Since he won’t tell you …
… I will.
Jim’s second poetry book, “Antidotes & Home Remedies,” is a finalist for a 2009 Oklahoma Book Award. The book, published last year, includes 60 poems, some of which were excerpted Sunday in “Life is real” Chapter Two.
Jim faces stiff competition in the poetry category. Two of the finalists are his close friends, Nathan Brown and Dorothy Alexander. Nathan, who performs with Jim at poetry readings, is a finalist for his book, “Two Tables Over.” Dorothy, who runs Village Books Press in Cheyenne, published their books, along with her own. She is a finalist for “Lessons from an Oklahoma Girlhood.”
You can read stories that Nathan and Dorothy told about Jim in Chapter Two.
Congratulations to all of the poetry finalists, including Carol Hamilton (“Shots On”) and Linda Hogan (“Round the Human Corners”). A full list of Oklahoma Book Award finalists is available at www.odl.state.ok.us/ocb/09final.htm. All five books are available at Full Circle Bookstore at 50 Penn Place in Oklahoma City.
Chapter 2 just went up
Chapter 2 of Jim’s story has just been posted on the “Life is real” main site.
This chapter takes a look at Jim’s life through his poetry and through the eyes of some of the people who know him the best. I think it’s pretty funny, at least in places, but two editors here cried a little when they read it. I think that’s a testament to how touching Jim’s life is and how easy it is to care about him and his family.
Let me know what you think.
Root of the problem
The tooth, like the rest of me, was about twice as big as it should’ve been.
I found that out yesterday, several hours after having oral surgery to remove an impacted wisdom tooth on the lower left side of my jaw. The operation went well, I’m told, although my mouth didn’t stop filling with blood for about 21 hours. Haven’t been able to sleep, either. Or eat. Hurts a ton, too, especially when I swallow or take a sip of … well, anything. Milkshakes, Vitamin Water, regular water, salt water (to rinse the wound), etc., it doesn’t matter. It all hurts.
But everything went well. That’s what the surgeon said when he called to check on me about 8 p.m. last night. “That was a difficult tooth to remove,” he said. “It was huge. Ordinarily, wisdom teeth only have two roots. Yours had four or five. Was it four? I think it was five.”
Five roots. Two and a half times as many as it should’ve had.
The news immediately made me think of how limited our diagnostic tools are, even now, even in the 21st Century. A week before the operation, I’d had a full set of dental X-rays taken. The wisdom tooth was clearly visible and clearly wrong. It had grown in sideways, the crown nearly touching the roots of the rear molar. A pocket of infection surrounded the wisdom tooth, which pressed up against a bundle of nerves providing feeling to the lower left jaw and bottom lip. Not a bit of it was visible above the gumline, but there it was, plain as day, staring back at me from that X-ray.
And all I saw was two roots. See, the X-ray just showed a sideways view of the tooth. If we’d been able to see it from above or from different angles, we might’ve seen those extra roots spreading out from it and known in advance that this was going to be a tough tooth to extract.
It’s a totally different scenario, but I couldn’t help but think of Jim and that little bump on his arm that signalled the start of his problems. Some of the best doctors in the world worked on his arm, analyzing X-rays and CT scans and MRIs, and they still kept missing things. A malignant fibrous hystiocytoma is difficult to differentiate from surrounding tissue, and little bits of it must have kept spreading despite the surgeons’ best efforts to remove it all. For all our machines and tests and hospitals and medical schools, we’re still so uninformed about so many medical conditions and the best ways to treat them. I always wonder which commonplace medical practices today will later prove to have been needlessly detrimental and misguided, like the use of leeches, arsenic or mercury years ago.
It’s scary, and it’s maddening that for all the billions of dollars that have been thrown at cancer research, we still can’t eradicate it, at least not in a depressingly high number of cases. I get angry thinking that someone as young as Jim Chastain has suffered so much and will die because his own body has turned against him, and there’s little we can do to stop it.
That lump in Jim’s arm, like my tooth, had too many roots. He didn’t know any more than I did. But while I lost a useless chunk of calcium and enamel, Jim lost his arm … and far too soon, he’ll lose his life.
Heartbreaking story out of China
Saw this on CNN International today. Wow. Just … wow.
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BEIJING, China (CNN) – A 13-year-old Chinese girl tried to commit suicide because she wanted her family to donate her liver to her cancer-stricken father, state media reported Thursday.
The girl, Chen Jin, swallowed more than 200 sleeping pills after she discovered a medical note in her mother’s purse that said her father was dying of liver cancer and had three months left to live, the news agency Xinhua said.
Jin’s mother returned home after visiting her husband in the hospital to find the front door locked. The mother climbed in through a back window and found two empty bottles of sleeping pills.
“Mom, I’m sorry I couldn’t stay with you any longer,” read a note that the teen had left next to her. “Please give my liver to dad and save him after my death.”
The incident occurred January 24 in Jiangsu province in east China. The teen was taken to the same hospital as her father, where she remains in intensive care, drifting in and out of consciousness, Xinhua said.
Doctors say that even if she pulls through, she will need surgery for burns she suffered from an electric blanket on her bed when she lost consciousness, the China Daily newspaper said.
According to Chinese media reports, the family — whose monthly income is about 1,000 yuan ($146) — has already spent nearly 100,000 yuan ($14,600) in medical expenses since the father was diagnosed with cancer more than a month ago. The mother, who is also in poor health, retired early more than eight years ago.
The woman told China Daily she is now trying to keep her husband from learning of their daughter’s desperate act of love.
LeAnn’s innermost secret revealed!
“So what do you think of Ms. Chastain? Is she a good teacher?”
The middle school girl looked at me shyly, all pigtails and brown eyes. “Yes,” she said, a picture of innocent youth. “She’s my favorite.”
“You’re not just saying that because I might put it in the paper, are you?”
The girl shot me a glance. I couldn’t tell if she was insulted or if she was surprised I’d seen through her little ruse. “No!” she said. “Everybody likes her.”
Yeah, sure, kid. Sell me a bridge while you’re at it.
A few weeks ago, John Clanton and I met up with LeAnn at Whittier Middle School in Norman, where she works as a math teacher. While John kept LeAnn occupied, I quietly interrogated several of her students, trying to ferret out the truth. “Does she call you names? Does she hit you? Has she ever killed anyone in class?” (OK, I didn’t really ask those particular questions. I wanted to, though.)
She’d brainwashed her students well. They all stuck to variations of the same story: We like her. She’s a fun teacher. She’s nice.
About the worst they’d admit is that she gives a lot of homework.
Here’s the deal, boys and girls: I was your age once, and I know how it works. Students and teachers don’t mix. Teachers keep you trapped inside on sunny days. They won’t let you play with your friends, and they force you to learn words like “hypotenuse.” Tell me you like your teacher, and I know you’re jacking with me.
Except … these students didn’t seem to be lying.
In the cafeteria, kids didn’t shrink away from her. She talked to them – not so much as an adult to a child but as an adult to another adult, albeit one who’s 4-feet-tall and eating pudding. In the hallway, students waved at her and smiled as she passed; I turned around to see if they’d throw rude gestures at her back, but none did. Before class, they scurried around her desk, babbling happy metatalk for a few minutes before drifting toward their seats.
During class, it was even worse. The Stepford Children couldn’t wait to participate, raising their hands and leaning out of their chairs in the hope that she’d call on them. They played a math game, some hybrid version of Hollywood Squares (based in Norman and without a single celebrity guest), and some kids actually seemed disappointed when class ended. Disappointed!
The way I see it, there are two possibilities here.
1) LeAnn is a great teacher.
2) LeAnn is a mutant with crazy mind control powers.
I think it’s clear which one is true. Sorry, LeAnn, your secret’s out.
