If you haven't already, please, do this now. For me. Become an organ donor.

Well, the test results came back and the news is bad. My uncle, who I previously mentioned might have liver cancer (although he has never had a drink of alcohol in his life), does in fact have liver cancer. He went in to the hospital about a week ago so that the oncologist could do some exploratory surgery, and it was confirmed.

The cancer is invasive. The cancer is aggressive. The cancer is rare and, even had it been caught right away, there is no known cure or treatment for this kind of liver cancer. While nearly unknown in the United States, this kind of liver cancer is prevalent in Africa and Southern Asia, and comes from a kind of mold found on nuts from these areas. The mold produces a toxin (Aflatoxin or something like that) which causes the liver cancer.

My uncle has never been to Africa or Asia. I would guess that someone bought him some sort of nut sampler for Christmas or something, and that’s how he got the toxin.

My uncle will be dead in under 2 weeks.

His liver and surrounding tissues are liquefying, and the people at the hospital already suctioned out 54 pounds of fluid from him. Today, they sent him home with a hospice service to wait for his death.

It kills me that I’m up here in Seattle with no way to go home to see him. I wish I had the money to buy a plane ticket, but the one I have is non-refundable, and I don’t have enough money to buy another one. I won’t fly out of here until the end of the week, and by that time, it may be too late.

Whenever bad things happen, I tend to switch off the emotional side of my brain and focus on policy. I ask questions like, “How could this have been prevented?” and “What should we do next time to ensure that this turns out better?” In that vein, I have come to three policy determinations.

1) We should increase the amount of funding for cancer research. It galls me to think that we have spent almost 300 billion dollars on the Iraq war, when we haven’t federally subsidized cancer research in that amount even if you added it up over the past decade.

2) We need to reinvigorate the stem cell research programs in the United States. The United States and a select few other countries are the forefront of scientific research in the world today. It is unacceptable for us to turn our backs on what is potentially the most astounding breakthrough in modern medical science just because a vocal minority want to save frozen embryos which will never (ever) develop into children. If we could have started regrowth of my uncle’s liver when it was first caught, we could have halted the cancer in its tracks.

And most importantly,

3) We need to reverse the presumption on organ donation. Currently, when a person dies, their organs are not-transplantable unless the person has give their explicit permission to do so. It is one of the vilest wrongs I can imagine to bury or cremate viable organs that could save hundreds of thousands of lives each year just because people were too lazy to fill out a living will or get the required signatures on the back of their driver’s license. To me, burying viable organs is like standing in front of a person who is starving to death and burning a large, sumptuous meal, just to watch it burn. It’s wrong, and we, as an enlightened society of the 21st century, ought not to allow it to happen ever again. If you want your organs buried in the ground, denying others the right to continue their lives when you die, you ought to have to make that clear, rather than the other way around.

Fremont Fair

I’ve never been all that fond of hippies. While I enjoy the fact that the free-love generation brought us a rebellion against the social norms of the 1940’s and ‘50’s, they made the regrettable mistake of throwing out quite a lot of good things as well for no other reason than that they were associated with the previous generations. When throwing out the bathwater, it would behoove a rebel to check the tub for babies first.

What brings this to mind is that I spent this past weekend, with my brother, at the Fremont Fair in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. Fremont is the all-around artsy neighborhood, full of coffeeshops, independent bookstores, unique and colorful houses and characters, and special ethnic restaurants. While walking the streets of Fremont (to get to and from the fair took a bit since parking was at a premium) it was not uncommon to see random strangers smoking weed. There was a fellow painting multi-colored polka-dots on the road, and more long-haired guitar players than you could legitimately shake a stick at.

The Fremont Fair took place on several square blocks where traffic had been shut down and the streets lined with booths hawking anything from tarot readings and astrology, to imported African musical instruments and handmade Afghani handbags, to people explaining philosophical positions or trying campaign for local political candidates. There were a few booths selling more commercial items like vinyl siding or life insurance, but they were few and far between.

And then there were the hippies. More hippies than I’d ever seen all in one place. Some had dressed for the fair as if it were a renaissance festival. Others had tattooed and painted bodies filled with piercings. One fellow wore only a loin cloth, and another had painted himself up like a tiger, including a fluffy set of ears, a tail, and nothing (I mean nothing) else. There were people openly taking hits of acid, and it seemed as if an awful lot of people I met were either drunk or high (or both). It was definitely an experience outside of my comfort zone. It was the kind of fair at which you might see a parade of 175 nude bicyclists, but luckily I missed that part.

But the fair itself was interesting. I was able to meet several of my brother’s friends who worked the fair at a booth with my brother. I was able to get into a philosophical discussion with a man from the Republicans booth as well as a wandering Satanist (the two of them got into it pretty deeply, and I ended up walking away and starting up a conversation with a Scientologist). I even got to fluster the people taking ‘aura’ photographs, by pointing out that all they were doing was measuring the conductivity of various samples of humanity to electricity and using a computer to visualize the resultant electrical field.

I spent most of my time, though, helping out at a booth run by my brother and a few of his friends. Since my brother is the president of a Seattle area club, he and his friends were out making a showing of their organization at the fair. I have to admit that it was a rousing success. They made a little bit of money from donations, had many fine dialogues with people interested in understanding their organization and its goals, passed out hundreds of fliers and business cards to people who stopped by the booth, and got e-mail addresses for about 50 people or so who were interested in getting more information about the group and its meeting times. For a group with about 50 members or so, the potential to double membership as a result of the fair seems like a fairly (pun intended) good thing. And as if that weren’t good enough for them, a journalist with one of the major newspapers in the Seattle metro area wrote a piece on the fair in which the reporter quoted a member of the organization to which my brother belongs concerning their group. Getting your group’s name in the paper is bound to generate a little bit of interest.

As much fun as that was, it was quite difficult to put up with the pot-smokin’ hippies.