Cancer-Free and Radioactive to Boot

In an article in The New York Times this past Monday, Matthew L. Wald writes about the renewed debate surrounding radioactive iodine, a popular and effective treatment for thyroid cancer. Strangely, the concern is not for the patients who swallow the nuclear material, but for the family, friends, and even strangers who they may come in contact with.

While it only takes one dose of the iodine to kill off the malignant cells in most thyroid cancer sufferers, it does render the patient radioactive for up to a week. The list of side effects reads more like a Marvel comic than a medical pamphlet. Patients pose a threat to anyone in their proximity, especially children and fetuses, and their bodily fluids, saliva and urine included, could probably fetch a pretty penny on any weapons black market. The radiation emanating from their bodies is so strong that “one patient in New York boarded a bus for Atlantic City, N.J., and set off a radiation alarm in the Lincoln Tunnel.”

But ever since 1997, the Nuclear Regulatory Committee hasn’t required those who receive the  treatment to be quarantined, meaning that like the glowing Greyhound-er above patients are left to fend for themselves after hospitals release them.

Almost five percent of patients, including Ann B. Maddox of Fayetteville, N.C., choose to stay in hotels rather than go home immediately. But even when they do return, they still try and keep their distance for fear of exposing their loved ones.

Said Ms. Maddox of sitting in the third row of seats in her Honda Odyssey when her husband came to pick her up the next day, “I’m sure it looked like we had some kind of spat.”

Keef

The Rolling Stones’ guitarist Keith Richard’s surprisingly translucent memoir, “Life,” made its way onto bookstore shelves Monday. With the help of diaries and letters (for memory-jogging) and journalist James Fox (for literary sprucing-up-ing) the 66 year-old icon offers up a blow by blow account (take that whichever way you wish) of life inside the “pirate nation” that was the Stones.

Of course much is being made of the book for what it does to stoke the ongoing feud between Richards and bandmate Mick Jagger. Throughout the volume, Richards reveals his nicknames for his boyhood friend (“Brenda and Her Majesty,” “that little bitch Brenda”) and pokes fun at his looks (“Mick’s tiny todger”), yet his coup de grace comes with the assessment that

“in 1983, he was just trying to out-disco everyone.”

The story of Richards’ many years of drug use has already been told , which is perhaps why the sections in which he opens up about the other two elements that compose the rock ‘n’ roll trinity are so fascinating.

On his devotion to the blues:

“You were supposed to spend all your waking hours studying Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson. That was your gig. Every other moment taken away from it was a sin.”

And on womanizing:

“I just never had that thing with women,” he writes. “I would do it silently. Very Charlie Chaplin. The scratch, the look, the body language. Get my drift? Now it’s up to you. ‘Hey, baby’ is just not my come-on.”

But according to Richards, he isn’t all bad-boy rocker anymore. He never really ever was. And his frustration with that substance-fueled stereotype of himself he helped create, and maybe his motivation for writing a more-sides-of-me memoir, are shouted out loud.

“People think I’m still a goddamn junkie. It’s 30 years since I gave up the dope! Image is like a long shadow. Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.”

Elderism #86

“Everybody wants to know, ‘How old are you?’ And of course, I am happy to tell them that I am as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.”

-97 year-old A.M.E. Logan, in an article in Mississippi’s Jackson Advocate. An assiduous recruiter for the NAACP who has been called the “mother of the Jackson civil rights movement,”  Logan has an interesting day job and professional distinction: she may be the country’s oldest Avon Lady.

Elderism #85

“…sleeping three hours a night, he scored the Frank Sinatra film Assault on a Queen, performed concerts in Wichita, Little Rock, and San Francisco, recorded the Sinatra score in Los Angeles while playing a three-night gig at Disneyland, then left the morning after the show for a two-week tour of Japan, all while carrying on an incandescent social life.”

– Geoffrey O’Brien recounting one week in the life of a sixty-seven year old Edward “Duke” Ellington in his unpacking of Harvey G. Cohen’s Duke Ellington’s America in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books.

The book and its review discuss at length how Ellington’s frantic go-getting spawned an almost baffling ability to defy both racial and musical stereotypes while enjoying critical acclaim and commercial popularity for over half a century. But for a man beloved by generations of listeners, his fellow musicians, and the friends, family, and bandmates he supported financially, he was often purposefully distant.

“I’m a hotel man,” Ellington said. “I like being alone, you know. I don’t know why.”

Humiliation Hits The Airwaves

Henry guested on Faith Middleton’s Food Schmooze on WNPR-Connecticut Public Radio this week to relive the “flunkadelic” visit a New York City health department inspector recently paid to his apartment kitchen.

And for those who currently find themselves in a public space and headphone-less, you can read Henry’s original documentation of the experience in the New York Times.

10 Things to Talk About This Weekend

Who thinks she got a diploma from Hogwarts; how Philip Roth spends his time on the day the Nobel Prize for literature is announced; and more. From the New York Times.

Elderism #77, #78, #79, #80, #81, #82, #83, and #84

Elderism #76

“A happy life is entirely dependent on the rest of the community. I love my watch, but if I kiss my watch the watch has no ability to return affection.”

–The Dalai Lama, in Evan Osnos’s long, detailed look at the future of Tibet, in the New Yorker (subscription required.) In addition to showcasing some of His Holiness’s delightfully eccentric behavior–he likes to tug on the beards of somber religious clerics; he sometimes makes decisions by putting pieces of paper inside balls of dough–Osnos offers a balanced look at how HHDL (as his Twitter followers know him) functions as both statesman and spiritual leader. Osnos says that HHDL’s romance with the West makes him vulnerable to detractors–“Although the Dalai Lama calls for full legal rights for gay men and women, he cites Buddhist doctrine, which condemns anal and oral sex, and considers it unsanctioned for Buddhists;” Osnos quotes Christopher Hitchens, who calls HHDL’s following “a Hollywood cult that almost exceeds the power of Scientology.”

About to turn 75, HHDL says his succession is an open-ended matter–he may be reincarnated as a woman, or he may eschew the traditional portents-of-divination route and decide to pick his own successor; or Tibetans may decide to do away with the institution of the Dalai Lama altogether. HHDL, we’re told, thinks about his death every day. He refers to it as “a change of clothing.”

The Most Stressful 28 Hours of My Life

…were the result of my asking a New York City health inspector to inspect my apartment’s kitchen. From yesterday’s New York Times. Come visit soon. Bring diaper wipes.

Elderism #75

“I am not a hoodlum. I am an expert barbecue cook.”

-73 year-old Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale, referring to 1967, when Ronald Reagan, then-governor of California, called Seale a “hoodlum.” The eighth of the “Chicago Eight” (the Eight became the Seven when Seale was tried alone after a judge had him bound and gagged for obstreporousness), Seale, the grandfather of four, leads a quieter life now. He still lectures on college campuses in his trademark black beret; but his real passion is barbecuing–or, as he calls it, Bobbyque.