January 23, 2011 The Importance of Anniversaries

For some reason, I have always been very interested in anniversaries.  When young, the only thing that mattered to me was the anniversary of my birth. However, as I grew older, my birthday became less important and the other remembrances in my life took over even ones that did not always bring back good memories.

The anniversaries of my parents deaths have always been important to me. I have even taken days of vacation to travel to Dayton to visit Calvary Cemetery and visit their graves. When the 30^th anniversary of my first marriage came around, I kidded that I wondered if I would get an anniversary card from my ex. I guess she not only forgot about our second anniversary when we were still married, but also the 30^th.

Then there are the more pleasant anniversaries, like UD playing for the national championship in 1967, or the Reds winning the World Series in 1975. Then there are the ones that are close to the heart like the anniversary of Julia and my first date or, of course, our wedding.

However, I have a new favorite anniversary, although it is more of a bad remembrance than a good one.  It was two years ago today that I receive the call that is etched in my memory. It was the call that began the journey that has brought me to today.  I can still hear Dr. Oesch’s voice telling me to go to the closest hospital immediately as I was at high risk of a heart attack and my kidneys were in failure.

It was a call that was completely unexpected. It was a call that made my heart skip a beat. It was a call that would change my life forever.  Within days I would know that it was more than just a bad chemical imbalance.  It was a sequence of events that made me wonder if I would still be alive in two years.

Doctors would not answer my question of how long I might still have. The internet is full of information, but how do you interpret it?  I was in stage III of a cancer that doesn’t have a stage IV.  The internet told me that people that find out that they have Multiple Myeloma when they are in Stage III have, on the average, 29 months to live.  I also found that only 15% of those finding the cancer in stage III live for five years.

Now I find myself at 24 months and feeling great. Twenty nine months will not be a problem. I will have beaten the odds and lasted longer than the average. I am a person that is driven by challenges. Don’t challenge me if you don’t want results. I would be the guy most affected by the coach’s half time speech challenging us to go win the ball game.

I am now challenged to make it to five years.  Only one out of six or seven make it that long. I am determined to be one of those six or seven.  I don’t know what percentage makes it to 10 years, but as soon as I find that out, look out, I have a new challenge!