Maybe I’m still alive.
Today is a kind of milestone – five years ago today, I had surgery to remove my tumor.
My final check-up at the cancer hospital is coming up in about 2 weeks’ time – it was originally scheduled for today, in fact, but they had to move it for some reason. After my check up, this time, the hospital releases me from “monitoring” (ie. the scheduled semi-annual CAT scans, mostly) under the assumption that any metastasis is unlikely at this point.
Thus, any cancer I get, from here forward, is presumed to be “new” in some sense, I guess. Not that it really works that way. The current understanding is that we all have cancer, all the time. But mostly, our immune systems in all their guises keep it in check. So getting sick with cancer is mostly a failure of some aspect of the immune system.
[daily log: walking, 8km; carrying heavy box to post office, 0.5km]
Day: July 3, 2018
Caveat: Poem #703
I lay prepared like poultry: grist for knives
or scalpels held by surgeons, mentally
relinquishing a grip on life, unknown
events awaiting, ghostlike now and gone.
Caveat: 스무th
Today at work I saw a student (I’m not sure who) had added a comment to one of my whiteboard alligators.
They gave the “annoyed alligator” something to say, with a speech bubble. What he was saying was, “스무th” [seumu-th] which is a transliteration of “smooth”, I suppose. I think there’s some kind of meme going around Korean tweenagerdom using this English word. But what I found surprising was that the transcription into the Korean alphabet (hangul) shows a certain phonological sophistication, in that the “th” sound is un-transcribed, which in turn indicates an awareness that the “th” sound doesn’t exist Korean. Normally, the “th” sound is alternately transcribed as either “ㅅ/ㅆ” [s/ss] or as “ㄷ/ㄸ” [d/tt]. And most Koreans seem singularly unaware that in fact it is not either of these sounds but rather something else. So this unusual non-transcription event makes me feel happy that at least one junior whiteboard vandal at Karma has got the concept. Here’s a picture.
[daily log: walking, 8.5km; carrying heavy box to post office, 0.5km]