Climate Change: Bug Spray for Humans

Chapter 10 of Local Girl Liveblogs the Apocalypse

Previously… Katherine identifies some big needs to get the project going. She needs land, she needs help, she needs resources. She’s put the call out and she’s trusting the right people will step up. If not, the enemy that alarms her more than martial law is lawless men with guns, and how does one tackle a threat like that?

Chapter 10 - Climate Change: Bug Spray for Humans

“Katherine Cooper?” a woman's voice on the phone says, harried already.

“Yes, that's me,” I answer. I know it's the oncologist because the number is in my phone, but I can never be sure who from the office is calling me. There's a team of nurses, a nurse practitioner, and of course the oncologist, who almost never calls herself. I see her every couple months after a round of imaging and exams.

“We wanted to speak with you about your latest CT results. Have you pulled them up online?”

“Uh, no, I haven't. There's been... a lot going on.”

“Of course,” she says, is if the collapse of the climate is akin to settling back in after a long weekend away. “So, this is the most recent imaging after the latest ARC radiation and your... tenth chemo cycle – ”

“Thirteenth,” I say, trying not to let frustration tinge my voice. Every time they call I have to be on my toes because they just cannot seem to get the numbers right. And normally I do check my results online, but I just couldn't bear to this time. Bad news would truly make the world feel like it was ending, and good news can be just as scary. Difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't been through it, but good news after a cancer diagnosis never really felt like a relief for me. More like a brief reprieve from that thing that is lurking, waiting for a particular combination of immune weakness, stress, and environmental factors – all timed to a genetic gunshot.

“Thirteenth... Oh, okay, yes, I see.” There's the sound of the nurse typing. “Sorry about that. Well, Dr. Hall is confident that the chemoradiation therapy has done its job and is keeping the cancer at bay.”

It's not a cure. It's a timebomb. “What are the next steps?”

“Well, how are you doing? How's your pain level?”

“Same as always. Really bad and I have zero faith that there's anything out there that can help me.” I am one of those lucky cancer patients whose pain is barely touched by opiates. Unlike with most people I know, the doctors are quick to prescribe me benzodiazepine drugs, probably because I won't live long enough to have to deal with the horrific consequences of chronic ativan usage and the ensuing withdrawal. And things like that, those subtle cues from the medical industry, are what reaffirm my terminal diagnosis.

The oncologist doesn't like to talk about prognosis because everyone responds to treatment differently, and new medications come out all the time. At first, this language made me hopeful, but eventually I figured it out. With the best treatment options we currently have, my cancer will not be cured. Any medication that gets invented has a long way through R&D and approval before it'll ever reach my bloodstream.

I'm in stasis until I'm in crisis, basically.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” the nurse says. “We do hear from our other oncology patients that acetaminophen is actually the best painkiller.”

“Yes, I've heard that myself. I take it.”

“Okay. Have you thought about seeing a psychiatrist? Sometimes it's good to have someone to talk to, and they may be able to prescribe something that brings you some relief.”

“Feel free to make a referral,” I say. “I'll follow up.” I hate the bored, childish tone of my voice – but more than that, I hate that we've arrived at this. I've been told by friends, family, and medical professionals that I need psychological help. It's almost comical at this point – why deal with your fear of suffering when the entire planet is under collapse? How is my anxiety meaningful when the psychiatrist is going home to the same end of the world as I am?

Are there coping skills for an existential disaster?

The phone call ends with a promise of a follow-up appointment that will, unfathomably, come through the mail in the next couple weeks. I unthinkingly open a social media app. When I see what the subject matter is – the end of the world, of course – I turn my phone screen off, pushing it out of my line of sight. Before the climate breakdown, there had been bursts of terror and war coming from all corners of the globe, but they'd felt temporary, at least to those of us who weren't living in them.

The news cycle got so dark that even an attempted presidential assassination didn't warrant more than a few days coverage before a new, possibly manufactured crisis entered the media sphere. It was a constant churn of pain and suffering, and you felt like a bad person if you had to look away, but at the same time, you got fucked up if you looked too long. Tragedies came in waves, you almost felt like you could catch your breath in between them. But now? There was nothing else to talk about, and even when someone would make a post trying to draw attention to something less apocalyptic, like a project they'd completed or a special dinner they had made, for a brief moment there's a burst of normalcy, but you hold onto it too tightly, open up the comment thread, and are immediately reminded that no, cauliflower steaks aren't going to save the world and wow, people are really not okay.

I see a few texts come in from Major, but I leave them and go to the bathroom to grab Tylenol. I take them, thinking of the nurse recommending them to an end-stage cancer patient as if I'd never heard of it. Their helplessness used to make me work harder, try more medications, more alternatives to conventional medications. In the beginning, I'd wanted to be a good patient, not too much of a bother. “Oh, I tried yoga and it actually helped! So you can cancel my prescription for hydromorphone.” Somewhere after the tenth chemo cycle, I stopped believing my pain had an end point.

Once I'd started getting neuropathy in my feet, I'd bought these ice-pack slippers to stuff my feet into, hoping to stave off the worst of the chemo's terrible damage. Some people wore ice helmets to keep them from losing their hair. I just shaved it when it got too painful to leave and wore toques or hooded sweatshirts with the hoods pulled over the soft wrap around my sensitive scalp. Short-term solutions became long-term ones. And now I have accepted, as much as one can, that this is more or less how I'm going to feel for the rest of my life, at least until it gets worse. But better is not in my cards. Still, me and Earth approaching hospice together, it's funny to think that there's a cancer taking over inside me, and that I'm also part of the cancer that's killing the earth. Not individual people, not really. But civilization. We were never meant to be such a burden. We could have done this differently.

Maybe. Guess we'll never know.

My body decides to take a nap, and when I awaken, the sun is beginning to set. It's orange and huge in the sky, sending warmth through the windows and a brightness I have to look away from.

It's a bad pain day. The entire day has been rough, but it's pain that woke me up. I check my phone clock – I'd only been asleep a couple hours so I couldn't take more Tylenol yet. Despite my assertions that other meds don't help, I take some anyway, such is the desperation of pain.

I try not to think about hurting (the tops of my feet feel like they're being crushed, hush, don't think about it – there's an ache in the bones of my pelvis and spine that feels dangerous, shhh think of other things, there's a headache that's ricocheting off my skull and settling into three separate areas, at least one indicating that I'm underhydrated, okay, tackle that one, easy fix). I put the pain in a box like I've been taught in meditation and drink deeply from the water bottle I try to keep with me. I'm willing the meds to work quickly and to reach all corners of my body.

There are a few texts, a couple from Tricia asking me if I'm awake and then describing an exchange she had with Mom, who is apparently looking up online about how this whole climate emergency is just an excuse for the new global government to exert power over their citizens. I close my eyes – we'd avoided the worst of the misinformation campaigns in Canada while we watched the USA devolve. Not that its tendrils hadn't crept north. We'd had our own battles with rightwing extremism and disinformation campaigns directed at Canadians. We'd tried, as a nation, to educate people on how to recognize bots, trolls, AI, and shills.

But with our information sources becoming so diffuse, and systematic attempts to defund and discredit the national news, it was impossible to reach everyone and even if you did, you had to compete with infinitely more exciting and somehow authoritative individuals, who became more trusted than governments despite never citing their sources beyond linking to another youtube channel. At least until some unsavoury information came out about the individual and the fan exodus swarmed like a collection of bees without a queen until they landed on some other, new, infallible leader who spoonfed fear and lies ad nauseam.

Even our brother James had helped in our efforts to keep mom off that track, challenging the wild ideas she'd bring to family dinners, encouraging her to only watch what she subscribed to and not what the algorithm put in front of her. But with most families, keeping your loved ones from radicalizing was a battle fought against corporations with unlimited funds and a relentless ferocity when it came to sowing discord.

I text Tricia back, thanking her for her vigilance. I read the text from Major: Let's meet up. Someone I want you to meet. I text her back and we make a plan to head out first thing the following morning. She'll come pick me up in her SUV and I'm instructed to wear long sleeves and pants. Which means there'll be bugs. I can't rage against the biting insects because they have an important role in our ecosystem and I'd rather there be more than fewer, but my less evolved self is not thrilled at the idea.

I wonder if climate change is just bug spray for humans.