluation by a host of specialists trying to get a handle on my condition(s). This will probably go on for at least another 6 months or so, possibly indefinitely, because there is no cure for what ails me, and keeping watch is the best they can do.

I've been getting lots of xrays and blood and urine tests to keep tabs on what is going on. A new test or follow up essentially every week for the time being. Certain markers show up regularly that indicate this or that condition, but nothing is severe enough to warrant alarm. Yesterday, the oncologist, for example, declared me non-cancerous for now, based on those tests which show the presence of a condition to be monitored (MGUS) but nothing else.

Major problem is rheumatoid arthritis and its effects which seem to be spreading and are only marginally under control. This is proving to be a challenge to say the least. I take prednisone which usually controls the pain and inflammation, but sometimes doesn't. I also take leflunomide, which doesn't seem to do anything. Previously, I was taking sulfozine, which also didn't seem to do anything. The rheumatologist is trying various medications, starting with the least expensive, to see what works. We haven't quite hit on anything except prednisone, which supposedly is dangerous over the long term even at the low dose I've been taking (10-15mg daily).

In addition to joint inflammation and pain, I experience extraordinary levels of fatigue regularly. RA is also suspected to be causing or worsening lung inflammation which contributes to fatigue in a vicious cycle, round and round.

Then there's COPD which is diagnosed independently of RA for which I need to see a pulmonologist. Next time for that is October when more tests are scheduled to see just how bad it is.

I was looking through some notes I kept as this journey continues, and it seems that I was doing better in May than I am now. I'd say there's been a slow-but-steady deterioration since then. The pain is mostly controlled, my range of motion is relatively good, but my overall ability is declining. Day-long activity is simply not possible any more. 20 minutes at a time is about the most I can manage and then I must rest for at least as long.  Naps are essential. I limp from sciatica from years ago but it's been getting worse. I get out of breath with almost any activity of more than a few minutes. Though I've tried not to, I've been gaining weight again -- a side effect of prednisone they say. That just makes things more difficult.

And so it goes. At one point I asked one of the doctors, don't remember which one, "What's going on? Why is this happening?" The answer: "You're getting old, and what's happening is more the consequence of old age and genetics than anything else. Compared to a lot of people, though, you're doing well. Just keep that in mind."

I do. Of course I have friends who say if I hadn't had such a wild youth, more'n likely I wouldn't be having all these issues in my dotage. It all comes from my bad living when time was. Then there are the others who are convinced it's all karma, results of things I did or didn't do in previous lives together with my own actions in this one...

Genetics (a form of karmic debt I suppose) enter into it, especially with regard to RA, because my sister had lupus, which is a related auto-immune condition. I assume the propensity came from our mother, though as far as I know, she didn't suffer from auto-immune conditions herself. She had thyroid issues and mental health issues, however, which may or may not have been related. She died of emphysema after a lifetime of smoking. She never quit.

I quit smoking 20 years ago, but I've been diagnosed with "mild" emphysema along with COPD, so I haven't escaped that consequence of smoking tobacco.

Both my sister and brother died of pulmonary embolism, both at a relatively young age: my brother at 32, my sister at 59. I'm not sure of exactly the cause of my brother's embolism, but the indications I got from his care givers and his death certificate are that he lapsed into a coma an was taken to the hospital where he died a few days later. The clot was probably due to his inactivity/paralysis.

On the other hand, my sister's embolism followed knee surgery that in turn followed injury in a prison/mental hospital where she worked. She died as a consequence of the injury and surgery. No doubt about it.

As for cancer... my father developed melanoma which he refused to have treated, and he died within a year, age 67. My mother's mother died of what I was told was stomach cancer, age 52. Her mother died at age 76 from uterine cancer. I've recently learned that from her death certificate. Previously, I didn't know what had happened to her, and from accounts by my sister, who claimed to have met her great grandmother when she was about 7 or 8 years old, I had always thought that Ida (my mother's grandmother) had died after 1940. Turned out, though, she died in 1935, and so my sister could not have met her as my sister was born in 1933 and wouldn't have remembered her if she did meet Ida -- which I strongly doubt. I wonder who she met who she thought was Ida...

My mother's father died in a railroad incident when he was 38; he didn't have time to develop killer diseases and conditions, I guess. As his mother died in 1918, I suspect it was from the Spanish flu. His father died in 1921, and it may have been from the same cause, though I don't know.

So those are some of the histories I'm dealing with. As I've noted before, a lot of my relatives died at a relatively young age, and right now, I'm older than most of them when they died -- wild youth or no.

This actually gives me pause. If I have lived longer, perhaps there is a reason.

On the other hand, I never thought I'd live past 30. So every year since then has been kind of a bonus, no?

Quien sabe...

So Even George Wallace Had an Epiphany

Georgie Bar the Door, c. 1963

I've been pondering the late George Wallace in regards to the current Kim Davis Affair -- an affair that will likely be gone once we're past Labor Day. These late summer news stories are often transitory as morning mist.

At any rate, George Wallace may have been a tiny man (5'6" maybe, if that) but he was a huge character in the civil rights era, the man who stood in the schoolhouse door preventing those Negroes from entering the lily-white schools of Alabama c. 1963.

Oh, he was a huge character and demon indeed, George Wallace was.

He was always railing about those Negroes and all the crime and misery they caused for good upstanding white folks, and how their needs and demands were at the top of Washington's list of things to do, whereas the good white folks of Alabam and the rest of the South and the Nation were being left out to fend for themselves, and why don't those hippies get a haircut and a job, huh, huh, and so it went, on and on, the little banty-weight piss-ant once and future Alabama governor (how many times George?) railing constantly, at full shriek, against anything and everything that represented racial progress.

Ol' George was a good man to hate in those days. Well, if you were on the side of civil rights as I was.

On the other hand, a lot of Americans were on Ol' George's side, they stood with Wallace. Bless their hearts.

He represented their shattered dreams... or something. I never understood how someone else's civil rights ruined -- absolutely ruined  -- the future of Good White Folks in the South or anywhere else. It never made any sense to me at all, but those opposed to civil rights and integration (and there were many of them) were sure that giving those people the same rights they had and letting them live next door and use the same facilities and so forth would lead inevitably to the ruin of white people.

They were sure of it.


How was that supposed to work, anyway?

Ol' George went around the country railing against anything that might provide a modicum of justice and dignity for those people. It just wasn't right, he railed, that they should have the same rights and privileges their Betters had.

Does it sound familiar? It should sound familiar, for there are all kinds of politicians who rail these days against rights and privileges for those people -- whoever the designated Other of the moment may be.

Comes now this Kim Davis in Kentucky (is that where she is?) refusing to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples she is, despite the plain text ruling of the Supreme Court, deeming it contrary to her God and so on and so forth. She sits in jail in contempt of court therefore, a martyr like MLK and Rosa Parks her lawyer claims for following her conscience and religious faith rather than the Law.

Oh my, oh my. Poor sweet Kim Davis. What a martyr indeed.

Yes well, she's a martyr like George Wallace was a martyr, only not nearly so appealing.

Ol' George never went to jail that I know of, but he was shot by a would-be assassin in 1972 while running his umpteenth campaign for president (at least it seemed that way), and he was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his natural life. I would say that might be considered a form of punishment if not outright martyrdom...

Ol' George kept it up just the same, railing and railing as was his wont.

And then he stopped. He became a "Christian". He had been a Methodist, but everyone knows they're not saved are they? He became a "Christian" -- forgiven and saved he was -- and he came to an epiphany.

He wasn't a martyr, he was just a nasty little shit with a mean streak a mile wide who'd caused untold pain and harm to millions of people for no good reason at all.

He didn't mean to, but that's what he did.

So. He changed. He apologized to those he had harmed. He could not get down on his knees because of his injuries, but he let all kinds of people know that he knew now that he had been wrong to insult and denigrate them all those years, he'd been wrong to stand in the schoolhouse door, he'd been wrong to be such a nasty little shit for all those years when he could have been using his power to do good, and he vowed to do good with what remained of his power and life....

And according to those who knew him that's exactly what he did during his final term as Alabama's governor. There hasn't been anything like it since.

As for this Kim Davis creature, she came to her realization that she had to become a martyr for her God when she became a "Christian" like George Wallace did -- rather late in her life after several marriages, affairs, divorces, and children of different fathers.

She's been forgiven and saved like he was, but whereas late in his life  George Wallace used his salvation on behalf of the downtrodden and dis-included -- many of whom he had personally down-trod and dis-included -- she has convinced herself that she was ordered by her God to use her salvation to further dis-include and down-trod the Enemy, ie: same-sex couples wishing to be married in her county.

Bless her heart.

I've never been much of a fan of same sex marriage because of the religious/sacramental nature of the term marriage. Leave it to the churches, I've long said, some of which have been performing same sex marriages for decades, and leave the law out of that issue altogether. Let the law address only civil unions without regard to the genders of the couples uniting.

Well, I was out-shouted and the Supreme Court (which has not exactly covered itself with glory since the lawless rendering in Bush v Gore) has ruled that same sex marriage cannot be prevented by law.

Therefore the little missy in Kentucky (or wherever she is) isn't like Rosa Parks or MLK, she's like that nasty little shit who stood in the schoolhouse door in 1963 preventing those Negroes from entering.

Will she come to her own epiphany one day?

Funny how God works in such mysterious ways....

Maintaining Stability in the Midst of Chaos

This post is mostly about Mars but no doubt will ramble all over the place as is my wont from time to time.

Three views of Mars from the Hubble Space telescope, March 10, 1997

There are so many images from the past few days, of the memorials for the new dead, of the Mars landing, of people just trying to hang on for dear life, of a planet incinerating, of despair, hope, grief and joy, that anyone's head would be spinning.

First to Mars for the thrill of adventure. For someone like me, this is really big-time exciting, though not quite as thrilling as earlier missions. They've become almost commonplace.

What we know of Mars today is nothing at all like the fantabulous Mars of Percival Lowell and Ray Bradbury; but neither is it much like the Mars of the 1972 revelations from Mariner 9.

Chesley Bonestell's vision of Mars, c. 1950

Portion of Noctis Labyrinthus from Mariner 9, 1972

Elysium "Pyramids" from Mariner 9, 1972,
used as an illustration in Carl Sagan's 1980 edition of "Cosmos"

Those images are burnt into my memory. They are the first to clearly show the presence of fluid-carved features on the surface, the first to delineate the Valles Marineris, the largest known canyon in the Solar System, and the first to clearly show the giant volcanoes of the Tharsis Ridge, particularly the one known then as "Nix Olympica," (Snows of Olympus) but now known as "Olympus Mons" (Mount Olympus), the largest volcano known in the Solar System, and on and on.

Mariner 9 had been preceded by Mariners 6 and 7 in 1969, and they had shown some of the same features, relatively clearly too (in some cases, the Mariner 6 and 7 images are higher quality than those of Mariner 9) but interpretation failed. For example Nix Olympica and the Valles Marineris are shown on the following full-planetary images from Mariner 7:

Mariner 7 (1969) images of Mars from 200,000 miles away

The circular feature in the upper center is the giant volcano; the squiggly business below it is part of what's known as Noctis Labyrinthus, highly fractured uplift area, and to the right of Noctis Labyrinthus is a dark feature with several dark spots around it which is the Valles Marineris feature together with associated canyons  and craters. Just barely visible are the tops of two of the three aligned Tharsis volcanoes which form a diagonal line at a 45 degree angle to Nix Olympica. The white patch at the bottom of the images is the extended South Polar cap.

All of these features and more are visible from Earth with the use of almost any fairly decent telescope, and they had all been reported and drawn -- though not necessarily photographed -- in great detail decades prior to the Mariner and later missions to Mars. These features are actually easily seen in Earth based telescopes; I've seen some of them myself.

The problem was -- and is -- one of interpretation. For example, "Nix Olympica." The name "Snows of Olympus" implies the presence of a significant mountain, which was how the feature was interpreted when initially identified and named; but the interpretation of the feature seen in the images above was that "Nix Olympica" was in fact a crater not a mountain at all. And the "snows" were clouds. Well, yes, there are clouds seen in this image, and Martian clouds were well known before space-craft explorations, but the original interpretation of a mountain is correct; the crater interpretation based at least in part on the Mariner 4 images which showed a heavily cratered Martian surface more like the Moon than the illustrations of a canal crossed smooth sand desert that had formed the basis of understanding the Martian surface prior to the arrival of Mariner 4 to take the first close-up pictures of the surface of Mars in 1965.

Mariner 4 image of the surface of Mars, 1965

But even here, where craters are obvious, interpretation is risky, and things in the image may not be quite what they appear to be. This is not a lunar surface, not even a lunar-like surface, but because there are craters at all, it was interpreted as lunar. You'll note in the lower left corner there is a straight line angled at about 30 degrees that extends about half way across the image; under certain conditions, it can appear to cross the entire frame. If this feature were visible from Earth (apparently it cannot be seen telescopically, however) it might well be interpreted as a canal. The formation is apparently a crack in the surface, of which there are very many over the entire globe, some of which are much longer than this one, and many of which evoke the "canals of Mars" as detailed by Percival Lowell.

According to standard interpretations, all of these features are associated with vulcanism and uplift. They do not form patterns of intersecting lines -- except when they do. And none of them are telescopically visible from Earth. According to standard interpretations, all of the "canals" so carefully delineated by Percival Lowell and testified to by other astronomers were optical illusions.

And yet the surface of Mars is crossed by literally thousands of linear depressions, some of them thousands of kilometers long, some of them roughly corresponding with the locations of Lowellian "canals."

How drole. Well, it would be if these linear features were acknowledged, but they are not. Few of them are even noted, though they be glaringly obvious in Mariner and Viking images especially. They are not "canals" in the sense that Lowell meant the term, but they are most definitely "canali" in the sense of "channels" as declared by Giovanni Schiaparelli. And there are thousands of them. Yet in standard Mars interpretation, there is essentially no mention of the abundance of cracks in the Martian surface, some of which indubitably mimic Lowellian canals.

Telescopic observers had also seen and recorded many craters on the surface of Mars well before any space-craft explored the surface, but these early records of craters on Mars tended to be ignored, not because the observations were necessarily in error (though they were definitely enigmatic) but because the dominant planetary paradigm was Uniformitarianism, and that implied that no planet with an erosive atmosphere (such as Mars) would preserve craters at the surface over the eons. Erosion would have long ago erased any evidence of abundant cratering, much as was believed to be the case with the Earth.

The following image from Mariner 4 shows another enigmatic linear feature that has defied interpretation for almost 50 years:

Mariner 4 Image of Craters in Atlantis region of Mars, 1965; linear feature at right edge of largest crater

What is it? It has not been located in later pictures of the area, or if it has, I haven't seen any announcement. From what limited scale information is available, it appears to be about 2.5 kilometers long, and .5 kilometer high, perfectly straight and perhaps 100 meters or so wide.

While this particular feature has not been located or identified in subsequent mapping and imaging of the area [see note below], there are many other enigmatic linear, circular and arcuate features on the Martian surface that defy ready explanation, so many in fact that there's a cottage industry of amateurs whose interpretations of these features as "buildings" of a Lost Martian Civilization are believed by many.

[Note: Now that I'm back doing vicarious Mars exploration again, I've made another "discovery." The Mariner 4 images above are of the same region; the upper Mariner 4 image is rotated 1/4 turn left and it has much lower contrast than the lower image. It appears they were taken at different times of day, but that's not possible as the Mariner 4 mission was a fly-by, not an orbiting mission. The upper image reference number is PIAO2979 while the lower image reference number is PIA02980, suggesting they were acquired one after another. The images were acquired with a miniature television camera most likely using different filters. For example, the upper image may have been taken through a green filter while the lower one was possibly acquired through a red filter. Interestingly, in the catalogues of Mariner 4 images, the first image is the only one that is referenced. The second one is not referenced in the catalogues and is almost never referenced at all. The crack that appears in the upper image is almost always referred to as a "ridge" -- as that was how it was described at the time the image was first released. The crack is part of the Sirenum Fossae ("fossae" means "fractures" or "ditches" not ridges.) The crack also appears in the lower image (just barely visible from the lower right corner rising at a 60+ degree angle toward the upper center.) The small linear feature noted in the lower image is barely visible in the upper image, but it is not linear. It appears to be more oval. A comparison was posted at Malin Space Science Systems in 2007 which shows the 1965 image together with a 1978 Viking Orbiter image of the same region at approximately the same scale:

Mariner Crater, Mars, as imaged by the Viking Orbiter, 1978

Mariner 4 crater image rotated.

The crack is clearly visible, extending straight through the bottom of the crater. A peninsula and a small ovoid hummock is visible on the lower rim of the crater that roughly corresponds to the oval feature in the upper Mariner image and to the location of the linear feature in the lower Mariner image. There is no sign of a linear feature in that location in the Viking image. It may be an imaging artifact. Or... ?]

The signs are that there has never been a civilization on Mars, "Lost" or otherwise, nor is it particularly likely there could be one, at least not one we would recognize. The surface of Mars is apparently extremely hazardous and potentially lethal to living things such as our own sweet selves and presumably to any potential aliens, let to alone bugs and microbes and such like. Not only are temperatures and atmospheric pressures typically too low for comfort (! to say the least), there are no ready resources -- at the surface at any rate -- to support biology on any but the simplest scale, and even then, there are many factors that argue against even the most modest biosphere on Mars.

That doesn't mean there is no biology on Mars. If biology on Earth can adapt to the most severe circumstances, there's no reason it couldn't do so on Mars. So the biology question should remain open until there is actual evidence one way or another as opposed to elaborate interpretations of ambiguous data. In fact, it has been suspected for some time that if biology is ever proven to exist on Mars, it will likely be in the form of microbes that were brought to Mars as contaminants on spacecraft launched from Earth!

Be that as it may, it has long been the practice in the planetary science community -- at least since Lowell -- to make broad and expansive interpretations of very limited and ambiguous data, and for those interpretations to stand for many years despite conflicting data. I've often called Mars "The Mimic Planet," and "The Planet of Deception." Much of what we see on the Martian surface mimics what we might see in terrestrial deserts, and yet, it's not really the same at all. Some of what we see mimics other features, whether canals or something else, and that mimicry can easily lead to erroneous interpretations, such as that of Nix Olympica as a crater rather than a mountain. There are many circular features on the surface of Mars that quite likely aren't impact craters but are interpreted as such because it is customary to interpret circular features on Mars as impact craters even if there are indications the feature formed through other means (such as undermining and collapse from below).

Geysers of some sort are not a newly theorized or even newly discovered phenomenon on Mars, but their broad acceptance by the planetary community seems to date only from 2006, whereas I and others were seeking them out as early as 1996 when the Mars Global Surveyor/Mars Orbital Camera images started being returned. It seemed natural that there would be surface geysers on Mars under certain circumstances. The surprise was that when geysers were found, they were in abundance, near the south pole, and were "sand geysers" rather than fluid geysers, caused by pressure release from below a layer of clear carbon dioxide ice warmed by the springtime sun.

Greg Orme is an Australian amateur Mars enthusiast whose tireless inspection of MOC images has resulted in numerous discoveries over the years. He was dogged and determined and I wouldn't doubt he's inspected every one of the hundreds of thousands of images returned by the MOC and other orbiting cameras. He's found hundreds if not thousands of "spiders," and these spiders are often seen as the remnants of the geysers that occur every Martian spring.

r1001457f

Above is one of my crops of the defrosting Inca City region near the south pole showing some of the spiders and some of the evidence of geysering (there don't appear to be any active geysers in this view.)

Note: Inca City is an enigmatic formation discovered in 1972 by Mariner 9 near the south pole. This is an image of it from the Mars Orbital Camera:

Inca City, Mars

It's considered to be a remnant of a buried crater due to its somewhat circular appearance, but it is not certain what caused the rectilinear features. Ice is suspected, but how the formation occurred is deeply mysterious. There are many somewhat similar features in many places on the surface, some of which resemble what a turbulent fluid might look like if it suddenly froze.

The geysering phenomenon got a good deal of coverage in 2006 when planetary scientists broadly accepted it. This Wikipedia article covers most of the story pretty well. This Mars Anomaly Research article from 2005 is quite complete, and it seems to be based in part on my original discovery of active geysering (c. 2001) as well as later images. Finally, this Mars Enigmas article from 2006, while somewhat confused and confusing, gives a pretty good overview of the phenomenon both from a popular and a scientific point of view.

Of course, none of this has anything at all to do with the Mars Curiosity's explorations in Gale Crater going on now. Gale shows evidence of once hosting a lake. The idea of ancient standing liquid water is far more exciting to planetary scientists than is the notion of presently active sand geysers bursting through a crust of solid CO2 (how boring.)

A sand geyser is probably not the most likely place to find present or past biology on Mars. Since the phenomenon is apparently both extensive and energetic, it's probably wise to stay out of the immediate vicinity of eruptions in any case. After going to all the trouble to land on Mars (and the Curiosity landing was spectacular), it wouldn't do to have the craft promptly blasted to smithereens by the nearby eruption of a sand geyser! We may never send landing craft close to an erupting geyser field.

There is enough chaos in our environment as it is.

On the other hand, Gale Crater, somewhat south of the equator, is bound to be calm and stable, much like Spirit''s stable location in Gusev Crater not all that far away (also thought once to have been a lake).

There will be discoveries no doubt, but more than likely, they will perpetuate rather than solve the biology enigma, and they will no doubt fuel more speculation about the poorly understood nature of the Martian surface.

I look forward to results!

Full resolution Curiosity heat shield on the way down. Courtesy NASA

Wheee!
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A note on how Mars images get manipulated.

The first image is from Viking 2, Mars winter 1976, altered fairly recently to resemble surface images from Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity.

Viking 2 lander image, 1976 altered to resemble more recent images from the surface of Mars

The second image is more or less what the picture looked like until it was layered with a sort of reddish "dust" which is widely believed to make the sky more or less pink more or less all the time, and thus make the surface appear quite red.

Viking 2 lander image, 1976, "dust" layer removed

The sky is pale blue, the ground ruddy but not particularly red, the rocks are multicolored, and white frost is clearly visible on the ground.

There are whole websites devoted to NASA'S  endless manipulations of the colors of Mars. At one time, there was wide circulation of an image from Viking 1 with a green sky and very red surface. The green sky picture is now only available with permission. That picture was recalibrated before the Pathfinder landing to look like this:

Viking 1 lander picture of Big Joe
Still a little bilious if you ask me.

Better