Temperature has remained in the 100s, dipping down to 99 at one time. This is all due to the secondary infection, which exhibits itself as a dry cough. The infection is not getting any worse and I have high hopes of it being overcome in a few more days. The excretion of the methotrexate is proceeding as planned. The bottom line is that my discharge home for a few days has been delayed. Mo already got her flu shot and Miranda will get her’s tomorrow, so we should be all set when I do get home.

Talked with Pat, the social worker, about the divisiveness of religion in the US these days. In his recent Atlantic Monthly article “Is God an Accident” https://www.newdualism.org/papers/P.Bloom/Bloom-at-AO.html Paul Bloom points out that there are no significant differences between the US and Europe in the number of people that believe in God, or what they believe in. My great-grandmother, for example, lived in England and was a member of the Assemblies of God, which is, I understand, a fundamentalist church popular in the US. She apparently held that the pictures (movies in the US) were the work of the devil.

Although less extreme, as a child, I regularly attended and enjoyed church (Church of England. A former teacher remembers me attending Holy Communion daily in the small chapel in the school basement; this was in England, remember, where religion is, or was then, allowed in schools. I think that I did not keep this up for long. I may have done it for Lent, shortly before or after my confirmation. Also, this was 40 years ago.]

Today, church attendance in Europe is much lower than in the US. Why is this and does it matter?

I remember when first coming to Stow being asked if I would like to join a men’s group to study the bible. My response was, sure, if they didn’t mind having an atheist join them. The invitation was dropped.

I see many of my friends in their guestbook entries offer prayers. I’m sure that some of them don’t know that I’m an atheist, but that’s not the point – they are not. I do not find the offering of prayers at all offensive. You can even pray for my conversion if you will (unlikely) – but please don’t proselytize. In the reverse situation, if you were the one in hospital and I were the one signing the guestbook, it would be meaningless for me to pray to God for you. I would offer my deepest good wishes to you for support and recovery. Being an atheist does not mean that you become incapable of caring.

My problem with religion is when it becomes divisive.

One of the reasons, I think, why church attendance is less in the UK, at least, than in the US is because community also exists in the local pub culture. Having worked the vendage in France one year, I know that France also has its café culture. In the US we do not have anything like this spread throughout the country, but the US does have certain non-religious communities, such as soccer mums and school groups. It’s not the same, however. These communities are often tightly scheduled and have high demands on time; being a member of them can often feel more like a job than time-off. Also they are exclusive – you can’t be a member of a school group if you don’t have school age kids. What is needed is more opportunities for community (non-alcoholic included).

Mo and I and Miranda tried a few of the churches in the local area and settled, for a while, on an Episcopalian church, the Church of the Good Shepherd in Acton. It has a dynamic music director

[By the way – there’s great anagram pair in English: Episcopal:Pepsi Cola / Presbyterians:Britney Spears]

The problem was that the church made more and more demands on Mo’s time – there appeared to be no middle way. It’s difficult to avoid feelings of guilt when you turn down an invitation to play in the pageant, or help out in ushering.

Some of the mega-churches that I hear of down South have very sophisticated approaches to marketing and providing services to the community. All well and good, if that is what you want, but harmful if it competes with other communities – either national or international. It’s fine for the church to offer health care and services to the homeless, but that’s not its principal job, and if it means that government thinks it can skip providing these services then we have a problem.

Although an atheist, I see a lot of good in religion. Simon Blackburn, in his book “Being Good – A Short Introduction to Ethics” does a fine job at dismantling the traditional religious explanations for ethics (is something ethical because God says it is, or does God say it’s ethical because it is?). Blackburn then goes on to talk about Benthamism and Utilitarianism, which provides a much stronger argument for ethical behavior – but it still does not explain Mother Teresa.

Snowing today – 10 inches expected in Stow so Maureen cannot come in. The parent/teacher conferences were canceled as well. I am pretty much insulated from all of this. I can see thin snow falling diagonally from right to left at a 45° angle. My window is largely obscured by the huge get-well card from Miranda’s 6^th grade classmates. Surrounding them on three sides are 12 get-well cards from friends and relatives. At the top is the hand-turkey that Miranda made for me when I was first admitted. It brightens the room up a bit, but I find myself craving visual stimulation. For the first ten days I had signed up for the extended set of TV channels at $5 a day, but I found myself watching it less and less, till I only watched it meal times for distraction. The rest of the time it quickly grew annoying with the endless repetition of news stories, in the vain hope, apparently, that repetition could bring about penetration. The local channel, WBZ is also free, as are two Spanish stations and two public TV stations, although one of them seems to be restricted to showing Andre Rieu concerts.

My room is on the 5^th floor. Outside I see two brick/glass buildings and miscellaneous ductwork. If I walk to the window I see the bridge that links Dana Farber to Brigham & Women’s, with hospital staff walking across. You can tell doctors by their white coats and porters by their blue ones. Under the bridge I see the street and what appears to be a parking garage. I see the occasional taxi drive slowly by, and pedestrians trudging through the slush, head down and wrapped up.

A rough night where my temperature was up over 100 for a bit and I wondered where it was going to stop. A lot of mouth pain. I did get a lot of sleep however. I could not focus on reading or even listening to the radio. I confirmed with Dr. S this morning that the new IV antibiotics they have me on are going to delay my going home. They have to stabilize me before letting me go. Both Dr. S and Dr. J confirm that I am doing very well in this treatment – touch wood when you write that – so I am obviously encouraged. Handling expectations of success and failure is going to be crucial during this episode.

Mo and I had a long talk with Dr. J yesterday, about my condition and life in general. I like him – I wonder if I talk too much though – I’ve become quite the gossip while laid up here. I am sensitive that my observations about hazards and risks in medicine could be taken the wrong way, to mean that one associates blame with them. I’m not, as most FAA inspectors could tell you. Read James Reason. (By the way, I had heard that he had moved on from aviation safety to medical safety, but I have not seen anything published recently. Can anyone tell me what he’s up to?) The notions of assignment of blame are hard to shake, as is the domino theory of accidents. I see these notions used daily, by politicians, and, of course, in litigation. It seems as if we are pre-wired to the need to assign meaning and cause and responsibility for every adverse event. We hardly ever do this for favorable events. It seems to me that one must allow that some things happen for no reason at all. Saying that does not preclude looking for causes and factors, but some things happen for no reason whatever. Perhaps Burkitt Lymphoma is one such event. It is interesting to study the disease in depth and to understand the mechanisms involved, but at some level surely one must that it happened at random.

As my mother used to say when I would whine “It’s not fair!” “Well, life’s not fair!” It is only recently in the last few years that I have begun to understand this. Not sure where she got it from – perhaps from living through the war and cast off at an early age to live with her grandmother.

The other side of the coin, of course, is gratitude. I think that Thanksgiving is perhaps one of the best of America’s many good ideas. A purely secular holiday that presumably has its origins in the harvest festival. I am prodigiously grateful for the opportunity to take a sabbatical and write this blog. Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

Another thing that I’m grateful for is the way that the Stow community has rallied to support Mo and Miranda. Martha has been walking and taking care of Diggory (our wheaten terrier) and this allows Mo to visit me every day. Kathy, Lynn, and Mary, to mention but a few, have been bringing in cooked meals to Bradley Lane. The school has been wonderful supporting Miranda. I have, up on my window, a huge homemade get well card with good wishes from all the children in Miranda’s 6^th grade at Hale.

Dr. S is concerned about my fever – 99.3 on two successive readings – since I have zero resistance right now. They wheeled in a portable X-ray machine and took a plate. I feel good, however. Appetite is good as well as thirst – three days in a row now.

Went through my address books that Rick sent to Maureen and contracted a few folks that I had phone numbers for, but have not talked to for years. I called, I guess, because I have valued them all as friends and have learned from them. Also, I figure they’d be interested in the blog. There are so many names that I don’t have addresses.

For those of you reading this, the blog is the best way to learn of my condition. Send me email, by all means, at [email protected], but I need to manage my correspondence. And please, also, no large attachments since I’m on dial-up.

As I wrote earlier, my speech has been affected, and because of dry-mouth and soreness it will sometimes be difficult to talk. Finally, the blog lets me correspond at my own speed, which varies from day-to-day.

Tonight, well tomorrow really at 2 am, I get my antidote, the leucovorin, to counter the methotrexate, as well as another G-CSF to bring my white blood cell count up.

Finished the “Fortune of War.” The last part, about Jack and Steven’s adventures in Boston are one of my favorite episodes.

her religions too, though I do not have experience here. This is also true of non-religious medicine such as yoga, homeopathy, and macrobiotics, to the extent that they attempt to substitute for mainstream medicine, rather than complement it. This is not to say that mainstream medicine is always correct – after all it is science and therefore falsifiable – whereas the others appear to me to lack the crucial characteristic of falsifiability.

[later]

There may be some permanent, or very slowly healing nerve damage, including partial paralysis of my lower lip and deviation of the tongue. Because I am now so careful in enunciating my words it appears that my accent has reverted to being yet more British. I may also need speech therapy to deal with this nerve damage.