Another Thought A Year Later...

     I began blogging a year ago when I discovered I had Hodgkin's Lymphoma.  I called this blog right from the beginning, "Cancerfree" because that was my intention.  It was exactly one year ago that I began the series of ABVD chemo-cocktails, that stuff created by voodoo scientists from the leftovers of World War One mustard gas, that stuff that saved my life.  I had 12 of them, a series every two weeks and this "cure" almost killed me.  I lost 50 pounds, all my hair, of course, and every two weeks when I went for the blood work and more chemo I was a little worse.  It is not like you take medicine and slowly get better each time.  It is quite the opposite, they are trying to kill you.  A lot of you, all the cancer and a lot of good stuff along the way.  There is a lot of collateral damage.  Like doing delicate surgery with a hand grenade!
    You get to talk to the doctor, a little bit anyway.  He is more interested in the numbers, checking with his computer, analysing the blood work, seeing how much more you can take.  The doctor talks in percentages.
My cancer was pretty much everywhere, into my spine and spleen, growing, well, like cancer does, like a cancer!  My odds were 50/50.  Along the way, maybe half way through when I began to look pretty bad and felt worse than I looked, he offered to cut back on some of these chemos.  Maybe even stop the one that was beginning to do damage to my hands.  My feet were numb by then and my hands, well I couldn't pick up a dime and had trouble buttoning my shirt, the first signs of trouble to come.  I could save my hands by stopping one of the drugs.  But I couldn't help thinking, if it is killing my hands then it must be killing the cancer!  Sacrifices.  Collateral Damage.
     I was going to be "cancerfree" so I kept taking them.  It would be nice if they were to find a more reasonable cure, something made from a single malted Scotch or one of those rum fruit concoctions to be consumed on the beaches of Hawaii.
    Along the way you meet a hundred interesting people and they are all fighters, all in this same battle and all with interesting accounts on how they fought this devil.  Some put up a terrific fight and lost and I will miss them and miss their descriptive honesty.  Sometimes in death you discover what life is all about.
    There are people much worse than me and I am a little embarrassed when I complain at all.  This "cure" from cancer is practicing.  They don't have it right.  It is voodoo stuff with feathers and monkey tails, rat poison and mustard gas.  In the future this will be looked upon the same as blood letting and leeches, whispering chants and screaming the evil away.
    I am a statistic now, making that curve go to 51% maybe.  My cancer is gone, I am "cancerfree", the name on this blog, my intention from the beginning.
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