When Andy showed me this spring dandelion panorama I interpreted it in a related but different way than he did (here is how he saw it, which includes an explanation of how he took the photo). I think it’s a representation of my last 21 day chemotherapy cycle. On the left is me looking intact on the morning before I had the chemotherapy infusions. Then there is the infusions and five days of high dose steroids when I am transparent. Next are a few days of semitransparency when I am not taking steroids but I am feeling strange and very tired from coming off the steroids and the chemotherapy. Then I feel ok, but not normal most of the time for a week and a half until the far right when I am fully formed looking again, and ready for the next cycle.
That next cycle started 10 days ago, so I am again in the phase where there are many versions of me in rapid fire with some satisfying but disjoint details present, but with some key parts missing, such as my head. The glorious spring setting is consistently accurate.
Now I am going on to things that are not shown in the photo, at least as far as I can tell. The last day of teaching for the semester was two days ago, on Friday. There are still finals but it’s a relief not to have preparing lectures on my mind. One of the two courses I am teaching this semester is Invasive Species. I found out I had lymphoma at the start of the semester. Cancer isn’t an invasive species, but the process of invasion is analogous. In the early lectures we covered the attributes of species that make them successful invaders, namely competitive resources use, high population growth rate (λ) and mobility, and then the attributes of a system that make it invasible, which are mostly related to disturbance. I could not help but think then about what had been happening in me for an unknown amount of time as the lymphoma grew and spread to different parts of my body. As the semester went along and my treatment started, we got to the ways humans respond to an invasive species, which ranges from trying to eradicate it totally, to keeping it under control, to giving up because there is no way to control it. All of these scenarios are costly and degrading to the invaded system. The measures we are taking against my lymphoma are between eradication and control, which is also the usual response we have to invasive species.
In other news, on Wednesday I am going to have another PET scan to see how well the treatment is going at the halfway point.
An eloquent description of your process Saskya and the parallels in your lectures and life. Your thinking makes me value the scientific way of parsing things out. Thank you for your words and insights and May the PET scan reveal good progress. Walk, don’t run!
I love both your and Andy’s takes on the picture.
I see you walking both after and before yourself, which I think is accurate in a way. Some of the yous are attached to each other and some apart from each other. I find this in-and-out-of-the-picture you moving through a meadow strangely musical. How would it sound when converted into rhythms or notes? (A question for Andy, perhaps.)
I didn’t think about music when I first looked at it, but now that you point it out I can easily think of it as musical.
Aino:
One frame of a movie is a 2D picture, color intensities as a function of two spatial components (sideways and up and down). One snapshot of music is, pictured, a slice of a spectrograph, it is intensity as a function of frequency. That is not something that we are familiar with interpreting or appreciating on it’s own. That is, a moment in time is even harder to understand or interpret in music than it is in the flow of images in time, I think, at least so far in my pondering. So, so far at least, I am having trouble taking this to music. Not that I can’t imagine it in some out-of-reach abstract way, though.
Dear Saskya,
this is just to let you know that we read your blog and think of you; are thoughts and minds are with you.
Ellen & Arend
Samuel, Simon & Salomé
Thanks Ellen, Arend, Samuel, Simon, Salomé! I am doing OK so far
Saskya, love the different interpretations of this one photo. Really does show how a piece of art can mean so many different things to so many people. Let us know how the scan goes on Wednesday
It’s Wednesday here already! I’m “holding thumbs” for Saskya and hope that the scan will give a clear “picture” of the situation, so the doctors know how to proceed!
The scans look good (see the next post). Your thumb holding helped.