It was always a question of when, not if

Well, shit.  MRI last Thursday shows something that ought not to be there.  So we'll wait about 5 weeks and look at it again to see if it's progression or what they term psuedoprogression.

It's possible that what they're seeing is an effect of the treatments, and that could be a good thing: it may be that my own leukocytes are attacking bad cells.  Hope so.

I reckon we will know more after the next scan.

Well....

Okay.


So.

Soon I will die.

But fuck that.

When i go, I want  a party.  I want all my friends to come over , bring booze and musical instruments, and have  fucking good time.

If you do, I will. And that'a what I want.  When it's time for folks to leave, come kiss me goodbye.

And I will be  happy.  I wil be content.  I will be ready.


Wish me adieu, my friends.  Thtat's what I want.

If there be one, I will see you on the other side.

But I really do want to have a goodbye kiss.  I will be a mess, but I will know you.  And I will carry your goodwill will with me whereever there is after this life.

Well, shit

My doctor recently called to tell me he had an astrocytoma, but it was bilateral and was involving his corpus callous,.  His balance was shot, so falling was a constant worry.

He was doing okay, but I reckon his reduced mobility led to the development of clots, one of which found its way to his lung, and a couple mornings ago, he died.  He was really an exceptional physician, and I'll miss him a lot.  He was patient, kind, comprehensive.  When I was diagnosed with my cancer, he spent a lot of time in the evening schooling himself on gliomas and following my case.

I was very flattered he called to talk to me about it, and I got to visit him several times before he died.  I think he had become more my friend who happened also to be my doctor than the reverse.  He was a bit of a renaissance man: interested in art and philosophy as well as medicine.  He was well-known around the community.

He was one of 3 physicians I've known (and I've known more than a few) who made me feel that he was treating me, not just my illness.  He would sit and chat and ask me about pretty much everything going on with me.  I got to meet his wife, a perfectly wonderful woman, and I can't stop thinking about her and what she must be feeling.  I'll call her tomorrow and see how she's getting on.  They had a fairly large group of friends, so I can know that at least she won't be alone any more than usual, for the most part.

But it's so damned odd, and sad, that my doc would come down the the same sort of rare cancer that I had, and remarkably touching that he reached out to me for support.  I hope I gave him some.  He called me his "hero" because the cancer didn't get me.  And in the end, it only got him indirectly.

It's a great loss, personally as well as collectively and professionally.

Well, hell.

so now, it's over 3 years, and so far, still no cancer.  I'm alive twice as long as they forecast (or endcast?), and it's strange.

I'm technically "cured," but 30 months of chemotherapy isn't nothing.  It changes you.  My energy level is crazy, sometimes okay, sometimes I can hardly get up stairs.  If I go out with friends to a noisy restauarant, it's physically taxing -- the next day I'm likely to run a big energy debt, a hangover from noise and trying to talk loudly.

Other thing is memory.  Short-term memory is shot (I have to write everything down), and I have some lacunae for things is knew long ago.  It's weird.

Biggest pain in the ass is that I spend most of my time looking for things.  That gets tiresome.  Seems like every time I go to get something from one room, I get distracted and forget why.  Then when I go back to where I came from, I recall what I went after the first time.  Sometimes it seems that I have to do everything twice, and that turns out to be especially frustrating for the spouse.  She has been such a rock, I really hate to put her through more crap.

So, on the one hand, I'm doing far better than I've a right to.

But if you know a cancer survivor, don't expect him or her to be the same person that he or she was before the cancer.  The treatments leave lasting effects.  One person I read said chemo-brain is like wearing a hat of fog.  I'm trying to resurrect some of what I learned when studying philosophy, and man, is it tough to remember things.  But I keep trying!

A year.

well, I'm officially Cancer-free after a year.

On the one hand, this is pretty astonishing, and I really like not having Cancer.  I still have some memory issues, but in the main, I'm my same old fucked-up self.

But I'm a little more scared than usual.  13 months is about what folks with astrocytoma get.  I've had 12.  That gives me pause and makes me want to spend a little more time thinking about how I want this to go down.

From what I've read, the end of this is pretty ugly.  Not sure I want to wade through it, and I'm damned sure I don't want Erin dragged through it.

I can likely get home hospice (if I hang on another year I'm eligible for Medicare, and they do hospice).  But still. It means diapers and IVs for nutrition, and just generally not being me.

I don't want that.  When I'm no longer me--when I can't converse, when I can't make morbid jokes about death--I'm not sure I'd rather not just go to sleep and discover if there's something on the other side of this life.

I'll be horribly sad to leave Erin.  I'll be horribly sad to leave my family, friends and colleagues -- as much a shit as I am, there are people out there who will be sad when I die.

But. I'm going to die.  Maybe not too soon, but sooner than I'd like.

I want to go paris again. I want to go on long bike rides on lonely gravel roads amid cornfields and cows. ("Hello, ladies!" I always say to them.)

I want to teach another class or two.  If my life has had any enduring meaning, it is through my students. They amaze me, frustrate me, but mostly they humble me with their hard work, their concern and affection, and their trust in me.

I mean that and feel it profoundly: I am humbled by my students.  They have been the most amazing groups of young adults, ever.  So they will be what remains of me when I go.

I couldn't ask for a better legacy.  Some hate me, but lots of them are glad I had a chance to teach them some stuff.

What I hope I taught them, more than anything, is a respect and love of learning.

That's something you can carry all your life: curiosity.  I hope they do. And I hope that they also have the tools to know how to answer the questions that they will encounter.

Teaching is the coolest job there is.  Grading papers gets old, especially when it dawns on you that you've be correcting the same errors for 25 years.  But you get to leave something enduring.

And I tell you: the reaction of my students to my illness has been nothing short of flabbergasting.  (is that a word?)  I have been completely blown away by their concern, their generosity, their care.

I always had a sense that i got close to my students, that they knew I cared about them beyond what happened in the classroom.  But this has -- far beyond my wildest imagination -- showed me how much I have mattered in their lives.

I'm sad I only got to work with them for a few years.  I wish it could have been a decade or more.  They are amazing.  You ask them to try, they try.  You give them something that will stretch them, and they reach for it and get it.

I'm amazed.

So, I can die knowing there will be a little piece of me living on -- if my students have students, I trust they will know what my students knew.  I have some former students who are now "Dr."  I couldn't be more proud.

Wow.  This is ramble and unfocused.  But then, so am I!

So, I think I figured something out.

Most of this week and last I have been sad, which is a big contrast from the past.  I've been trying to understand why.

I think I know: I have more or less suddenly realized that my life has gone from one of optimism and wild future opportunities to one with a deadline, and those opportunities are gone.

Sobering to realize that you have far more past than future.

I still have some time, I think, given that my cancer has not recurred in over 7 months, but still -- I'm 57 going on 58, and there are relatively few opportunities for one nearing 60.  I figure I can still pick up the occasional class without jeopardizing my disability benefits, and that will allow me a chance to make some difference in the world, still, before I go.

And every class you teach, no matter how many times you've done that material, is an adventure.

Young people are amazing.  Though I have no kids of my own, I feel as though hundreds -- even thousands -- of parents have lent me their children for a few years, and without seeming vain, I think I have made a mark on many of them.  In a good way.  Fundamentally I think I'm a good person, and being the clasroom with me several times a week for years willl probably have a good influence.

And I so adore them.They keep me young, keep me thinking forward, keep me thinking of the future and not only the past.

So I do believe I will need to get in the classroom from time to time, just to stay alive and fresh an optimistic.  As long as I can do a good job (and fear of not being able to do a good job was the reason I opted to retire), I'd like to keep doing it.

But for now, I should go to bed.  Tomorrow is lawn chores, and i'll need all the energy I can muster.

Ciao!

Well, hell: the melancholies.

So, the last few days I have been feeling melancholy, and today I figured out what it is.  I have been thinking a lot about when I was young, and thinking about that for some reason really makes me feel sad.  Not sure what it is.  I am sort of stuck thinking of my 15-year-old self, and wow does it make me sad to think about that kid.  The idea of dying sooner rather than later seems sadder when I think of that kid.

I don't know if it's the idea that whatever opportunity that lost is really, honestly, now going to be gone.  I don't know if it's regret over things I didn't do (although I don't feel regret for things that I did, in the main). Some of it,  I think, is realizing that there are people that I miss from that time that I am never going to see again, and some of them were pretty important to me -- and I guess, in some ways, still are.  I wish I could find some of them before it's all over, but don't know how.

It's a pretty profound ache, and I do not like it.  Maybe when you go along living your life you never stop to think about the people that you will never see again -- it always seems there's a chance you will.  But not now.  :/

I'm sure some of this is also coming from the fact that I haven't been feeling very well for a couple of weeks.  I go visit the doc in a week or so, so that will be good.

Tomorrow is my big sister's birthday.  She has some right frontal lobe damage from a tumor resection back in 1987.  I hope I can get down to see some family this summer.

Anyway, I should try to sleep.