Beauty

That's what she said she found on the morning of her young husband's death. 42 years old, he was, with 2 school age children and a wife, even younger than he.

It was only about a year from the time he was diagnosed with renal cell cancer to the night he died. His wife is my new hero. She stayed with him till the very end, barely taking time to rest, less she miss one of those ever more rare moments of lucidity where she might snatch a kiss, a look, a smile.

She did all this while continuing to teach and raise her two young ones.. and to try, somehow, to make them understand why this ugly fucking disease was slowly taking away their Daddy.

This was a hard one.

At the end, she said his passing had been a beautiful thing.

I will always remember Sarah and Chris who found beauty.

God damn this disease forever.

"It Came From Hollywood!"

Well, I'm back from Hollywood. What a depressing city that is, especially near where the hospitals are (there are so many, mostly Kaiser hospitals there, I call it Hospital Row.. it's like the Las Vegas strip sick people.)

Got my brain zapped in 3 spots. I don't know if it's had any effect on me or my thinking. I do feel sort of odd but that may be just due to stress and so on.

My advice to you is avoid getting a brain tumor if you can. It's not really all that fun.

You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me 'till I'm sane
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me.
~ Pink Floyd

So just barely a month after my surgery, I've already got more shit in my brain.

That didn't take long, did it? That is pretty fucking fast if you ask me.

My son asked me if my religious views have changed since all this cancer nonsense started. I had to tell him, no, I'm still the same old unbeliever I've always been. I'm not an atheist, exactly.. I just can't seem to bring myself to believe in god simply on faith alone, no matter how comforting it may sound. He's going to have to show me something if he wants my vote.

If he wants to punish me by sending me to hell or whatever for feeling that way then so be it. I can't decide something like that based on a threat.

But I'm not anti-religious and I'm willing to admit that He could exist. I just doubt it a lot.

Anyway, it looks like I could be finding out the truth much sooner than I'd like.

It seems they've found more lesion in my brain.. as many as 4. Two for sure and two more tiny "maybe mets". This is some scary shit.

But I'm not really afraid of dying, exactly. Oh, I'm plenty scared of pain but being the old agnostic that I am, oblivion sounds kind of comforting. All worries gone for good.

But I don't want to leave my loved ones sooner than I normally would. Most of all, I don't want my wife, the love of my life, to be all alone.

No, what I'm personally afraid of more than anything is of something happening to my mind. This is why I've decided to refuse Whole Brain Radiation - I'd rather be dead than sitting here mumbling and drooling on myself. (That's an extreme, over-stated example - I know most patients that do WBR do not get that bad..).

Still, the whole idea scares the crap out if me.

So tomorrow we are heading up to Hollywierd to find out if they can zap my brain mets individually with their Novalis machine. We were unable to talk Kaiser into sending us to UCSD for the treatment, unfortunately. (the bastards).

If they succeed in getting control or eliminating the brain mets then I can start thinking about getting my lungs treated.

Cancer Sucks!

"I need all the peepers I can find
cause I'm the harvester of eyes..." ~Blue Oyster Cult

I'm feeling halfway decent these days. Still having trouble with certain things. Typing is still difficult.. when I look over what I've typed, it's often so bad that even the spell checker doesn't know what to make of it. I do things like type an entire paragraph and then realize I've been typing "g" in place of "m" with results like, "Gy Gother picked up a gallon on gilk while she was at the garket" (My Mother picked up a gallon of milk while she was at the market).

Needless to say, this yields some pretty comical gibberish. Sometimes I don't notice for several paragraphs but I'm learning to stop and reread often. This makes writing take quite a long time but hell, what else have I got to do with my time?

No news on the medical front. I had the brain MRI yesterday and will get the results next week. If it's clear, then I'll be heading to see Dr. G after my ct scans, also next week, these of my torso or CAP (chest, abdomen, pelvis).

I imagine I'll find out then what comes next - lung surgery, IL2 treatment or whatever.

I saw the optomologist (sp?) 2 days ago and saw a graphic that shows my vision loss. It looked something like this:


The blackened out sections represent areas where my vision is completely gone. I reckon that's a loss of about 50% on the right and, what, about 20% on the left. This is most likely permanent, I'm told.

It seems pretty band when you see what I've lost on paper but really, it's not all that bad. I can see as well as before in the unaffected areas, as far as I can tell and that's really not that bad.

I've even been driving a bit though the Doc advised me to be very careful and to stay off the freeway. But at least this will mean that I can return to work at some point, hopefully. Though I doubt I'll be able to do my old job.

--snip--

I may have mentioned this before to you but I'll say it again though it's a painful subject, to say the least.

I have been the worst kind of fool. I kept smoking long after I knew what it was doing to me. I had severe bronchitis, near pneumonia several times and still I smoked. My wife quit and begged me to quit too and still I smoked. That was 20 years ago when my son was born.

In 2004, I was diagnosed with kidney cancer and, much to my shame and embarrassment, still I smoked.

I was sneaking around and hiding my smoking like a teenager smoking in the boy's room at high school. I was 44 years old.

I was very embarrassed and ashamed that I was still smoking and I imagined that no one knew. Of course they knew. You can't hide that smell from a non-smoker no matter how hard you try.

People were polite enough to pretend along with me though, for the most part.

2 years later they found the nodules in my lungs and incredibly, still I smoked.

Every night I went to sleep in fear and swearing that I would never smoke again - every morning I would eventually go buy another pack. Sometimes I'd fight it for a while but most often I didn't even bother to try. I felt hopeless.

There were periods of not smoking as long as a year or more spread through out this story but I always ended up smoking again at some point.

On my tombstone, they should just put up a drawing of Joe Camel.

When they told me they needed to cut my chest open to do the lung biopsy last month (or was it 2 months?) I quit again for perhaps the hundredth or maybe thousandth time. I have not smoked since.

When the brain tumor presented itself in early feb. 2007 , I had been not smoking for barely 2 or 3 weeks. I have not smoked since but I am already getting occasional cravings and I am terrified that once I'm all healed up and feeling my old self (if that ever happens), I'll smoke again.

I don't *think* I will and I'm sure as hell not planning to but..... (Of course, if I ever do smoke again, I won't have to worry about cancer cause if my wife found out, she'd surely kill me herself ;) )

By the way, feel free to share this post with anyone you know that smokes or even if they don't, especially young people.

So did my 35 years of smoking cause my kidney cancer? There is no way to ever know. You can draw your own conclusions but I know what I believe.

Maybe if I had stopped after my original diagnosis in 2004, I'd still be sitting safe at Stage 1 instead of where I am today. Like a fool, I never believed that something this bad it could happen to ME and even if I had, it may not have helped because I was as addicted as any hardcore junkie is to his needle.

--snip--