My Cancer Blog is Almost Over

Two more weeks and my year will be over. It has been an interesting year to say the least.

Yesterday, while shopping with my daughter, we saw an old man using a shopping cart as a walker. Without it he would have fallen down. "You were much worse than that Dad," my daughter said. I know she was right but I can hardly remember it now. For over eight months

when I went to bed at night I knew the next morning would be worse. Two hundred and forty days that became a lifetime, always deeper into that tunnel where only darkness became my friend.

I lost all my hair of course, we all do. It is a members only club. There are a lot of jokes about it and all kinds of hats and even wigs for those who care. The fun part is no pubic hair but by then we are holding tenaciously to our humor. Not much laughter in cancer. I lost fifty pounds

but would not recommend this diet to anyone. I could hardly eat at all. My brain would literally say "spit it out or die," but you wouldn't understand that. I don't.

The hardest thing to describe is the fatigue and I realize why people die. We just get too damned tired. We have taken it to the end and there is nothing left. No reservoir, we are at the bottom. It becomes an incredible experience to just wake up in the morning. You know that you are alive but you are just waiting for night and the comfort found in dreams.

I have written this blog because I don't want to forget. It has been an interesting experience all this remembering and I realize that I have forgotten nothing. At least nothing that I remember.

My Other Blog is HERE.

There were no symptoms

Except for the lump on my neck I felt fine. I think I first saw it in September last year. I noted it every day while I was shaving. I tried to will it away. In October I went to Washington D.C. and spent three weeks with my daughter. We walked everywhere. Two or three miles a day was our normal routine. Two or three days a week she was in Court. Ah, daughter's can be so much trouble these days! No, she was on the defense side, mostly keeping young women off the streets and out of jail. These days I would walk on my own, just exploring the big city.
Then there was November and Thanksgiving, my birthday and the Holidays. I went to the doctor on January 10th finally running out of excuses. I've told that story the one I am remembering today is how cold I got. I began the voodoo ABVD chemical cocktails a the end of January. I received twelve total, every two weeks for six months. Half way through this process is when I got all the symptoms all at once.
I was always cold. In July on a hot day I remember sitting in the front room of my house with the heater turned on and blankets wrapped around me up to my neck, shivering! In the middle of the summer I would sleep with sweat pants and three wool blankets and awake in the middle of the night, shivering. It was a freight train all right, with ice tracks and a cold north wind and I couldn't stop it at all.
Today is December and all of this nightmare has passed, no more trains, no cold or icy winds
and it all seems like a far away dream. Something that happened to someone else.

My Other Blog is HERE

One Week to Live!

No, no, not me. At least I don't think it is me. We are almost never given this option anyway
and those that do get it are mostly beyond living anyway, too sick to create a "bucket list".
Actually I think this "bucket list" should be for the young, those eager and strong enough to accomplish their dreams. The dreams of youth should be huge! I am always saddened when they are limited to getting a job at McDonalds and buying a car! I am amazed that the Peace Corps
doesn't have lines eight blocks long to enroll in their programs offering a chance to see and live
another's life in a different culture on the other side of the Earth! Too many people live and die within 100 miles of where they were born. Horizons should be expanded, our experiences broadened, our curiosity awakened at an early age.
Youth is not determined by age, of course, and excitement and curiosity can be found in some
of us "older elders"! My mother flew in a hot air balloon over the Kilamari desert when she was
a mere 84! She gave up driving on her 90th birthday! When death took her I think she was ready and her bucket list was empty. She was simply waiting.