News From The Cancer Front

I went to see my oncologist Monday, and he's still happy with me. And when he's happy with me, oh, I'm happy too. I do a pretty thorough "lump-check" on my body every few hours on my own, and lately I haven't found anything untoward. But it's always a comfort when he does it and he can't find anything untoward either.

I'm due for a PET scan in a few weeks, but it's for monitoring, not diagnosis. So far - fingers crossed - I have no active cancer going on.

My only real complaint has been the persistent swelling of my left leg, which the experts believe to be caused by the scar tissue and general destruction in the left side of my groin, some of it courtesy of chemotherapy and some of it courtesy of radiation. But I've noticed in the last week that the swelling seems to be abating somewhat. It doesn't look any different, at least not unless you know exactly what to look for, but it certainly feels different. My shoe is getting looser instead of tighter. I can bend my knee through a larger angle. It's easier to get in and out of cars.

Conduct this experiment: bend your toes downward, and notice the way wrinkles tend to form on the sole and side of your foot. For a long time I couldn't even bend my toes downward, and if I did, there were no wrinkles - my leg was so swollen it was like an overstuffed sausage, so tight that wrinkles never formed at all. But I'm starting to see wrinkles again, and I can bend my toes.

As victories go, it probably doesn't rank up there with the big ones - Trafalgar, Pharsalus, Kursk, Midway, Waterloo, the Battle of Britain, Vicksburg, Actium. It doesn't even rank up there with the not-so-big ones - Pea Ridge, Empress Augusta Bay, even French Lick. But it's a big deal to me personally.

This leads me to wonder what the most significant battle in human history was. I think every battle is hugely significant, if only to the poor bastards that had to fight it, and a lot of battles that are considered "great" were in fact meaningless. Cannae comes to mind in this regard - yeah, sure, Hannibal inflicted a terrible defeat on the Romans and killed umpteen thousand legionaries, but in the end, what did it get him? The Carthaginians still lost, Hannibal still went into exile, and today we recognize Roman notions of civilization as the underpinnings of modern civic life, not Carthaginian notions of civilization. For all the good it did Hannibal, Cannae might as well not have happened at all. Another one is the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Huge naval battle, full of stories of sacrifice and courage, especially on the part of the men of the escort carrier group Taffy Three, but even assuming the US Navy lost the battle, Japan would still have lost the war.

I usually vote for the Battle of Poitiers, also known as the Battle of Tours, where Charles Martel and a bunch of grubby Franks defeated Abdul Rahman. It is said that this battle finally ended Islamic invasions of Europe. Maybe, and maybe not. But it did cement the primacy of the Franks in western Europe and paved the way for Charlemagne, and that's pretty dang significant.

The most significant battle in modern history, I think, is the Battle of the Atlantic. I've written about this subject before, but I'll repeat just a little. Given the power of the US industrial economy, and the vast scale of US and Canadian resources, the only hope the Germans had in World War Two was severing Britain and the Soviet Union from their principal sources of supply (points not often noted in the books I've read is how the massive infusion of US-built trucks gave Soviet tank armies considerable mobility in the later years of the war, and how vast supplies of US and Canadian grain allowed the Soviets to draft far more men off their farms than they could have otherwise, not to mention how most of the high-octane av-gas burned in all those Lancasters and Spitfires came from Texas, or how many of those Lancasters and Spitfires seemed to have Canadians at the controls).

So, if the Germans were to have any hope of winning the war, they had to win the Battle of the Atlantic. This comes basically down the question of whether German U-boats could stop Atlantic convoys, or if the escorts could get the convoys through on a reliable basis. And it turned out, they could. Some of my more patriotic associates don't like my notion that it was largely British and Canadian convoy escorts that won the war, but it seems inescapable to me. This is not to say that the United States had no role to play - look at how many of the Royal Navy's escort carriers were US-made, or how many US aircraft the Coastal Command operated. But the point is that the campaign against the U-boats was for the most part planned and executed by the British and the Canadians, though perhaps using a good deal of US hardware.

Besides, it seems obvious to me that the US Navy was always chiefly interested in defeating Japan, not Germany. And it must be said that US Navy fast carrier task forces and submarines went about that task with great and terrible efficiency.

And that, me buckos, is one gigantic digression.