In which my body continues to antagonize me

and I try my hand at political commentary

Hi, all. I’ve written a number of pieces since I last harassed you—I write one, give or take, every week, after all—but there are two that I’d like to highlight (and one forthcoming piece that I’ll probably highlight in coming days, if you’ll permit me one more email tomorrow or over the weekend).

For the first piece, I read J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. It’s kitschy, sentimental and full of conservative clichés about the laziness of the poor. I’m embarassed for anyone who ever liked it, and I theorize a little about why people were so taken in by its dubious charms: https://wapo.st/3A7afgH.

For the second, I wrote some political commentary! This piece also features my first feats of “reporting” (by which I mean, I called a few people on the phone and asked them about coconuts). It’s about coconuts, memes, Kamala, and how irony is the aesthetic mode of effective political coalitions. It was fun to write! https://wapo.st/4fn6LHb

In other news, I drank radioactive iodine about a week ago, in an effort to kill my remaining thyroid cells. (I did not do this of my own initiative: implausible as it sounds, radioactive iodine therapy is the state-of-the-art treatment for thyroid cancer, not some Trumpian quack remedy like colloidal silver.) Initially, being radioactive was more psychologically than physically harrowing. I felt normal, but I knew that I wasn’t normal, and that was weird. There’s something Lovecraftian about the invisibility of radioactivity. I guess the agents of most ailments—viruses, microplastics, and the like—are invisible to the naked eye, but we’re so used to thinking about how they’re transmitted that we have some ingrained sense of how to avoid contamination. I kept finding myself involuntarily and inaptly applying the COVID rules to my situation, thinking: if I only met people outside, I wouldn’t imperil them. But that isn’t true, because radioactivity isn’t an airborne virus. It’s a ghostly emanation, and for the first five days after radioactive iodine therapy, you can’t be near anyone for a prolonged period, even outside. So I sat in quarantine and watched Challengers (which I really disliked—that cheesy shot from the vantage point of the ball, my god) and The Devils (which I really liked a lot) and….ate box upon box of Lemonheads.

Almost all of the radioactivity leaves your body within the first 48 hours, so during that time you’ve got to take lots of showers and drink lots of water, then urinate and flush the toilet several times. You also have to suck on sour candy continuously, so as to ensure that the radioactivity cycles through your salivary glands and does not damage them. In fact, you have to wake up in the middle of the night to shower and suck on sour candy, which I did several times. If I ever write auto-fiction (don’t worry, I won’t), it will feature a scene in which my doctor sternly instructs me to wake up at night to eat candy. Reader, he did.

Suffice it to say: I will never eat—or even look at—a Lemonhead again.

The treatment was successful, I think. I had basically no thyroid tissue left, anyway, and the few bits and pieces that remained hadn’t spread anywhere alarming; they were all concentrated in my neck. We won’t really know if we’ve axed all of them for a while, because the assasin iodine takes a couple of months to make the kill. Just to ensure that I’m fully cancer free, I’ll have to do bloodtests that measure the “biomarkers” of thyroid cells (something called “thyroglobuline,” I think?) and undergo another scan in the coming months/years. I have a very low risk of recurrence, though.

For the first few days of my exciting new life as a cancer-free nuclear hazard, I thought the extremely restrictive diet I had to maintain for a month before the treatment (for complicated reasons I can best summarize as, “the thyroid absorbs more of the radioactive iodine if it’s starved of all other iodine”) was the worst part of the whole ordeal. The dreaded Low Iodine Diet proscribes everything. You can’t have iodized salt and therefore can’t have any food/baked goods from restaurants (almost all of which use iodized salt), anything from the sea (sea salt, seafood, seaweed), soy products, canned beans (unless they contain no iodized salt), dairy, and egg yolks. If there is a hell, the chefs there serve low-iodine food, I’m sure of it.

I’m vegetarian, so I was subsisting on nut butter and carrots and trying, but largely failing, to remember to soak beans in advance of my meals. I was hungry all the time. Trad wives make it seem pleasant and wholesome to cook all your own food, but let me assure you, it is not. I’ve been reading a lot of Elias Canetti lately, and I can imagine him saying something like: allowing others to prepare food for you is the most primal way of signaling that you trust them with your life. (He says some similar things, but he does not say exactly this.) It’s pleasant, actually, to trust other people with your life. The alternative—preparing all your food yourself—is pathologically anti-social. While I made my sad, stupid little meals, I thought of Gödel, who believed everyone was out to poison him and eventually starved to death.

Needless to say, I was pleased to go off the diet. I ordered a burrito the moment I was cleared to eat cheese. I still have mild hypothyroidism—we are continuing to adjust my dosage of hormone replacement medication in the wake of my surgery, which was almost three months ago now—but I had been feeling alive enough to, e.g., hike 17ish miles on one long day in the White Mountains (pictured below in all their glory).

But a few days after I drank the iodine, I felt floored with fatigue. It’s possible the exhaustion is a product of the nutrient deficiences I acquired while living off carrots. (I have low iron and low calcium now.) I think it’s likely, however, that radioactive iodine therapy just makes people tired, even though it’s advertised as free of side effects. In fact, if you simply Google “radioactive iodine therapy fatigue,” the first result informs you that radioactive iodine therapy can induce fatigue for up to a year. My year of rest, relaxation, and bodily decay has been irritating for so many reasons, but one of them is that doctors have repeatedly assured me that something they’re giving me has no side effects, leaving me to freak out and assume I have further cancers when I experience the side effects that shouldn’t exist—until it occurs to me to Google them, at which point I discover that they are quite common. When I was briefly on the steroid Budesonide for my microscopic colitis (an autoimmune digestive disease; I have a million diseases and it’s ruining my life), I found myself unable to sleep for weeks. The drug totally fixed my digestive problems, and the treatment only lasted two months, so I would’ve taken it even if I had known—but I wish I’d had some warning! I guess I have to gear up for “up to a year” of fatigue now, I shriek into the abyss.

You’d think I’d be an old hand at relaxing after more than a year of vitamin B12 deficiency, autoimmune chaos, hypothyroidism, colitis, endoscopies, colonoscopies, injections, infusions, organ removals, and cancer treatments, but no, I am as inept at chilling the fuck out as ever. It’s not in my tempermental repetoire. I don’t really know how to do it. I rest when my body forces me to—mostly when I fall asleep while I’m trying to read—but I resist it before I succumb to it, and I feel guilty about it afterwards. I fucking hate relaxing. What are you even supposed to do while you are “relaxing”? Do you just lie still? Do you read stupid books instead of “hard” ones? During my two four-hour cancer scans, I listened to The Secret History on audiobook (I HATE audiobooks and would never listen to a book I liked), and I hated it, but I couldn’t move my arms to turn it off, and I did not feel relaxed at all. I think if it were still possible to relax by having an ecstatic experience in an alpine sanitorium, I might be able to get into it, but I was born too late for everthing pleasant. I hope that someday I will once again reach the point where I never have to fucking relax again. The logical endpoint of relaxation is death.

I realize that this shriek into the void has no point, but there’s something fortifying about ranting in public, and I’m in no condition to deny myself small pleasures. Enjoy your functional bodies while they last.

Here are the White Mountains, in all their glory, as promised!!!!!!!