Re: Our ol\' pal oakie
Wow.
Truely this thread, like Jim mentioned, is an inspiration to me. There are many componants to sucessfully fighting a beast like cancer and the meds with state of the art technology are only a small fraction. I've been through this before more than once and truthfully, each time has been - looking back on them - part of the high points in my life. Such a nasty burdon can deliver some amazingly blessed times.
We learn to see and know things that ordinarily we have no time for, connect with someone we'd otherwise postpone, notice a color or a taste or a feeling that in prosperous or busy moments would slip right by, undetected because we're forging along with a plan that leaves little room or time to enjoy something that may not equate or deliver us some material reward in the game of survival, played on terms of success which we measure in things and not always experience or connections made. I sometimes loose the value of a moment of conversation with someone - about things that don't factor into my designed role in humanity - and when things slow enough for me to notice, that opportunity has passed.
There are also other benefits or bonuses created, I've noticed, that wouldn't happen if luck would maintain and our fortunes continue unhampered. Family members who resist connecting with each other for reasons often forgotten or because of issues of no humane reason suddenly reach out and bond again, the denominating factor being one of them has cancer and it belittles any other antagonist or issue that kept them apart, real or imagined.
Stoplights, especially in the middle of the night, have suddenly become one of the strangest things we're taught we have to obey. There's no one coming - for miles - from any direction, and your waiting there, looking around, knowing your life has been rescheduled to depart in calculable hours from the short amount of days in the precious few months they told you is all could be expected. One minute, two, then three and on...your waiting for nothing, delayed in getting somewhere that's important because there aren't many wheres or places left one can do or see so you've planned them out carefully, even down to the minutes it takes getting there. The value of an hour of our time - in employer's terms - fiscal amounts, whether you're a doctor of neurology or a unioned sign painter, is measured in peanuts compared to value I placed on the last planned hours I had 20 years ago, when cancer to me meant death because everyone I knew growing-up who had it, died from it and the docs who discovered it in me didn't change those impressions much. I lived like no tomorrow becaused there wasn't one.
Oddly, that gusto created in me, I'm absolutely convinced, a strengthing immune/response that was part and parcel to the end result of my having survived that terminal diagnosis, in spite of the treatments and known science of the time. Those treatments also affected genetic damage that caused the cancers I'm now facing, expected for years but delayed until now, which isn't bad considering the decades I've had that I wasn't supposed to.
I'm doing great - even climbed hardcore the last three days but weaker than I think I should be. There are treatments for these tumors but it has to consider each chemical, how often and much I had before and restricts radiation because I've had forty lifetime's worth on protocols past. I had a bone marrow transplant and they can't do to me - or anyone now what they did and how back then - again. They're working on designing a treatment for me that insures I can post something like this again, years from now, down the road - saying much of the same about living and making life more alive not by extending it, but realizing it.
I've shared more than a few moments in cancer wards or waiting rooms at clinics with other terminal patients - the thing that stands out the most is the fact that some patients are 80 and had a life behind them, long and steady. Others are young and don't have a life ahead of them, but often I discover that a ten-year-old with a month left to live has more joy and purpose and has lived more out of his handful of years than the elder that's sitting there, bitter to the end, pissed-off at the world he spent a lifetime in judgement on. Length of life means nothing, like the hourly rate in dollars we're given for our skills, it's the amount of life we're able to pack into what precious and short little we're all blessed to live.
I'm going to be okay, this really is nothing too bad and even if it is (we'll find out over time,) it's okay...Like I said - some of the best most productive moments in my life have been while dying of cancer and so far it's all been worth it - "would I do it again", one might ask and I have to honestly say, yes. I try to tell this to people who get diagnosed and think in terms of what we used to know about cancer, the killer which can also be cancer, the blessing.
Again, long winded and wasn't prepared for Jim's thread or the topic to fester out but thank you all for the support and more so - for the humanity and compassion that we're often too busy to express or feel.
