Katherine Addison's Blog

[image error]

Archie Goodwin a.k.a. Catzilla
March 2006 - February 21, 2025

We found Archie in our flowerbed in July 2006 when he was 4 months old. No idea where he came from. We never saw any sign of a mama cat or siblings. He had been out on his own for a while, judging by his parasite load and the other contents of his poop, but he was definitely not feral. So we adopted him.

He was a spoiled brat of a cat, but he was also affectionate and funny and extremely patient with bipedal whims. He did not like laps, although he would sometimes come and sit on you tensely, as if to prove he could do it. He did love snuggling in bed and had finally worked out how to do it so that he was neither strangling me nor completely blocking my view with his fluffy butt. And he had the best deep, loud, rumbling purr. He came and snuggled with me and purred last night, even though he has to have been feeling pretty crummy, and that's a gift.

When UW did the ultrasound of his abdomen this afternoon, they found a very large mass in his intestines, which absolutely had not been there in December. The enlarged lymph nodes looked like they were metatastic, the pancreas looked, in his UW vet's term, "gnarly," and when they checked his bloodwork, his bilirubin count had doubled since Wednesday, and it was astronomical then. So large-cell lymphoma, fast-growing and aggressive. And he had gotten so frail. I didn't think he could stand up to chemo, and the vet said she honestly doubted chemo would even help.

So I called it. He was blissed out on the sedatives from the ultrasound. It seemed stupid and cruel to wait long enough for them to wear off. I told him I loved him, I told him he was a good boy, I told him it was okay for him to let go.

He died in my arms and I drove home with an empty cat carrier.

comments

카지노싸이트 is giving away 30 ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) of The Tomb of Dragons.
[image error]
Details here: /giveaway/show/400337-the-tomb-of-dragons

comments

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so it’s a good time to bring you up to date on what’s been going on with me for the past year and a half.

In May 2023 I was diagnosed with breast cancer in my right breast following a routine mammogram. (So if you want reasons that you ought to be doing routine mammograms, I am one. Also, the word that now strikes fear into my heart is “distortion.”) I did not say anything at the time because I REALLY did not want to talk about it. I just wanted to get through it.

They did biopsies, they did an MRI (which is the most unpleasant medical experience of my life to date, excepting only IUD insertion), they determined that the best thing to do was surgery followed by radiation. Happily, it---or they, there were two of them---they were not the sort of tumor that called for chemo. Also happily, they were very small, so a complete mastectomy was also not called for. At the beginning of July, I had a lumpectomy. They got both tumors, the margins were clear, the lymph node they dissected was clear. All good. I spent July and August recovering from surgery. Lots of fatigue.

In September I had radiation treatments for 20 days. Following excellent advice from my friend Elizabeth Bear, I used calendula cream and Korean snail slime religiously and never had anything worse than a mild sunburn. And more fatigue.

In October I started on Tamoxifen, which is an estrogen blocker. And here things started to go awry. The Tamoxifen made my fibromyalgia not just worse, but TERRIBLE. I was in miserable amounts of pain basically daily. So in January my oncologist decided to try halving my dose (from 20 mg to 10). The fibromyalgia cleared up, but the fatigue did not, so I wasn’t in pain, but I was exhausted. I was going to bed at 8 every night, sleeping from like 9 to 6 and then taking a 3 or 4 hour nap every afternoon. Not great, but I was still hoping my body would adjust when at the end of March I got a blood clot in my right calf.

No more Tamoxifen.

We tried a 10-day course of blood thinner injections (NOT FUN), but after that was done it became apparent that the blood clot was still a problem (my right foot started swelling and became too painful to walk on), so I started three months’ worth of blood thinner pills.

(At around this same time, I started getting nauseated. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the cancer or the cancer treatment, but it is persistent as hell.)

Had a mammogram in April that showed nothing wrong

Finished the blood thinners at the end of July and, the Tamoxifen having had time to clear my system, started estrogen suppression therapy, with an injection every three months and pills daily. So far, the big side effect is that my temperature regulation is completely out of whack, so that I spend my days going from too hot to too cold back to too hot, with the occasional hot flash thrown in for good measure. This is not pleasant, but it is better than the terrible fibromyalgia, and my oncologist holds out hope that it will in fact get better with time.

Had an MRI at the beginning of October which showed no problems, and---my oncologist tells me---breast MRIs are notorious for false positives, so if it didn’t find anything, that means there really isn’t anything to find.

So, from the perspective of this major and very scary upheaval, things are really going pretty well. It’s hard to say whether my current health problems (endless fatigue, nausea, anhedonia, apathy, complete lack of creativity) have anything to do with cancer or cancer treatment. (We’re currently tapering my antidepressant to see if that changes anything.) But I am doing my best to keep fighting.

comments

Cry Havoc!: The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 by Nelson D. Lankford

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is about the first half of 1861. Lankford is interested in how the Civil War came to happen, and particularly interested in dismantling the idea that it was inevitable, or that it had to happen the way it did. It DIDN'T have to happen the way it did, and he digs into the decisions made by individuals (Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, of course, but also the mayor of Baltimore, the commander of the Gosport Navy Yard, William Seward and Gideon Welles, random telegraphers, captains of regiments of volunteers...) to think about other choices they could have made. As with the other book of Lankford's I've read, Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital, he draws on a wide variety of sources and considers everything carefully and critically. And he does a good job of conveying how far from consensus reality the North and South had drifted (his prologue is Harper's Ferry 1859 and the widely differing interpretations of John Brown) and how different a single event, like Lincoln's call for volunteers after Fort Sumter, could look depending on where you were standing.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



View all my reviews

comments

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a smart, funny, angry book about murder in ancient Rome, and about what counted as "murder" and what didn't. (Most of the anger comes from the fact that killing an enslaved person didn't count as murder.) It's "popular" history, but history that doesn't cut any corners on that account. Southon does a great job of explaining the ins and outs of Roman history quickly and entertainingly. She does, of course, spend a great deal of time with the Julio-Claudians, both as murderers and murderees, but she also spends a lot of time talking about less visible murders, and she paints a vividly three-dimensional picture of life in late-Republican and early-Imperial Rome.



View all my reviews

comments

The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans by Charles Royster

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a really excellent book that's kind of difficult to describe. It's partly about Stonewall Jackson and William Tecumseh Sherman, but it's mostly about how Americans in 1861-1865 understood the war they were fighting. Royster really digs into his primary sources, which I appreciate, and his chapters about how Americans conceptualized the Civil War are fascinating. I think his title does a bad job of explaining what the book is about, although one of his principal arguments is about how and why the Civil War became so destructive---which would be why Sherman is one of his main characters. Although Jackson was also a proponent of destructive war, his place in the book is more a discussion of secular hagiography: why did Thomas J. Jackson of all people become a hero to BOTH South AND North, and what work was that image of him doing?

Royster writes beautifully and engagingly, and I found him very persuasive.



View all my reviews

comments

An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government by William C. Davis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


My primary takeaway from this book is that Jefferson Davis was a pig-headed nightmare.

This is a step-by-step recounting of the flight of the Confederate government from Richmond. William C. Davis's two principal characters are Jefferson Davis and John C. Breckinridge, whom he depicts as locked in an almost-unacknowledged struggle for how the Confederacy was going to end the war. Or, in J. Davis's case, NOT end the war. He was talking up to the moment he was captured by the Yankees about going to Texas and raising another army, and the fact that he apparently could not understand that this was impossible is actually one of the things I found most frightening about him. Against him, Breckinridge's determination to end the war and end the Confederacy in a way that provided maximum protection for both soldiers and civilians does look honorable.

I think W. C. Davis is wearing rose-colored glasses in a couple of places. He asserts that Robert E. Lee waffled about telling J. Davis that the war had to end because the "old warrior" couldn't bring himself to admit defeat, whereas I've read enough about Lee to know that he waffled because that was what Lee DID---given almost any moment at which he needed to provide a clear statement of his opinion, he equivocated and sidestepped, was vague where he needed to be specific, etc. It was the nature of the beast.

And W. C. Davis is definitely wearing rose-colored glasses in his conclusion, where he tries to argue that BOTH Breckinridge AND Davis provided good examples for the South after the Civil War. Breckinridge I'll give you---when he came back to the US after the amnesty, he stayed away from political office, he supported the enfranchisement of Black men, when he said anything it was about reconciliation. But Davis?

"If the Confederate president never accepted defeat gracefully, and even if he fell into the bitter post war squabbles that helped to make so many Southerners look foolish and spiteful, still he always rose above the mendacity and rank falsehoods to which the others repeatedly sank. If he never inspired his people with love, still by his conduct as a prisoner and for twenty years afterward, he gave an example of unbending pride and refusal either to supplicate or apologize" (397), and I'm sorry, but how is this a good thing? Also, I'm not quite sure I understand the difference between "mendacity and rank falsehoods" and what he says about J. Davis's memoirs: "What he did not wish to admit, he simply wrote out of his history. Inconvenient facts he ignored, and embarrassing incidents he expunged. His failures were really those of others; his only mistakes had been putting faith in subordinates who then let him down" (395). It seems to me like W. C. Davis is splitting hairs, just as I think he's splitting hairs when he tries to argue that J. Davis wasn't a fanatic. J. Davis's complete divorce from reality seems to me to be the essence of fanaticism.

So I think W. C. Davis needed to think through what he was saying about J. Davis a second time. I would also have liked a slightly more heads-on acknowledgement of chattel slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War---he doesn't deny it, or try to ignore it out of existence, but he doesn't address it, either. I know, it's so much easier to talk about the Confederacy if you don't, because then it DOES almost look as simple as a disagreement over the Constitution, and words like "honor" don't have such an uneasy footing, but the fact is that the liberty that white Southerners were so loud about wanting was specifically the liberty to own other people, and while I understand that most of them didn't see it that way, I also don't think it's something that we should move past. We have the example of the abolitionists to show us that it's also NOT simply a matter of imposing 21st century values on 19th century people, and as I said in some other review, I think about Frederick Douglass and what HE would say. And that tends to cut through the rhetoric pretty quickly.



View all my reviews

comments

Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England by Jane Kamensky

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I wanted this book mostly because she has a long chapter on the Salem witch trials, but the whole thing was excellent. Puritans were obsessed with speech laws---who gets to say what to whom---so Kamensky has buckets of primary source material: trials for heresy, trials for witchcraft, transcripts of sermons (and their interruptions), public apologies, the ubiquitous Cotton Mather...And she uses her source material to show both how speech was SUPPOSED to work and what happened when someone like Anne Hutchinson refused to follow the rules. And this is all interesting in its own right, but it's also building to her discussion of Salem.

It's appropriate that I just finished The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, because that's what Kamensky says happened during the Salem witch trials (I think she uses the actual phrase once or twice), people---girls, goodwives, slaves---who were normally supposed to be silent (and disregarded if they did say something) were speaking AND BEING LISTENED TO, and not just by people of their own status, but by the magistrates. Men, once accused of witchcraft, were not listened to, no matter how high status they were. People who confessed were spared; people who insisted on their innocence were hanged. And even after the trials had stopped, she points out that the world stayed upside down and we get the spectacle of a minister apologizing to his congregation.

Kamensky doesn't have answers for WHY the Salem witch trials exploded the way they did, but she does a great job of analyzing HOW.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



View all my reviews

comments

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution by Christopher Hill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Justifiably classic work on the explosion of radical sects that occurred during the English Civil War. Nowadays, we only know about the Quakers (and Hill talks about why it is that the Quakers survived), but there were Diggers and Levellers and Ranters and Grindletonians and Muggletonians... And the thing about them that Hill conveys very well is that, along with being radical religious groups, they were all Utopian experiments, trying to imagine a better system than what they had. Some of what they came up with, especially Gerrard Winstanley, sounds shockingly modern and Marxist---the abolition of private property was one a lot of them had in common, and they were trying to figure out what do you do NEXT? Unfortunately, the answer is, you get betrayed by the generals, and the power that almost shifted in your favor shifts back, and before you know it, the world turns "right side up" again and hello, Charles II.

Hill is an excellent writer, and he writes about his very dense subject matter very clearly.



Four and a half stars, round up to five.



View all my reviews

comments

The Rise of the Gothic Novel by Maggie Kilgour

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Literary criticism, focused carefully on the Gothic from Caleb Williams to Frankenstein. Kilgour is interested in the way the books are talking to each other, particularly, in one strand, The Monk to The Mysteries of Udolpho, and then---Radcliffe's rebuttal---The Italian to The Monk. In the other strand she's interested in how Frankenstein reflects both on Godwin's Gothics and on Maria, the Gothic that Mary Wollstonecraft left unfinished at her death, and how those influences are tangled up in the biographical elements and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's experiences as the daughter of a famous philosopher (i.e., Godwin) and the wife of a famous poet. And in all of it, Kilgour is interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the Gothic, from Burke to Godwin to Rousseau. Her organizing idea is that the Gothic genre is always talking about itself---this is clearest in Frankenstein, where the monster as the (hideous) child of Frankenstein is directly parallel to the novel as the (hideous?) child of MWS.

This is densely written, but not theory-heavy---unless you count the theories of the philosophers she's interested in. The next time I teach Frankenstein, I may have my students read her chapter on it, because her reading certainly helped me structure my thinking about the novel.




View all my reviews

comments