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I am a foreigner living in the Yau Ma Tei area of Hong Kong. Having lived in Hong Kong for 22 years, I can make some observations:Hong Kong, despite its urban areas being among the most densely populated in the world, is mostly rural, with extensive country parks. There is excellent hiking in the hills, with some forests. The high rainfall makes the landscape quite green for the most part, though there are grasslands.More cows are feral than farmed. They used to be kept by farmers, but farmers moved to urban areas and released their cows, which now happily roam the countryside chewing the grass.There are feral macaque monkeys, which you can easily encounter in some country parks. They may have been released about a century ago to eat a toxic plant that might have contaminated Kowloon Reservoir. The monkeys have thrived and are cute.There are wild boars. The piglets are cute.OK, now for the most common big animal in Hong Kong: us. There are about 7 million people here, mostly concentrated in the small areas of flat land amid the often hilly terrain.On buses, many passengers sit in the aisle seat even when the window seat is vacant. When new passengers approach, I assume that I should make room by scooting over to the window seat, but many people just stay in the aisle seat and make the new passenger climb over their knees to reach the window seat. This seems inconsiderate, and I’d think it’s uncomfortable for the original passenger as well, but this is the common behavior.Similarly, in crowded subways, people don’t tend to move in to the interior of the car to make room for entering passengers. As a result, new passengers have to either squeeze past existing passengers to get to interior space, or just wait for the next train. I find this inconsiderate, but this is common.On escalators, people stand on the right and walk on the left. People politely move to the right if they forget and stand on the left and then see people walking towards them.Subway trains, buses, and minibuses are numerous and frequent. You usually don’t need to check the schedule because there’ll be another vehicle coming in just a few minutes. The transport system is great, which is possible because the population density is so high.Despite the high population density, traffic is not as jammed as one might expect (though there are jams in certain places at rush hour, and at random times due to accidents). This is because of the wonderful, multi-modal, mass transit system, and because most people don’t drive cars.Most people don’t drive cars because the government charges high license fees to discourage driving in order to reduce traffic. This works pretty well.People usually line up politely and don’t cut in line or rush ahead.There is only one dominant free TV station: TVB. There used to be 2, but the other station, ATV, (which, ironically, was the first to be started in Hong Kong) was much less popular and went through a chain of owners who tried to make it profitable but never could. I stayed up late at night on ATV’s last night to see the moment it blinked off the air for the last time. There are now some new stations, but they haven’t gained popularity.The government requires free TV stations to offer programs in English for part of the day, even though the vast majority of the population (about 95%) speaks Cantonese. Many people (about 2/3?) speak at least a little English, and a big minority are fluent in English, making it easy to live in Hong Kong without speaking Cantonese. I am a native English speaker who tried for a decade to learn Cantonese but failed, maybe partly because it’s easy for me to fall back on English.Despite the government calling it Asia’s World City, Hong Kong is very ethnically homogeneous. Over 90% (~95%?) of residents are ethnically Chinese, either born in Hong Kong or mainland China. Most of the rest are domestic helpers working as live-in maids under special visas from the Philippines or Indonesia. Some residents are ethnic south Asians. People from other continents (Africa, Europe, or the Americas) are a tiny percentage. I’m in the latter category, and I tend to notice that in many parts of Hong Kong, I’m the lone white guy out of thousands of people around me, but in some parts, I’m in the ethnic majority. However, people are certainly free to move around and mix; I think it’s just that language used at some events and venues, or cultural interests, tends to attract or repel people of different language or culture. I’m in some interest groups or events that are quite mixed, with people from all over the world.Although Cantonese is overwhelmingly the most common language, t-shirts usually have messages in English. I’m puzzled as to why. Maybe it’s just the fashion. I have a habit of reading t-shirts I see people wearing in public, which bemuses/annoys my family. Often the messages are just brands, but many are meaningful. However, some are nonsense: either random words strung together, or even random letters strung into “words”. I keep waiting for a company to start selling t-shirts with Chinese messages on them, but I still haven’t seen many.Custom license plates on cars are usually not funny. Instead they may simply have a name or even just a number. In Chinese culture, certain numbers are considered lucky, and these are desired for license plates.There doesn’t seem to be a sense of public aesthetics. Older buildings are often not cleaned or painted. Even along the major streets in commercial centers, many high-rise buildings are bare, gray concrete, except for brown algae and rust streaks. Old, broken, rusty metal supports for signs or laundry or who-knows-what, and wire and bars jut from buildings. Weeds and even trees grow from cracks in buildings. Trash and bird droppings accumulate for decades on ledges. It looks kind of like the city (well, just the old buildings) was abandoned decades ago, and nature is reclaiming it, except that it’s teeming with people. All buildings are well engineered and maintained, so they’re not in danger of collapse. It’s just that appearance is not a priority, to put it mildly. Part of the reason might be that apartment buildings are often not owned by one company or individual, but by many different individuals (who own each flat), and it can be nearly impossible to get them to agree to pool their money to clean up the building since that won’t benefit them, especially since I don’t think that buildings were set up with owner associations until recent decades. The government could step in to require owners to clean up their buildings, but the government is generally laissez-faire, and it may also be scared of confronting any powerful groups, such as homeowners, so it takes no action. The government could pay for clean up itself, but the public doesn’t regard this as a priority.New buildings, by contrast, can be quite fancy. Middle class apartment buildings often have breathtakingly beautiful lobbies, with fountains, marble floors and columns, and sweeping staircases: like luxury hotelsAir conditioning is often overused. Some stores keep the temperature low and open the door to the street so that the cold air floods outside in order to attract passers-by to enter and shop. This wastes energy, but business takes priority. Some empty offices keep air conditioning on, which may be due to lack of concern for the environment. Some offices and buses keep the temperature low (feels like 15C sometimes), maybe because whoever controls the settings just feels better that way.Some people prefer to turn on lights and air conditioning in empty rooms. Some janitors like to do this in office buildings, for example. I haven’t asked them why, but maybe they feel it is welcoming to people who may be arriving later. Many people don’t think about the environment.Alternative energy is way behind other countries. I can stare out my office window across to Lamma Island and see the wind turbine. That’s THE wind turbine—the only one in Hong Kong. There may be good reasons for this, however. Flat land is limited and very expensive, and cheap, flat land, plus sun or wind, is necessary to make wind or solar energy economically viable. Thus, we use coal, gas, and nuclear. But lately the government introduced a subsidy program for homeowners to install rooftop solar panels.Unlike most places, Hong Kong’s government doesn’t run a deficit. Instead, it consistently has a surplus, and has accumulated a huge pot of money that it uses for….It doesn’t really know what. There are several weird things about this. First, why can the government run a surplus? Income taxes are low, with a progressive income tax capped at 15%. But the government has owned all the land since it was established, and land developers must pay a huge fee to the government for land, which is often a bigger source of government revenue than income tax. Land is expensive because Hong Kong is hilly, leaving only a minority of area for building, and because people crowded into Hong Kong from mainland China for decades because there were more job opportunities here. Second, why doesn’t the government spend all its money? I don’t know. Maybe government officials tend to share an instinctual desire to save, not spend. I’ve known people who can’t bear to spend more money, even after they’ve gotten good jobs and accumulated plenty of savings, so personality may play a role. Maybe economic philosophy plays a role, with officials wanting a laissez-faire small government.The government spends a lot of money on some social programs, but little money on others. There’s a huge public housing program, with many people (half?) living in heavily subsidized government housing. Medical care is almost free. Schools are almost free, and universities are relatively cheap. But old age pension from the government is low (it’s called fruit money, which gives an idea of how little it can buy), and some elderly women push carts down the streets to collect cardboard to earn a meager living by selling it for recycling.Another weird thing about the above observation is that the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in the US, ranked Hong Kong as the freest economy in the world every year for the past quarter century. Yet Hong Kong pays for more social programs than many other governments: public housing, universal health care, universities.Symbolizing the meeting of cultures here, one of the most popular drinks is milk tea. Tea is from China and adding milk to it is from Britain.Popular breakfast meals at cheap cafes are also culturally mixed: noodles, fried eggs, sausages, French toast, rice porridge, orange juice, dim sum, egg tarts, egg sandwiches, macaroni.A couple of decades ago, Hong Kong adopted the Octopus card, a stored-value card named for its ability to pay for 8 (or something around that number) different modes of public transport. It was a big convenience to not have to carry a pocket full of coins and wait in line when boarding a bus for everyone in front to count out the coins they need to pay the fare. Since then, many store chains also started accepting Octopus for payment, which I love for its convenience. I don’t carry coins any more. But when electronic payment through cell phones swept mainland China in the last few years, it didn’t sweep through Hong Kong. And we still need to pay cash for taxis, some mini-buses, and many small shops. Thus, the early lead in e-payment seems to have frozen, and other places are leapfrogging over us.Crowding can be intense in some situations. I’ve driven up at least ten floors in a parking structure before finding a place to park. Ice in skating rinks gets gouged deeply in just a couple of hours of intense use. My dad, after visiting from suburban Los Angeles, quipped that if you died while crossing the street in Mong Kok (which appropriately means “bustling corner” and is one of the most crowded places for shopping and dining), the crowd would keep your body upright until you reached the other side. At rush hour at some subway stations, you need to wait for several subway trains to pass before it’s your turn to squeeze in.It can get loud. Walking along Nathan Road, the main commercial street in Kowloon, the buses, trucks, and people talking on their phones and with their companions make noise exceeding safe levels. Dim sum restaurants are often huge, square, open rooms packed with round tables, with nothing to absorb the sound of hundreds of simultaneous conversations. This noise bothers me, and I try to limit the time I spend in the noisiest places. But I don’t hear much public complaint about the noise, thus I suppose most people are fine with it or get used to it.Income inequality is high. Some are billionaires and some are homeless. There are many Rolls Royces and many people limited to public transport. Some are members of expensive private clubs, and some sit on benches in crowded urban parks. Yet there is less sorting of rich and poor into separate neighborhoods than in some other places because the government disperses public housing throughout many places, including expensive, waterfront areas, which effectively mixes the rich and poor to some extent. Other governments could learn this aspect of urban planning to prevent some de facto segregation by income. However, this is possible here because the government owns all the land and chooses to forego some of the huge income that it could get by selling premium land to the highest bidders, and most other governments don’t own the land and thus can’t do this.In conclusion, as you can tell by all these points, Hong Kong is very unique!

I was very arrogant about my health until recently.At 59, I had never been sick, I’m very fit, and look quite a bit younger than my age. My father is 90 and lives the same lifestyle now as 30 years ago, living in his own home in the Texas Hill Country.I’m a physician and have almost daily occasions to offer health advice, and I have a healthy, thriving practice.I am a fan of Nortin Hadler, MD, who writes extensively on intelligent, informed healthcare, offering facts and studies a healthcare consumer should be aware of before giving or refusing consent to commonly recommended medical screenings and treatments for conditions such as high cholesterol, blood pressure, or glucose; colonoscopy; mammography; PSA screening and more. Lest you think he’s fringy, he’s Professor Emeritus of Medicine at UNC School of Medicine at Chapel Hill, and Harvard and Yale educated. You can see his brilliance and relevance in this PBS interview.For 20 years or so, I’ve seen a wonderful internist yearly, but, would abdicate responsibility for this behavior, saying. “The only reason I have a doctor is I have a wife.”Thank goodness I have a wife.September, the year before last, 2018, I had previsit labs for my annual visit with Rick Earnest, who was Chief Resident during his internal medicine residency at Emory, he’s top notch.My white count was low. Rick’s nurse called and said he wanted another CBC and a folate. White count low; folate normal.Then, I saw Rick in his office and we chatted dispassionately about the neutropenia… WBC was around 2, with 4–12 being normal.He told me he had talked to a local heme/onc that morning and then, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Looks like you need to see a hematologist…” I agreed.About a month later, I had extensive labs at the local oncology center; met the delightful hematologist, Kavita Nirmal, who recommended a bone marrow biopsy.I knew this was coming and, once again, being very healthy and having no signs or symptoms, I thought serial CBC’s would do.However, after my consult with Kavita, I had no urge to refuse the bone marrow biopsy, and it was done that day.Things moved quickly from there.The next day, Kavita called and said I needed to see a specialist at Baylor. Five minutes later, she called back and said, “You could also go to MD Anderson.”Baylor is two hours, MD Anderson is four.Initially, I balked at accepting an MD Anderson referral, as this meant, in my mind, saying, “This is serious.”Over the next 24–48 hours, I had the strong intuition I should go to MD Anderson.I responded to Kavita’s phone call about my treatment choice in a way I found funny/odd… I said, “I owe it to my family to go to MD Anderson.” I thought, “Wow, Dude, you can’t even take responsibility for your choice to go to MD Anderson.” (It wasn’t a big deal… but, interesting.)My records and actual marrow specimen were Fedexed to MDA; I went there for labs and another bone marrow biopsy; and met with a national leader in leukemia, Naveen Pemmaraju.All this occurred in a very compressed period of time and in a context of general surreality, punctuated by briefs periods of extreme surreality.I had accepted there was something wrong with my bone marrow. I had actually been aware I was neutropenic as far back as August 2016; but, again, arrogant invincibility had me ignore it.In Longview, I was told, based on microscopic evaluation of my marrow, and an estimated 13% blast count, I had myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), something I was familiar with when a fellow staff psychiatrist told me he had it. It was a significant health scare for him, but that was in the 90’s and he and I were in touch for at least 10 years after that, and to my knowledge, he’s still fine today… (we both moved on from that mental health center years ago).Then, as I was going through the process leading up to seeing Dr. Pemmaraju, a nurse who was checking me in and reviewing my chart, was reading out loud to herself… as I listened, it was all quite routine to me as a health care provider, until the letters “AML” came out of her mouth.They weren’t intended for me; she was just one of those people who reads out loud when they read. Perhaps she thought I knew. Perhaps she didn’t know she was reading out loud. It is a cancer center…I can’t think of an adequate adjective to put in front of “stunned” and “frozen” to adequately express that instant as the biggest WTF! of my life rang out in my mind…“It’s leukemia?! I have leukemia?!!!” My mind was reeling with that shock…It was quite a mental shift, in an instant, unsuspecting, unprepared, from MDS to AML.I suppose it was helpful to have the time to be past that initial reaction later, as I sat in one of Dr. Pemmaraju’s exam rooms, waiting to see him. He burst into the room almost as enthusiastically as Kramer on Seinfeld. He was young, energetic, positive and extremely enthusiastic.There I was, sitting face to face with one of the finest allopathic physicians… a hematologist/oncologist who only treats two types of leukemia and MDS.It was a briefly challenging/confronting situation on a philosophical level.You see, I’ve been writing, Power Without Pills: A Curious Psychiatrist’s Guide to Healing and Growth in the Modern World since Googling John Sarno, MD in February 2006. And, I have talked some trash about modern medicine. Not irresponsibly or inappropriately… but, trash talking nonetheless.I was challenged with substantial, in-my-face cognitive dissonance.I resolved it for myself quickly.I had been throwing the baby out with the bath water.I had been all “mindbody medicine is where it’s at!” and, then and there, I realized I had been going to an extreme.I once heard a man say, “You’re just as half-assed no matter which cheek you got.”So, I decided, “Alright... I like this guy... I trust this guy... I’m going to roll with this, and I’ll handle the mindbody part... and he’ll handle the traditional medicine part…”Both cheeks were suddenly firmly in place.He told me they have a clinical trial, using the CLIA protocol, where they’re getting upwards of 90% complete remission rates in frontline AML.All three drugs are FDA-approved for AML, but no one is using all three together. “We are gonna rock this thing! We are going to crush it together!”, he said, beaming.He told me I’d need some preliminary tests, like an echocardiogram, to qualify for the study... a formality.Then, I would be admitted, given five days of chemo, be in isolation, and have a total of around 28 days inpatient before being discharged to outpatient treatment where I would receive five consolidation rounds of the same three chemotherapy drugs every 28 days.He said I’d be in complete remission by Day 28.That conversation was on the Friday before Thanksgiving. He told me to go home and spend time with family... my wife was there in that initial consult and throughout, but I hadn’t seen my father in Austin in a while... it was a wonderful, deeply meaningful break/visit with close family before I went inpatient… ostensibly 28 days, in isolation.On the eve of Thanksgiving Day, I was admitted to the Leukemia Specialty Care Unit at MDA, at around 7 pm, and began chemotherapy that night.How I’ll be bathing in isolation for the next 3–4 weeks…My wife and father-in-law visit me in the square bubble…This woke me up in the middle of the night, tickling my nose…Going…Gone. My hair didn’t survive.It went exactly as he said; except I had a Day 21 bone marrow biopsy in the hospital. The next day, the attending on the service strode briskly into my room, smiling, and said, “Go home. You don’t need to be here any more.”My blast count had gone from 30% to 4%, complete remission, in 21 days.I said, “Uh… I’m not ready.” (My wife was four hours away and expecting me to be discharged in about a week).I went home the next day, six days early, for good biological behavior.I was in complete remission.There was suspense though. I was told through some magic called flow cytometry, they could give a measure of prognostication, MRD, Measurable Residual Disease. With MRD, they could find traces of leukemia, the presence of abnormal blasts, “down to levels of 1:10,000 to 1:1,000,000 white blood cells (WBCs), compared with 1:20 in morphology-based assessments.”[1]A few nervous days later, at my first outpatient follow up, I was given the news, “You are MRD negative.”A Senior Coordinator of Clinical Studies, Department of Leukemia, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Rabiul Islam, who’s worked there since 2003, gave me that wonderful news, and he added, “I have never seen an MRD negative patient at Day 21.”As I have said, I highly value and practice mindbody medicine; parts of that are a positive mental attitude and faith in the healing propensity of the body and the intelligence of life.And my positivity and faith had been rewarded at every turn (even developing leukemia, which I would not have consciously asked for); but it was never the kind of faith and positivity that produced a reaction to, “You are MRD negative,” of, “Well, of course, I’m MRD negative.”I cried when he told me and it brings tears to my eyes now as I write this. I am deeply grateful.And, along those lines, I have taught mindbody medicine concepts for over 20 years and was pleased to find nothing changed with being diagnosed with an illness that has a 25% five-year survival rate. I found, not surprisingly, I walked the talk. Yet, you don’t know how solidly your ship is moored until there’s a storm.As interesting foreshadowing, for years, as one approach to mindbody medicine, I would discuss the hypothetical situation in which someone was diagnosed with a type of cancer that had their physician say, “The 5-year survival rate is 5%.” I would then say, “I wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, no! Those are terrible odds!’ I would say, ‘What did the 5% do?’’’ (My apologies for the complex, and possibly incorrect sentence structure.)I have had many profound blessings in the powerful life lesson leukemia brought to me.To address the question:The leukemia was caught on a yearly routine blood test before I was symptomatic.I am young and healthy, with no comorbid illnesses, and I really stood out on the Leukemia Specialty Care Unit because of my youth, fitness, and lack of comorbid illness.I got the best cancer treatment in the world, I assert.I’ve had an excellent attitude throughout.I never fought the leukemia. I was never inclined to. At the local cancer center, the narrative was everywhere about fighting cancer; even the wifi password had that rhetoric… yet, I could not abide by that narrative.I’m not suggesting that people not adopt that narrative; it’s fine with me if they do; it’s just not for me. I’m not going to start a “Fight Fighting Cancer!” campaign.I do want people to know there’s more than one narrative to adopt in the face of cancer. Pick according to your gut.I’ve said thousands of times: “What you resist persists.” I would not fight. I would listen.I viewed the leukemia as a messenger, and my job was/is to get the message.I have enjoyed Louise Hay’s work, and was aware of the fact she gave meaning to particular illnesses.I thought, “Leukemia is a childhood disease…” Hmmmmmmm…I had started guided journaling at What is Self Authoring? many months earlier, and had started with the Past module (there are also two for the present and one for the future… starting with the past made the most sense to me…) but, I quickly fell into procrastination…One obvious message was, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you…”, meaning, I got one message as, “Don’t keep putting off deep work.”Now, acute myeloid leukemia is relatively rare with about 20,000 newly diagnosed cases a year. That’s an incidence of 0.006%. It’s rare.But, things would likely be much darker (which sounds weird to write, because I can’t say they’re dark (though I can admit if one looks at the five year survival rate for AML, one would be inclined to say they’re dark… but, that’s a statistic, and part of good mindbody medicine is not being negatively influenced by stats…)) if I hadn’t been getting yearly routine labs.TLDR:Get yearly routine labs like a CBC and complete metabolic panel.The risk/benefit ratio argues for it.Think of it as insurance… you definitely want to have it, even though you don’t want to use it.Extra credit edit:So as to exclude as few readers as possible, I am adding an important point…I have used the word, “blessing” more than once, and said that there is meaning in this life challenge/lesson, thereby asserting/strongly implying it’s not random; we don’t live in a strictly mechanical Universe, in which we humans are machines that break and consequently go to doctors that intervene on our behalf and restore us to health.I was ultimately convinced of that mechanistic worldview until the age of 23. I no longer believe in or inhabit that worldview… but no matter…I’m working on a reply to the gentleman’s comment in which it’s asked what I think caused the leukemia.My reply involves logic I learned from my mother, an adept at logic. She changed her worldview late in life with logic.She told me one day, she had done a thought experiment in which she made a matrix of cells… the particulars will be in the reply when I post it.It is the particular thought exercise that’s relevant here:Let’s say you can’t abide by the notion of an actual blessing, or the idea there’s meaning to be mined in a disease, especially a life-threatening one like leukemia, you can still potentially get the value of that system/belief through this exercise:Let’s construct a matrix of four cells: 2 rows, 2 columns…I’m blessed really/I’m not actually blessedI believe I’m blessed/I reject the possibilityThen stand in each cell and look out at the world as if those conditions are so… what do you see? Is that possibility empowering?You see, it isn’t the truth that I was blessed and it isn’t the truth there is meaning, not randomness, in the leukemia… it’s a powerful place to stand.For the strictly “If I can’t see it in a lab, it doesn’t exist,” Do you want to be empowered, or do you want to be right? Or, if your health isn’t good, do you want to be healthy, or do you want to be right?Consider everyone is a house with four rooms: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.In the modern world, you risk falling prey to the paradigm, the physical level of reality is all there is… It’s all matter and energy… if you can’t see in the lab it doesn’t exist.That worldview may be true, and obviously, it may not be.If you hold yourself as a house with only one room, physical, which gives rise to the illusion of the other three rooms and that’s not the case, there may be a dear price to pay.EDIT (April 16,2019):I can’t say I’m about to add materially to my answer of the question; however, I can see how the reader might be curious as to what’s up as of today… I don’t remember when I wrote this; I see my last update was February 16th.There have been three excitements and one very sad loss since I last updated. I’ll end with the loss.About six weeks ago, after receiving a unit of red blood cells, an infusion which took about two hours, I drove home and sat on the couch. I started to feel cold and hot at the same time. Cold won out and I got underneath an electric blanket and turned it on. Very shortly I was having hard chills.My instructions from MDA since my December discharge were, “Go to the ER if your temperature hits 101 or more.” I didn’t have to take my temperature. My wife drove me to the ER. It was a Friday afternoon and the ER was packed. Getting into the ER was fun; because I have staff privileges there, but the staff up front and the triage nurse don’t know me from Adam. So, I went in the back doors of the large ER, bald, with an overnight bag slung over my shoulder and said, “I’m Dr. Murphy. I’m in treatment for leukemia and I have a fever.” Most of the dozen or so doctors, nurses, technicians and unit clerks behind the counter stopped what they were doing to stare at me. I stared back at them. Eventually, a nurse broke the deadlock. “17 is open,” she said stepping out to escort me.I was deathly ill. All the routine things… blood cultures, chest xrays, etc. were done, looking for a possible source of infection.For the next three days I lay in the dark, sleeping as much as I could. They left me alone, which I thought was odd, but appreciated. At MDA I don’t think they would have let me lay in the bed 24/7, and didn’t even when I had RSV (another story).Monday rolled around; nothing had grown in the blood cultures; and, I had started to feel better. About 11 am, having enjoyed a great rapport and relationship with everyone there, I said politely to the nurse, “Um, I’m going to be discharged. I just need to know whether it will be AMA or not.” 10 minutes later I was signing routine discharge orders, and I went home. I felt like crap.In retrospect, the most likely explanation was a non-hemolytic transfusion reaction, something that occurs in about 1 out of every 1,000 RBC infusions. This can occur if WBC’s stow away in a batch of inadequately washed RBCs. They cause a cytokine reaction, the kind of thing that makes you feel awful when you have the flu.Gradually, over the next few days, my energy came back.The second excitement was going back to MDA on a Friday, my chemo rounds always start on Friday, and had labs in the morning to prep to see Dr. P, who would then order the 3-day round of chemo.My WBC was below 1,000, even though, due to circumstances, I was on Day 35 of a cycle. Being in a clinical trial at MDA, there are protocols and guidelines and chemo was off; it couldn’t proceed.Once again, Dr. P predicted the future. He said, “We’ll do a bone marrow biopsy; you’ll still be in remission. You’ll go home. Have a great weekend. Come back Monday morning. We’ll do labs and give you a shot of Neupogen Monday and Tuesday mornings, and we’ll restart your chemo on Wednesday.”That was an exciting weekend; because, while the blast count was likely ready Friday afternoon, no one was there to read it. And, while I mentioned a couple of potentially arrogant sounding behaviors around febrile neutropenia hospitalization; I’m not the type to be inclined to try and get the results before Monday.I was able to think positively throughout most of the weekend. I did allow my mind to think about a recurrence, but not to dwell on that possibility. I wasn’t in denial; I knew the results of the biopsy could be bad news staying alive-wise. But again, I mainly stayed in positivity and continued to visualize my 90th birthday party (my father, Stu’s 90th birthday party is next month) and to affirm, “I am so happy and grateful now that I’ve released the patterns that gave rise to the leukemia.”Monday morning, after having had my labs, I was sitting and waiting in the 8th floor leukemia waiting area, waiting to be called back for an injection of Neupogen, my cell phone rang. It was Dr. Islam. “Your blast count is 2%.”I cried with joy, once again, as I did when he told me, “Your MRD is negative. I have never seen an MRD negative patient at Day 21,” months before.To be continued… fatherhood calls at the moment…there’s more coming… and… 95% of what I write on Quora is via iPhone… somewhat constraining…My two older sisters and I with our father at his 90th birthday party last month, May 2019. He’s a huge inspiration, and not just because that’s his house we’re visiting and he’s had CLL for ten years and has only accepted monitoring of it.I’m coming up on 6 months complete remission. There’s much more to write; and, my commitment is that what I write make a difference for you.And, as promised above, there’s more to the story and I will flesh out what I believe made the difference in the face of a potentially terrifying disease…Today, my hair, like springtime blossoms, is sprouting again… a sign of the life force, irrepressible, pushing up through the cracks in the sidewalk…Here’s to New Life……and again, more to come…Edit: July 4th, 2019Today, the 4th of July, enjoying Life. I’m 60 now… my hair’s sprouting… the sprouting started this Spring after the chemo was finished… I gave that timing meaning… Springtime… new life…I intend to share more about this experience, and yet, I’m not sure this is the place to do that given the original question.So far, it has been a pleasure to have this forum to share my experiences with leukemia and everything related. If you have a suggestion as to a better forum/platform to share my knowledge, experience and hope with regard to leukemia, let me know.EDIT Saturday, July 27, 2019:I had surgery Thursday to have a myringotomy and tympanostomy tube placed in my left ear. It went perfectly.Fluid filled my left middle ear during my last hospitalization (for febrile neutropenia) in April. There were two complications from that hospitalization, I presume from high dose IV vancomycin and cefipime… a sudden and persistent left ear effusion and neuropathy of my distal feet bilaterally.The tube has all but resolved the effusion (it’s present in the morning, but drains within and hour or two). And the neuropathy, which consists mainly of the sensation my socks, no matter what their fabric, are filled with sand in the toes, and there is pain at times, increased initially with hard shoes and jogging. However, the jogging actually seems now to be a force for its resolution.I set a goal of running a 10K by September 29th, a goal RunKeeper helped me to decide on. Thanks to my varsity tennis playing son, Elliot, for that app tip.I had preop labs Tuesday, and coincidentally, two month followup labs for my heme/onc, Kavita Nirmal, on Wednesday. Not surprisingly, they were both very close…WBC 4.1Hgb 16Platelets 157,000It’s all good.EDIT Thursday, September 12, 2019:Reporting in for the curious…My post above starts with the yearly routine labs I had done September of last year, 2018. That’s cool, and relevant to the question.I’ve had two haircuts since my nuked hair decided it was OK to start growing again. Gone is the childhood fear of the barber or stylist getting it too short.I’ve run 5 days a week since July 21st, and I am registered in Texas Oncology’s Celebrate Life Survivor’s 5K on the 28th.There are two big benefits of running 5 days a week.One is the health and fitness benefit which is enough on its own.The other is, who I am for myself today is larger than who I was when I was saying, “I need to start running again,” for SEVEN years. (I was shocked about 4 months ago, in a moment of self-clarity, I caught myself running that line of bullshit past myself, and I stopped and asked myself, “When was the last time I exercised regularly?” …2012. Damn, Dude. You’ve been saying that to yourself for SEVEN years.)About 3 months ago, I started making the bed if I were the last one out. I’d heard Dr. Jordan Peterson recommend this one before solving any of the world’s problems. “Make your bed.”About a month later, during breakfast with my varsity tennis playing son, I downloaded an app, RunKeeper, he’s using to log his many runs.It started pressuring me to run a 10K in a month. I reacted, “I’m 60 years old. I’m not running a 10K in a month… I’ll run one in two months,” and on July 21st, I started running 5 days a week.Another recent shift in who I’m being in the world is manifested by the fact that I’m writing again.UPDATE: September 30, 2019I beat my oncologist in a 5K this weekend! Sorry, Dr. Nirmal. Good run!Not that long ago, my hemoglobin was 7 and I got winded climbing a flight of stairs. Now it’s 17 and I can run a 5 kilometers!UPDATE: October 25, 2019:It just occurred to me it is getting close to the one year mark that I went to MD Anderson for the first time and I don’t think I’ve adequately acknowledged them.To me, and probably by objective measures, MD Anderson is the best cancer treatment center in the world. It must be one of the largest with over 20,000 employees and over 15,000,000 sq ft of space. Yet, it is one of the best run organizations I’ve ever seen of any size. That’s important. But, not as important as the care and concern I saw everywhere. The ethos there is healthy, upbeat, nourishing and inspiring.In particular, I want to acknowledge and thank to a depth appropriate to one given to someone who participates in literally saving a life. Naveen Pemmaraju, thank you for saving my life. I am the father of a now 3-year-old, precious boy. I am also the father of two other boys, 19 and 17, who shouldn’t lose their father, either; yet, the biggest save was saving the life of the father of this precious 2-year-old boy.December 13, 2018 - Just discharged from MD Anderson’s Leukemia Specialty Care UnitThis is what I’m talking about, Naveen. This is such a huge gift. Words aren’t adequate to express the depth of my gratitude. Thank you.Rabiul Islam, thank you for your relentless close support and encouragement. You repeatedly went above and beyond calling me on my cell and keeping me informed. And, the moment you told me I was MRD negative is one of the happiest moments of my life. You didn’t have to add, “I have never seen an MRD negative patient at Day 21.” But, you did and that made a deep, profound positive impact. It has been some of the best medicine mentally and emotionally, and probably physically and spiritually. All boats rise with the tide. What a profound gift. Thank you.Michael Andreeff, thank you for who you are personally and professionally. You were my first inpatient physician contact, and it was, interestingly, on Thanksgiving Day. You walked into my room with an entourage of residents and fellows and said, “Who are you, and vot are you efen doing here?” (Sorry, that’s my recollection of your delightful German accent.) I loved our banter. When I told you I was a psychiatrist, you told me, “I vanted to be a psychiatrist, but I vound up being this.” You were part of the development of flow cytometry in the early days in Heidelberg. Flow cytometry told me the leukemia was gone down to a resolution of 1:1,000,000 WBC’s compared to 1:20 resolution possible with a microscope alone. Thank you for the quintessential physician that you are; and, thank you for having me look forward to witty banter every morning at morning rounds. What a delight.Zeev Estrov, thank you for who you are. Two memories stand out. You came into my room the morning after my Day 21 bone marrow biopsy and said, “Go home. You don’t need to be here anymore.” And, after I started to recover from the seeming near death experience from RSV, I perked up for your morning rounds; and, you and your entourage of residents and fellows came in. I had finally had a good night’s sleep and told you so. You turned to your students and said, “That! will tell you more than any lab test.” To me, such a brilliant moment of teaching. In medical school, I remember the lesson of one of my professors, “You treat the patient, not the labs.” You are another star in the MD Anderson firmament.To the staff of the 12th floor Leukemia Specialty Care Unit and to the nurses who inserted my PICC line, I cannot say enough to thank you and express the gratitude I have for my treatment there. It is a difficult thing to be a young man, otherwise healthy, diagnosed with a life threatening disease and facing an uncertain future, knowing it included, at the least, chemotherapy and weeks of isolation. I don’t think I’ve told anyone this because it sounds weird. When Dr. Estrov told me to go home on Day 22, I was disappointed. That’s partly your fault. Good job. I’d say, “Keep it up,” but that would be silly. It’s who you are.To the 8th floor Leukemia Clinic and staff, thank you for always being friendly, upbeat, professional but not dry or stiff, and always being a well-oiled machine. Wow. You and your clinic and lab are part of the reason that the thought occurred to me, “This is the best run organization I’ve ever seen of any size.” Amazing. Thank you.To my individual nurses, inpatient, outpatient and chemo, because all of you were so extraordinary in skill, compassion and presence, I got to be right every time about how great MD Anderson is, every time. Every contact. Thank you.To the nurse who put in my PICC line, when I was the most alone and scared, Wednesday night, alone before Thanksgiving Day, thank you for your flawless insertion of a central line, your calming bedside manner, and thank you for telling me you had multiple myeloma years before and remain disease free. (The only thing that could have made the whole experience better, for the next patient, consider leaving out the part about your PICC line getting infected. :) ) Thank you.There are so many people to thank. Right now I am acknowledging you, MD Anderson. Thank each and every one of you. I am weeping now in gratitude as I get in touch with the magnitude of the gift and how you gave it. Jackson just turned 3. He will thank you one day. For now, I thank you on his behalf.Oh my! There are so many people to thank!To be continued…EDIT: January 7, 2020An interesting “problem” is arising here… the longer I live, the less appropriate the word “recently” in the opening line of this answer is… in December, less than a month ago, I went back to MD Anderson for my first checkup since July. All is well and my MRD continues to be negative over a year after entering remission. Thank you, Dr. Pemmaraju and all of you at MD Anderson.And, as I mentioned above, there are many more to thank. I will address two of you now:To Nortin Hadler, MD, of UNCSOM. Nortin, your startlingly deep compassion and ability to read between the lines of what I was saying moved me to tears. You heard me asking things I didn’t know I was asking. Your clinical acumen and profound compassion were so intense at times it was hard to be with. You encouraged me at a deep level. Not long before I was diagnosed with AML, I wrote you to thank you and tell you how much your work has meant to me as a physician and reader. I didn’t expect a reply, let alone one of such thoughtfulness. Then, during my struggles with leukemia, you shined as a lighthouse of steadfast personal and clinical wisdom. Thank you for hearing what I didn’t even know I was expressing and addressing it.To Steve Derdak, DO. My sister, one of the finest physician’s I know, refers to you as the smartest physician she knows. That’s quite an endorsement. I still remember visiting you when you were in medical school and thumbing through your Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine to find it thoroughly highlighted. Years later as an intensivist at Brooke Army Medical Center you brought your vast clinical experience to me personally in a very frightening and challenging time. Thank you for being there. And thank you for your sweet, personal bedside care of Marty at our home during her final days.And thank you Quorans for your views and upvotes. I deeply appreciate it!More to come.Edit: June 21, 2020Went back to MD Anderson a couple weeks ago for a routine followup. Results were all good except MRD.CBC great. Bone marrow aspirate showed 1% blasts (normal is < 5%). All very exciting. 6 days out a notification popped up on my phone that Dr. Pemmaraju wanted a telephone appointment with me.That was not welcome news, and I couldn’t wait until the next day to find out why. I called his PA, Rodney, and learned the news. My Measurable Residual Disease is now positive. I am in morphological remission, but not at the level of resolution provided by amazing technology.Dr. Pemmaraju’s recommendation is 3 rounds of venetoclax and azacitidine (VEN/AZA). Mild chemo… he used the analogy that the previous chemo is like a bomb and the VEN/AZA is like a Predator drone strike.He said my MRD will turn negative again. And he referred me back to the Stem Cell team.No problem seeing the Stem Cell team again for a consult but I was dead set against it.My thinking was why would I sacrifice feeling great for the devastation SCT is?And I’ve already created this narrative of how powerful mind/body medicine can be…It wasn’t an easy choice at all. And at one point in the last 16 days of wrestling with my circumstances I decided to do SCT but from a place of fear. (There’s a powerful distinction between choosing and deciding worth taking a look at.) Then I decided against it.At some point I looked at the scientific research and statistics on it; then I watched some inspirational videos by successful recipients and using the rhetoric from one of those people, switched to viewing SCT as an investment in my future. And I went back to my matrix of 4 cells and considered each possibility it boiled down to which mistake I would rather make…Have a stem cell transplant when I could’ve done well using mind over matter after allorNot have a stem cell transplant when in fact I needed one to prevent death by AML progression?Decision is derived from the root word “cide” or to kill off. In a decision the circumstances and considerations determine the selection… you have a pro list and a con list and the selection is based on which list is longer. The alternative is killed off by the considerations.Choice: To select freely and after consideration.Initially I decided no. Then I decided yes. All of that occurred in a field of fear and suffering.At some point I chose SCT and a feeling of peace came over me.I am at peace with the choice and the outcome.Once again, I think I will fare exceptionally well and I know that isn’t a given.I realize one outcome is death by overwhelming infection, organ failure or graft vs host disease.That is out of my hands. I accept my fate. I choose it.And I am happy to share the journey ahead.Edit: August 3, 2020Day 1 Cycle 2 of venetoclax and azacitidine. Mild chemo. The first cycle of this had few side effects and no hair loss. It was surprisingly hard on my kidneys… the cycle is Monday through Friday every 28 days (if possible) and my creatinine spiked to 1.5 on that Friday. It returned to normal and a nephrology consult concluded it was a reaction to the venetoclax. Dr. P concluded it was an idiosyncratic reaction and doesn’t think it’ll happen again.Edit: November 3, 2020Getting Busulfan at MD Anderson this morning in preparation for a stem cell transplant.I am quite well and continue in morphological remission. My MRD turned positive in June for the first time since December 2018. I’ve accepted MD Anderson’s recommendation for a SCT. It’s been their recommendation all along, but until June insurance wouldn’t pay for it and I didn’t want it. However, confronting a dead canary down here in the mine, two thoughts persuaded me.I have three boys, the youngest is four. In that context I look at this as an investment in the future; and, I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it… I met a wonderful man in his early 70’s, John, in an infusion room last year. Delightful. I got to talk to him at length twice. Delightful man. He looked well to me. However, his chemo had never gotten him into remission and he died very quickly. His death hurt deeply. I grieved his death and I could feel the pain of it much more acutely than my mother’s 8 years ago, something I think odd. Perhaps it was the reminder of my vulnerability.I remain optimistic and grounded in my choice and commitments.Today is the first day the thought, “I am a writer” occurred so consonantly. Perhaps the dawning of the reality of death, not necessarily of its immanence, but of its ultimate reality, shifted my audience from what others think to what I think. I’ve a story to tell. It’s for me and that others may benefit.“The ill person who turns illness into story transforms fate into experience…” —Arthur Frank, from The Wounded StorytellerFootnotes[1] Minimal/measurable residual disease in AML: a consensus document from the European LeukemiaNet MRD Working Party

Big time. Not only the two were (originally) strikingly different, both deities were not entirely “gods of war” as usually conceived of, but rather examples of what could be described as ideals of masculinity: a peaceful one for Mars, a violent one for Ares. This explains a number of differences between the two.First of all, Mars in Archaic Roman culture (ca. 1000 to ca. 200 bC) was not the god of war: he was the god of a number of things that could be summed up as “male responsibilities” or, in a culture-specific scope, male fertility: chief among them, agriculture, as befits a small, agricultural civilization such as that of the original Seven Hills was (in that worldview, fields and women were seen as strikingly similar in their “passive” potential for life, which could only be realized through man’s intervention. Agricultural metaphors for childbearing are pretty common in both Latin and Greek literature).The identification of that virile, agricultural deity with war came relatively late within Archaic Roman history for one very simple reason: the Romans “discovered” war relatively late, in the form of summertime skirmishes between bands of cattle-raiding youths, often leading to nothing more than duels between the two sides’ respective leaders/braggarts/hooligans. For an idea of how Archaic Roman warfare functioned, and of exactly how different it was from anything we would nowadays label “war”, check out this fascinating little video:“Hidden within such dense historical fog are countless “battles” fought by nameless people at forgotten locations for unknown reasons; [tales of which] would be no more reliable than the myths and legends Roman parents recounted to their children.”This must have started sometime after the original hamlet of 1000 bC grew into a more prosperous farming settlement: folklore attributed the creation of the first Roman military force to the mythical third King, Tullus Hostilius.Roman historians identified the (plains-and-hills-inhabiting) Romans as the victims of such raids, and the neighboring highlanders (Volsci, Aequi, Hernici), as the initiators — this highland-vs.-lowland pattern is as old as the world, and is particularly ubiquitous in the Mediterranean since the start of recorded history; in the words of one of the greatest experts in the history of the Mediterranean basin, Fernand Braudel (1902–1985):“The ever-present mountains.Mountains are all around the Mediterranean. They come right down to the sea, taking up more than their share of space, piling up one behind another, forming the inescapable frame and backdrop of every landscape. They hinder transport, turn coast roads into corniches and leave little room for serene landscapes of cities, cornfields, vineyards or olive groves, since altitude always gets the better of human activity. The people of the Mediterranean have been confined not only by the sea — a potential means of escape, but for countless ages so dangerous that it was used little if at all — but also by the mountains. Up in the high country, with few exceptions, only the most primitive ways of life could take hold and somehow survive. The Mediterranean plains, for lack of space, are mostly confined to a few coastal strips, a few pockets of arable land. Above them run steep and stony paths, hard on the feet of men and the hooves of beasts alike.Worse still, the plains, especially those of a certain size, were often invaded by floodwaters and had to be reclaimed from inhospitable marshland. The fortunes of the Etruscans depended in part on their skill at draining the semi-flooded flatlands. The larger the plain, of course, the harder and more backbreaking the task of drainage, and the later the date at which it was undertaken. The great stretches of the Po valley, watered by the wild rivers of the Alps and Apennines, were a no man’s land for almost the entire prehistoric period. Humans hardly settled there at all until the pile-based dwellings of the terramare, in about 1500 bC.On the whole, human settlement took more readily to the hillsides, as being more immediately habitable than the plains. Lowland sites, which called for land improvement, could be occupied only by hierarchical societies, those able to create a habitable environment by collective effort. These were the opposite of the high-perched hill settlements, poor but free, with which they had contacts born of necessity, but always tinged with apprehension. The lowlands felt and wished themselves to be superior: they had plenty to eat and their diet was varied; but their wealth, their cities, their open roads and fertile crops were a constant temptation to attackers. Telemachus had nothing but contempt for the acorn-eating mountain-dwellers of the Peloponnese. It was logical that Campania and Apulia [not shown on the below map, but further south on the Western and Eastern shores, respectively] should dread the peasants of the Abruzzi, shepherds who at the first sign of winter swarmed down with their flocks to the milder climate of the plains. Given the choice, the Campanians would rather face the Roman barbarians than the barbarians from the local mountains. The service Rome rendered southern Italy in the third century bC was to bring the wild and threatening massif of the Abruzzi to heel.Dramatic descents from the mountains took place in every period and in every region of the sea. Mountain people — eaters of acorns and chestnuts, hunters of wild beasts, traders in furs, hides or young livestock, always ready to strike camp and move on — formed a perpetual contrast to lowlanders who remained bound to the soil, some as masters, some as slaves, but all part of a society with armies, cities, and seagoing ships. Traces of this dialogue remain even today, between the ice and snow of the austere mountaintops and the lowlands where civilizations and orange-trees have always blossomed.Life was simply not the same in the hills as in the plains. The plains aimed for progress, the hills for survival. Even the crops, growing at levels only a short walk apart, did not observe the same calendar. Wheat, sown as high up the mountainside as possible, took two months longer to ripen there than at sea level. Climatic disasters meant different things to crops at different altitudes. Late rains in April or May were a blessing in the mountains but a disaster lower down, where the wheat was almost ripe and might rust or rot on the stalk. This was as true of Minoan Crete as of Syria in the seventeenth century AD or Algeria in our own time.”— from The Mediterranean in the Ancient World, written in the late 60s/early 70s and published posthumously.There exists the possibility that the patronage over warfare in Rome initially belonged to a female goddess, Bellona, who was later understood to be Mars’ sister and co-patron and who, unlike her putative brother, shares an etymological link with warfare: bellum = “war”.Nevertheless, Mars picked up this trait and held it for most of Archaic Roman history, finally losing his association with the business of warfare itself to Jupiter, the god (among other things) of justice and order, around the start of the epoch known as Classical Roman age, ie. ~ 100 bC: after this point, he continued to be worshipped by legionaries mostly as the god of valor (as such, very close to the hearts of the individual soldiers) rather than of the Armed Forces themselves. These developments I’ve already covered, with dates, details and pictures, in the early part of another answer of mine, right after a few introductory quotes: my answer to “Why is a two-headed eagle the symbol of Albania?”Quoting from that answer:[…] by [the Marian military reforms of] 106 bC, the old indigenous Roman religious hierarchy (centered around Mars/Mamers, Liberus and Ceres — three agricultural gods) had been turned upside down by the — much more complex and urbanized — Greek religious understanding: Jupiter, the Roman equivalent to Zeus, the Greek king of gods, had been originally a relatively minor god of skies and thunder — his animal consequently being the eagle. And, as the legion was no longer a seasonal collection of free citizens but rather a professional troop at the Senate’s orders, it no longer was to be protected by Mars (god of the virility of agriculture and the virility of war) but rather by Jupiter, god of justice, order and thus — civilization.The older triad mentioned here has been proposed by some to have formed an actual “Archaic Triad”, just as the later one made up of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva (most likely imported from the Etruscan triad Tinia/Uni/Menrva by the Etruscan last kings of Rome) is known as the Capitoline Triad — but even if there had been a specific Archaic Triad, we don’t know who was part of it: some say,Mars (fertility, duty), Ceres (fertility, crops), Liber (fertility, wine);others say,Mars, Jupiter (thunder, sky) and Quirinus (a Sabine god, probably of war, later identified with either Mars Quirinus or with Janus Quirinus).As can be easily seen, Archaic Romans had very few things other than the uncertainties and the hard work of subsistence farming to occupy their thoughts.Mars of Todi, an Etruscan statue from the 5th/4th Century bC, the period right after the greatest Etruscan influence on Rome, is thought to represent a human hoplite rather than the deity it is named after. Photo by Jean-Pol Grandmont.The theory also exists that Mars may have originated from the Etruscan god Mariś, son of Hercle (= Hercules), but that is far from universally accepted. The Etruscan god of war, Laran, seems entirely unrelated to the Roman Mars, unlike many other shared Etruscan/Roman deities.The very oldest surviving mention of Mars is the ritual prayer known as Carmen Arvale, in which Marmar, Mars and Marmor (probably three different spellings of the same name) as well as the Lares, who were guardian deities probably derived from the spirits of the ancestors, are mentioned. It was sung by the Arval Brethren (from arva = fields), an Archaic body of priests, but Cicero himself, who quoted it and made it survive down to our day, admitted being at a loss for its meaning, and we don’t have much more hopes than him.Around this period Mars, also known in Old Latin as Mavōrs, was the equivalent of the Italic Mamers, a generally similar deity with a few local touches in different Italic towns and tribes: these local identities were assimilated as aspects/epithets of the god as commonly conceived of. Among the more common in Rome, were:Mars Gradivus (“who steps forward”, “striding”, “marching”), is the aspect of the god more focused on protection, in the form of the citizen “stepping into the field” as a soldier;Mars Quirinus, originating in the aforementioned Sabine deity of the same name and traditionally interpreted to be Romulus deified, is the protector of citizens (“Quirites”) > assemblies > oaths > treaties > peace; as such, the opposite of Mars Gradivus;Mars Grabovius, mentioned in the in the Iguvine Tablets (from Iguvium, Umbria, a more cosmopolitan Etruscan/Italic/Celtic culture) as part of a local triad with Jupiter and the Umbrian god Vofionius;Mars Pater (“Father”), as he was the mythical father of Romulus and Remus; with this epithet he was invoked in many of the more important prayers and pleas, including the suicidal practice known as devotio, comparable to the Japanese kamikaze of WWII;Mars Silvanus (“of the forests”), as mentioned by Cato the Elder; it could in fact be a simple lack of a comma in the text, in which case it would be two separate deities; but even then, Silvanus has been thought to be an “emanation or offshoot” of Mars;Mars Ultor (“the avenger”), a further specialization of Mars Gradivus whose cult was introduced by Augustus to mark the defeat of Caesar’s assassins at Philippi as well as the restitution of Crassus’ military eagles by the Parthians;Mars Augustus (“the hallowed”), linked to the Imperial cult as a protector of the Emperor’s health, but also venerated by private citizens as the protector of their own health.We in the modern world are more used to the Abrahamic understanding of theological knowledge being revealed unto mankind by the deity through men temporarily inspired to repeat God’s very own words into a holy book: this is the principle that makes Abrahamic religions “exclusionary” (a much better label than “monotheistic”, as argued by prof. Jan Assmann); but ancient paganism saw the source of theological knowledge in men particularly sensitive to being possessed by Muses/Camenes/goddesses linked to a general, underlying Memory of the world, who dictated to their countrymen bits of deeper knowledge — and those could easily turn out to coincide with some parts of the neighboring culture’s imperfect knowledge of the foundations of the world (a common occurrence, since there usually were distant but shared Indo-European roots to European foreigners): since cosmology and theology were seen as ever-perfectable fields of inquiry, other cultures’ intuitions were welcome into your own knowledge, if the two were compatible — this is the principle underlying interpretatio.By this same logic and much later, after 272 bC (expansion into Celtic Northern Italy) and 50 bC (end of Caesar’s Gallic Wars), a number of Celtic deities also came to be known as “Mars” in Latin, with epithets betraying their non-Roman originals: some twenty-five of them are mentioned in the link; red-blooded Romans outside of Italy also developed specific provincial cults of Mars.Balearic Mars, the name attributed to a number of bronze statuines from the Balearic islands, whose pre-Roman culture had been a mix of Iberian and Punic (polytheistic Semitic). They were used for a religious cult that continued under Roman rule, justifying the supposition that the old god was also “interpreted”.Finally, starting around 200 bC, Mars-as-understood-by-the-Romans (ie. the positive, healthy, dutiful face of virility) started appropriating not the features of Ares, but the wealth of stories surrounding the Greek counterpart, as well as the Hellenistic rationalization that deprived the Greek god of much of his importance as an irrational deity: again, interpretatio at work, this time in the other direction.Ludovisi Ares, Roman copy of a Greek 4th Century bC original by Scopas or Lysippus.As for Ares, let’s go back in time again, this time to Archaic Greece (early First Millennium bC).While Mars’ role is pretty straightforward, Ares was a very nuanced and strange deity: for he wasn’t, as may be believed, the god of war, as much as the god of bloodlust, of the animalistic thirst for inflicting pain and death — let’s call it Will to Power (while keeping in mind that it’s neither “will” — rather, a natural instinct — nor aimed at “power”, as much as at bending reality to one’s will). The patronage over war in its more rational and noble aspects went to Athena, and it is not by chance that she was a virgin and said to have been born fully clothed and armed. Ares also had a feminine figure akin to what Bellona was to the original Mars, a lesser-known goddess known as Enyo — she too is a much more sinister figure than her Roman counterpart — as well as sons such as Phobos (“Fear”) and Deimos (“Terror”), following him into battle.The very name “Ares” (which seems to be linked to the root *ar[1] from which also areté, “excellence”, a highly competitive virtue; areîos and áristos, “nobler” and “noblest”) sometimes appears as an adjective with the meaning of “frenzied”, “warlike”, sometimes even as an epithet of other gods: Zeus Areios, Athena Areia, Aphrodite Areia — the Mycenaean name for the deity seems to have been Enyalios,which was retained as an alternative name for the Archaic and Classical Greek god, as in the famous distych by Archilochus — poet, soldier and perhaps even a mercenary, full to the brim with lust for life:εἰμὶ δ’ ἐγὼ θεράπων μὲν Ἐνυαλίοιο ἄνακτοςκαὶ Μουσέων ἐρατὸν δῶρον ἐπιστάμενος.I am a servant of Lord Enyalios,and of the Muses, well-versed in their lovely gift.— fragment 1 WAlthough there are also reasons to believe that, both in the properly-Greek age as well as in the Mycenean one, Ares and Enyalios might have been separate deities.In other words, Ares is an unrelentingly terrifying god: whereas Mars has an aura of wholesomeness, phisical vigor, duty, honor, protection, Ares is the god of a shocking ecstasy, of a mindless frenzy closer to rapture or drunkenness than to normal human behavior.To give an idea of how the Greeks experienced this state of mind (rather than how they interpreted the relative deity), let me share a quote from another upcoming answer of mine, in which Italian classicist Enzo Mandruzzato (1924–2012), describes poet Tyrtaeus’ understanding of warfare, which has nothing to do with Athena and everything to do with Ares:“Aeschylus too was a poet and a soldier, and on his gravestone he willed the fighter, not the poet, to be remembered; in his Persians, however, the noblest act of national celebration ever committed to paper, the battle of Salamis is represented as the victory of justice and of the gods. Tyrtaeus didn’t care at all about justice. Bravery surpassed it. Self-sacrifice redeemed any abuse and all harshness. He wasted no time despising his enemies. Nor hating them.”So much for the sentiment; now let’s check a couple of poets, who were, in the ancient world, considered the sources of theological knowledge. Homer himself has Zeus speak pretty harshly:“Τὸν δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὑπόδρα ἰδὼν προσέφη νεφεληγερέτα Ζεύς.«μή τί μοι ἀλλοπρόσαλλε παρεζόμενος μινύριζε.ἔχθιστος δέ μοί ἐσσι θεῶν οἳ Ὄλυμπον ἔχουσιν· 890αἰεὶ γάρ τοι ἔρις τε φίλη πόλεμοί τε μάχαι τε.μητρός τοι μένος ἐστὶν ἀάσχετον οὐκ ἐπιεικτὸνἭρης· τὴν μὲν ἐγὼ σπουδῇ δάμνημ᾽ ἐπέεσσι·τώ σ᾽ ὀΐω κείνης τάδε πάσχειν ἐννεσίῃσιν.ἀλλ᾽ οὐ μάν σ᾽ ἔτι δηρὸν ἀνέξομαι ἄλγε᾽ ἔχοντα·ἐκ γὰρ ἐμεῦ γένος ἐσσί, ἐμοὶ δέ σε γείνατο μήτηρ·εἰ δέ τευ ἐξ ἄλλου γε θεῶν γένευ ὧδ᾽ ἀΐδηλος,καί κεν δὴ πάλαι ἦσθα ἐνέρτερος Οὐρανιώνων.»”“The lord of thunders viewed, and stern bespoke:«To me, perfidious! this lamenting strain?Of lawless force shall lawless Mars complain?Of all the gods who tread the spangled skies,Thou most unjust, most odious in our eyes!Inhuman discord is thy dire delight,The waste of slaughter, and the rage of fight:No bound, no law, thy fiery temper quells,And all thy mother[7] in thy soul rebels.In vain our threats, in vain our power, we use:She gives the example, and her son pursues.Yet long the inflicted pangs thou shalt not mourn,Sprung since thou art from Jove, and heavenly born.Else, singed with lightning, hadst thou hence been thrown,Where chained on burning rocks the Titans groan.»”— Iliad V, 888–898; Alexander Pope’s translation.Still, despite this uncivilized, destructive nature, the Greeks had the ethical maturity to understand that there is a need even for unpleasant things, and consequently invoked him, too, as in the archaic corpus of prayers known as Homeric Hymns (which in fact have nothing to do with Homer, but were composed in the same epoch and in Homeric — ie. mostly Ionian — dialect):“Ἆρες ὑπερμενέτα, βρισάρματε, χρυσεοπήληξ,ὀβριμόθυμε, φέρασπι, πολισσόε, χαλκοκορυστά,καρτερόχειρ, ἀμόγητε, δορισθενές, ἕρκος Ὀλύμπου,Νίκης εὐπολέμοιο πάτερ, συναρωγὲ Θέμιστος, 5ἀντιβίοισι τύραννε, δικαιοτάτων ἀγὲ φωτῶν,ἠνορέης σκηπτοῦχε, πυραυγέα κύκλον ἑλίσσωναἰθέρος ἑπταπόροις ἐνὶ τείρεσιν, ἔνθα σε πῶλοιζαφλεγέες τριτάτης ὑπὲρ ἄντυγος αἰὲν ἔχουσι:κλῦθι, βροτῶν ἐπίκουρε, δοτὴρ εὐθαρσέος ἥβης, 10πρηὺ καταστίλβων σέλας ὑψόθεν ἐς βιότηταἡμετέρην καὶ κάρτος ἀρήιον, ὥς κε δυναίμηνσεύασθαι κακότητα πικρὴν ἀπ' ἐμοῖο καρήνου,καὶ ψυχῆς ἀπατηλὸν ὑπογνάμψαι φρεσὶν ὁρμήν,θυμοῦ τ᾽ αὖ μένος ὀξὺ κατισχέμεν, ὅς μ' ἐρέθῃσι 15φυλόπιδος κρυερῆς ἐπιβαινέμεν: ἀλλὰ σὺ θάρσοςδός, μάκαρ, εἰρήνης τε μένειν ἐν ἀπήμοσι θεσμοῖςδυσμενέων προφυγόντα μόθον Κῆράς τε βιαίας.”“Ares, exceeding in strength, chariot-rider, golden-helmed, doughty in heart, shield-bearer, Saviour of cities, harnessed in bronze, strong of arm, unwearying, mighty with the spear, O defence of Olympus, father of warlike Victory, ally of Themis, stern governor of the rebellious, leader of righteous men, sceptred King of manliness, who whirl your fiery sphere among the planets in their sevenfold courses through the aether wherein your blazing steeds ever bear you above the third firmament of heaven; hear me, helper of men, giver of dauntless youth! Shed down a kindly ray from above upon my life, and strength of war, that I may be able to drive away bitter cowardice from my head and crush down the deceitful impulses of my soul. Restrain also the keen fury of my heart which provokes me to tread the ways of blood-curdling strife. Rather, O blessed one, give you me boldness to abide within the harmless laws of peace, avoiding strife and hatred and the violent fiends of death.”— Hymn 8 (“To Ares”)Not Ares (whose depictions are very difficult to tell apart from mere human warriors anyway) but rather the famous depiction of Achilles killing Penthesilea: lust for blood in the most menacing and unadulterated of forms.Traditional Greek myth also told of Ares’ dalliance with Aphrodite, which was discovered and punished with public ridicule by the gods, as Aphrodite was married to the hideous-looking Hephaestus — something of a not-entirely-shocking Greek commentary on the tendency by hot chicks to dig jerks, if you’ll excuse the language. He was what 4chan would call a Chad and, in line with that label, he also sired a number of children with a number of women and goddesses; yet,[a]part from having a weakness for women, Ares was also seen as a protector for badly treated women. For instance, he murdered Halirrhothios, a son of Poseidon, who raped his daughter Alcippe. From this story, there are some suggestions that women may have asked him to punish men who treated them badly.[2](The name of the Areopagus, originally the place where the Athenian council of elders gathered, but later the place where homicide trials were held, is also significant: Ἄρειος Πάγος = “Ares’ Rock”, as the myth went that Ares had been tried right there for the murder of Halirrhothios, and acquitted).Mars and Venus caught by the gods, Joachim Wtewael, 17th Century, oil on copper.The pruriginous story of Ares and Aphrodite took a life of its own when it became part of the hybrid Graeco-Roman understanding of Mars, as mentioned before, around the period known as Classical Roman epoch (1st Century bC/1st Century AD). The growing divide between the sincere piety he was object of among soldiers, provincials and humbler people, on the one hand, and the intellectualized/aestheticized, learned but fundamentally empty picture of him that survived among the higher classes is best exemplified by how this very myth was purged of all life into a mere celebration of female charm and male fecklessness by artists and connoisseurs of a less violent, more sophisticated world, one in which aristocratic Romans ultimately represented the gelded and perfumed versions of their farmer forefathers. As Gustave Flaubert once wrote,“Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.”In those days, the gods ceased being gods and became mere reflections of men.Mars disarmed by Venus, by Jacques-Louis David, 1824.Footnotes[1] Origin and meaning of root *ar- by Online Etymology Dictionary[2] Blood, Lust, and Protection: An Alternate View of Ares, God of the Greek Pantheon