December 9, 2013 -- Remembering our Past

This Christmas is a turning of the page for me. This is not some earth shattering thing, but for some reason, it is important to me. You will probably think I am crazy to even think about it, but let me explain.

I finally broke down and bought a new Christmas tree.  There it is. It is out in the open.

Sounds simple doesn’t it? I guess it isn’t the buying of the new tree, it is the realization that I need to throw one away.  You see the tree that will be thrown away is the one that we have used every year since Justin was born. It has been in dozens of photographs and hours of Christmas videos. It is really the only tree that Santa has left presents under for the last 22 years.  It is the tree that Justin almost knocked over when he was five and sprawling under to get his next big gift.

I have always been a Christmasaholic. I was the guy that was going elbow to elbow with all of the crazy women shoppers at Hallmark the day after Christmas.  One year when we were staying with Julia’s parents we went to a mall that had two Hallmark stores and sent Julia’s brother running back and forth between them so we knew what each other was buying (pre-cell phone days.)

It was 23 years ago that Julia and I fell in love with a Christmas tree that was way over our budget. Today it would be a bargain, but at the time it was rather pricey. We waited until after Christmas hoping that it would drop more than the typical 50%.  We waited and waited but there was no further dropping of price.  It was February and the tree was still in the window just taunting us.

It was February 8, 1991 and we decided to drive across town to see if a miracle had happened and the price had dropped. The store was closed and I can remember Julia staying in the car while I went up to again check  if the price had dropped.  We decided to head home still debating if we should just splurge and buy the tree.

Just a few hours later, Julia went into labor and we were soon holding our first born.  The tree search became part of one of the most important nights in our lives.  After we returned home with Justin, we bought the tree.

The 21 Christmases have been wonderful, but there isn’t enough shipping tape to hold the old thing together. It was time to move on.  As a result, there is a Costco 9 foot tree with blinking LED lights flashing between white and multi-colored standing in our family room. It will be beautiful on Christmas morning, but there will still be something missing.

Sometimes in life we attach important moments or times in our lives to inanimate objects. For whatever reason, they bring back memories that are worth far more than the object ever was.  I have hundreds of old science fiction books that my dad read in the 1940’s and 50’s sitting in the basement.  I still have a couple of the sets of clothes that I wore as a baby that my Mother loving set aside. We keep mementoes from our senior prom or ticket stubs from our first game or concert. To someone else, they mean nothing, but to us, they mean the world. We always want to move on, but we love where we came from, sometimes is the strangest things that take us there.

Julia lost one of her dearest friends this last week. Robyn Driscoll fought a seeming endless war against breast cancer for almost a third of her life.  Robin was a fighter that refused to give in to the monster that stole her life well before her time.  But that was just a small part of who Robin was.  Everyone has nice words to say about someone after they die, but Robyn’s were completely deserved. She was a thoughtful, loving person that will be missed by many. Please keep Robyn’s family in your thoughts and prayers.

I feel so lucky with where I am in my own battle as I remain in remission heading into the new year.  We get caught up in our own lives sometimes, especially at Christmas.  Keep those that are fighting serious illness in your thoughts and remember to give a little gift to your own special charities as you never know when a cure might be found or a person’s life changed by your thoughtfulness.

November 4, 2013 - Light the Night

Cancer.  It is inevitable.  At some point in your life, you will be confronted by this disease. It will either be a loved one, a friend, a colleague or quite possibly yourself. In 2010, a study was released that stated there is a 41% chance that each of us will develop cancer in our lifetimes. Every four minutes someone in the United States is diagnosed with a blood cancer and, every 10 minutes, someone loses their battle. Approximately one million Americans are currently battling blood cancers.

A little less than five years ago, I had that unenviable talk with my doctor that I had become one of those with a blood cancer.  At the time, I wasn’t sure if it was a death sentence or not. The average life span for someone contracting Multiple Myeloma and finding it in Stage III was 27 months. I really didn’t know what to think. I knew that both of my parents and several other relatives had died of cancer. I couldn’t help but think that it might be my fate, too.

The bad thing was I had cancer. The good thing was a number of new chemotherapy options had recently become available and more were on their way.  I began my first round of chemo within days and followed with a stem cell transplant.  Two years after the transplant, my cancer had returned to the point that chemo was again necessary. I then started a protocol that works for most but, unfortunately, didn’t for me.  Six months later we tried a new regimen that has worked miracles for me for over a year and a half. I am able to write this today because I had options. Aside from a cure, that is what cancer patients need.

Because of your helpful donations to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s 2013 Light the Night Walk, more blood cancer patients may also have options in the future. We all hope for a cure for cancer, but it is only through donations that this will ever happen. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society not only helps fight for a cure but they also help patients and their families’ work through the difficulties that many of us face when confronted with cancer.  This ranges from research to medical bill assistance to counseling for both patients and their family members to group gatherings so that cancer patients can interact with others that are facing the same issue and learn about new advances in their treatment future.

We set a record for TeamOutlaws last year collecting over $4,000.  Please help us again gain an upper hand on cancer this year by visiting:

http://pages.lightthenight.org/az/Phoenix13/teamoutlaws

Thank you again for all of your help over the years. As it is every year, I hope to continue this tradition next year and for every year that I can. Help us beat cancer. The walk is this weekend and we are nearing our goal of $4,500 in contributions.

On a personal note, I have been in remission for four months now and chemo free.  It is a month to month proposition but it is a wonderful feeling knowing that I am where I am.  I have a blood test in another week that should give me an idea if things are continuing to go well. Stay tuned.

September 26, 2014 -- On the Road Again

It seems that having a bucket list is a rather trendy thing to do. As always, I am anything but trendy. I have never been one that has worried about a bucket list. Since I became sick, I have had a good deal of time to contemplate all of the things that I have missed in my life and to be honest with you I just don’t feel like I have missed anything of real significance. I suppose there are some things that I have never seen that would be amazing but I’m not sure that I want to fly to Egypt to spend 45 minutes staring at the pyramids.  It would be exciting to walk along the path that Jesus traveled during his life, but I’m not sure I want to be worried about dodging a stray bullet or bomb along the way either.

All in all, if I happened to get hit by a bus on the way home, I would have to say that I would have been very happy with the life I have led and the things that I have experienced.  There are some things that I miss though, some things I would like to do again.

It would be nice to wake up in the morning and not have half of my body screaming at me to stop moving so fast as the other half creaks as I get to my feet.  It would be nice to comb my hair after a shower without having to be a landscape architect to cover all of the bald spots. It would be nice to be able to read without having to find my six dollar Costco glasses first.  It would be nice to remember where I put my glasses or my keys or my wallet. It would be nice to be able to do something athletic and still be able to move the next day.

One of the things that I did when I was younger and can still do is drive.  Back in the day when gasoline was $0.50/gallon, it would make a lot more sense to drive to a vacation spot than hop in a plane.  Driving from Ohio to Florida was no big deal.  I would start at in the evening and drive for 18 hours straight only stopping to get gas. If you had to pee, you better make sure that you timed it for when the gas tank was empty.  I would order a pizza or two and put them in the back seat to dine on during the trip.  A Trip-tik from AAA was the way to go. It was light years ahead of having to read a map while driving.

It didn’t seem to bother me that I would have to make the same trip home in seven or eight days with nothing to look forward to except work on Monday morning. I would get to see parts of the country (albeit at 75 miles an hour) that I normally never got to see. The heavily wooded hills through Tennessee, the red dirt of Georgia and the smell of dampness when you finally got to Florida all made it worthwhile. Of course, avoiding radar and finding a “caravan” made it even more exciting. How I stayed up all night and never seemed to get drowsy amazes me to this day.

When Jason decided late this summer that he did not want to return to school in South Dakota, it created a dilemma since he had a storage unit filled with clothes, supplies, a TV and mini refrigerator.   It was of enough value that we didn’t just want to walk away and eventually see Jason’s stuff on “Storage Wars” so we had to come up with a way to move his various boxes 1,300 miles without having to take out a second mortgage on the house. Julia looked into moving companies and found them to be ridiculously expensive.  She found another route that was more affordable but it would require someone to get his things ready to move and then wait around for the shipping company to show up.  Both of these were doable but it just didn’t seem like the “best” way to handle the situation.

It seemed to me that I would have an opportunity to relive my youth and get to have another one of those crazy driving road trips.  Well, I can’t drive for 19 consecutive hours anymore, but I sure can drive for six hours and take a break, have someone else drive for a while and eventually find a hotel to sleep off the stiffness of sitting in a car for 12 hours. Jason was soon designated as my co-pilot and plans were starting to be hatched. Julia thought I was an idiot for doing this, but she just never could understand the enjoyment of the quest.

I had everything planned that I could including getting an SUV from Enterprise for the trip that we were going to pick up Tuesday night so we could get on the road at 6 AM and miss all of the traffic.  As I stood at the Phoenix airport Enterprise counter, I came to the realization that I was in the middle of a senior moment. When I set up the reservation, I limited my search to airports only since most off-airport locations rarely have specialty cars. Little did I know that I had actually made the reservation at a Scottsdale location. 

I called the Scottsdale location and was told they closed in 20 minutes. If I got there in 19 they could handle me, a minute later and they would have shut down all of their equipment.  I then started to break every speed limit posted between the airport and Scottsdale yet hit virtually every red light.  We pulled into the lot at 6:04 PM and watched five people pull out, one even rolled up his window as Jason approached.  This was not the way to start the trip.

When we got there at 7:30 the next morning, I went through the normal procedure to get the car which took about 15 minutes. However, when I got in the car, I found that the fuel light was on which added another 20 minutes to our wait.  This was starting to look like a mistake.

I took the first shift and the old thrill started to return.  Nothing like being on the road driving through new places.  I was going to add New Mexico, Nebraska and Wyoming to my list of states and all was good.  Jason and I got to see a camel farm, deserts where there should be green and green where you would think there should be desert.  We were able to visit the largest motorcycle rally in the world.  We made hotel reservations as we drove and hit Hooter’s with regularity. It was a good old road trip with everything but the beer and the women.

When we returned four days later with an SUV filled with Jason’s belongings and a wallet emptied by the cost of gas, we had accomplished what we had set out to do.  We had made it home with all of Jason’s things still working and had managed not to be run off the road by a semi or some other crazed driver late at night.  But what we came home with was something more, something that I had not counted on.

You see, the thing that you don’t think much about is what you are going to do for four days in a car. This was not going to be a trip where we stopped every few hours to see the sights. It was two days in the car getting there and two days back. It was just us and the freeway.  But what it turned into was something special.  Imagine four days in the car with your soon to be 20-year-old son with nothing to do but talk.

Jason has never been much of a talker.  Very quiet and sometimes an island, Jason opened up.  In the end, if I would have had to pay him by the word, I would have been even more broke.  We talked about anything that suited us at the time. There were no preconceived notions of accomplishing this or that. It was just talk.  I think I learned more about my son in those four days than I had in the previous four years. 

All of this just reiterated what Julia and I have thought for a long time.  Although far from perfect and certainly not a carbon copy of either of us, we have a great kid that makes the right decisions and does the right things. I’m not sure even he knows what he will be doing moving forward in life, but I feel pretty confident that he will continue to make the right decisions and continue to be the type of person you can only hope for when you hold your child for the first time.  It’s funny, you start out worrying about how far you will get your first day and in the end you come home with a whole new perspective on your kid.  Next time you have a chance to entrap your kid in a car for a few days, give it some thought.

September 10, 2013--Twenty Five and Counting

It was a day like most in Ohio in the Fall. The morning air was crisp and clean with just a hint of clouds in the sky. It would turn out to be a nearly perfect day with little or no breeze, temperature peaking at 72 degrees and the sun kissing the last of the summer flowers.

It was certainly a great day for a drive, even if it were just for a pizza and some ice cream. Because there was nothing else to do at the time and there is nothing better that a good pizza, the drive was going to be just a bit longer that one would expect. It was down to Cincinnati and LaRosa's. If you are not from the area and have not had LaRosa's, you have no real understanding of why someone would drive that far for a pizza. You would probably also not quite understand why someone would drive several miles out of his way just to buy 15 cans of LaRosa's sauce to jam into his suitcase to bring back to Arizona.

However, the real reason to go to Cincinnati was to get some Graeter's ice cream. At the time, few in Columbus understood the significance of Graeter's ice cream. Since that time it has been on many top 10 listings of ice creams made in the United States and opened several locations in Columbus. What is more important in life than ice cream, especially when you are talking about making it part of a special celebration?

You see, that day that was going to change my life.  I was 34 at the time and was doing OK for myself. I had a good job, a little money in the bank and other than a mortgage, had no debt.  I had good friends, went on nice vacations, had a two seater sports car and just about everything I wanted. But I was still lacking something and on September 10, 1988, that lacking would go away. On that day I married that most beautiful girl in the world. On that day, I finally had everything I really needed.

When we stand in front of the priest, minister, rabbi or justice of the peace and commit to be with the same person for the rest of our lives we really have no idea what we have committed. At that point, it is all about the amazement of the day. In reality, it is work. It is never easy no matter who you are. If you are going to make it work, you have to want to make it happen. Happily, both Julia and I have wanted it no matter how hard or easy it was.

From the outside, we are almost always amazed when we find that someone is going to get a divorce. That is because we are, more often or not, shielded from the difficulties that people go through.  Julia and I have had difficulties just like everybody else but we both realized that we were pretty darn good together despite whatever stumbling block we were facing at that point in time. We never game up because we knew what we had was right.

It is now 25 years later and she is still the most beautiful girl in the world. It doesn't matter that we have a few more pounds to lug around or have a wrinkle or two more than we had in 1988, our feelings have only grown more intense. I love Julia more today than I ever have. 

She knows all of my quirks and imperfections and she still loves me. She puts up with my love of the Browns, Reds and Flyers. I know she doesn't actually hear me when I talk about them, but she makes it look like she does and that's all that really matters. It doesn't bother her (much) when I come home and just plop on the couch or if it takes me a month to change a light bulb because that's what marriage is about.

We know who we are now. It's not 1988 and we think we know what we are doing. We actually know all of the things that drive us nuts about the other and we don't care, because we know what we have it is far more than that. We have each other and that is all we need.

Now if she can just put up with me for another 25.

I love you baby doll.

August 5, 2013 - July 13, 1913

It was the middle of July in 1913 in a small mining town in western Pennsylvania that Sophie and John Churan welcomed their first child into the world.  Times were different then.  He wasn’t born in a hospital surrounded by scores of doctors and nurses with equipment buzzing everywhere.  Little Andrew was never really sure what his actual birth date was but celebrated July 13 as his birthday because that was when his birth was recorded at the county offices.

 

The world had yet to see its first global conflict. Telephones were a luxury as less than 10% of homes had one and the first coast to coast telephone call wouldn’t happen for two more years.  There were less than one million cars in the United States. If you could afford one, it would cost $800. Trains were the ideal mode of long distance transportation as the first commercial scheduled flight wouldn’t happen for six months. The Titanic sank the year before but there was no CNN to let everyone know. The newspaper, almost dead today, was the best means of circulating the news. They were available daily with special editions available when news broke.

The first public radio broadcast had only occurred three years earlier and it would be another decade before radios became a popular household item.  Movies were fifteen minutes long and Charlie Chaplin was going to sign his first movie contract the same month. The thought of a television would have been laughable.

There were no large grocery stores. A loaf of bread was a nickel, a pound of steak was twenty cents, a gallon of milk was thirty five cents and penny candy actually did cost a penny.  That fifteen minute movie would cost you seven cents.  The average wage was $0.22 per hour and most took home between $400 and $600 per year.

In 1913, the life expectancy for a man was 50 and for a woman it was 55. In the last 100 years, that expectance has increased by 50% to 75 for men and 81 for women.  In many ways our lives have gotten easier and our health system much better which has allowed us to live much longer than our ancestors.

The world in 1913 seems more than 100 years ago in many ways.

My dad lived a life that was simple in nature but he tended to enjoy whatever it was he was a part of. Family was all important to him throughout his life as I remember relatives always being over to our home. That probably came from the close relationship he had with his mother and younger sister, Margaret as his father died when he was five.

He was as different as can be when compared to my childhood. I was sheltered from everything as my mother felt that I would die for sure if I was exposed to just about anything. My kids still love to make fun of me whenever we talk about the fact that I had to learn how to ride a bicycle at the age of 13. In comparison, my dad had to move away from home and work on a farm to help support the family at the age of 14.

At 14, he was a big as he was ever going to get. He was strong as an ox and earned every dime he was paid.  Mature beyond his years, one of his favorite stories was when some of the men he worked with put him up to fight one of the other men that worked on the farm as a cheap form of entertainment.  Dollars were wagered on both the boy and the man. They were put inside of a box car and only the winner was to walk out of the car.  There was straw and cow manure everywhere but that didn’t slow either of them down. He gave the twenty something man everything he could handle and walked out the victor. He was tough but five years later he met his match and she was anything but the rough and tumble man my father had become.

When he met my mother, Julia Pregon in 1932, his world changed. From the very first moment he saw her, he knew she would be his wife.  For 41 years, they loved, laughed, fought, cried and worked together.  My mother was just as ambitious as my father and smart well beyond her ten years of education. Individually they were strong, but together they were special. We all hope to have a life with another person as they did. When he lost her, he lost a bit of himself, I’m not sure he was ever the same.

He lived through the depression and learned the value of a dollar at a young age, something he never forgot.  Always hard working, he worked full time until he was 70. He was never a rich man, but one that enjoyed the simple things like reading a book, playing cards or just taking a walk.

His greatest thrill in life aside from yours truly was when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.  His love of science fiction was with him for decades.  In 1969 when we saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” it as if all of those years of reading paperbacks all came true.  Not sure why I have held on to them, but I still have hundreds of science fiction books that my dad read from the 1940’s on.  I guess it is just my way of hanging on to him a bit.

He lived to be 77 and he saw the world change around him unlike any generation before.  The only thing he really missed was the birth of a grandchild as died three months before Justin’s birth. He had waited so long to hold his son and just couldn’t hold on long enough to hold a grandchild.  Hopefully, both he and my mother have enjoyed seeing the boys grow and become the wonderful men that they are.  He made a real difference in my life. I can only hope I will make the same in theirs.

July 7, 2013 -- The “R” Word

As we go through life, we are given many rules, things we need to do and things we need to avoid. Words have become one of the problem areas in our country as we become more politically correct. Paula Deen has become a pariah and lost a fortune because of her admitted use of the “N” word.  Cancer has become common place in many of our lives as more and more friends and relatives are affected. We sometimes choose to avoid the use of certain words like cancer and refer to it as the Big “C”.  I have had one word that I have kept out of my vocabulary in the past few years, not because it was a bad word, but because it was a word that seemed so foreign to me.

When I was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, the first thing that I had to wrestle with aside from the fact that I was now part of the Big “C” clan was that it was incurable. MM is referred to as being a treatable yet incurable cancer.  Certainly treatable, but over 10,000 people still die in the United States every year from this form of blood cancer.  It was very hard for me to wrap my head around having to deal with this cancer for the rest of my life. 

I’ll never forget an online webinar that Julia and I tuned in when the guest speaker said that we basically have a cure because we have many options for chemotherapy.  Obviously, this doctor hadn’t spent much time sitting in a cancer clinic La-Z-Boy with a needle in her arm. Waking up every day for the rest of your life knowing that there was no end to being treated, isn’t an easy pill to swallow.   Yet knowing the alternative is death puts a whole new spin on it.

When I received my stem cell transplant, I held out the hope that although not cured, I would be able to say I was in remission.  Despite doing everything I needed to do when I received my transplant, it just didn’t do everything I had hoped.  Although I was in a state of “very good partial” remission, I still had the cancer with me every day.  Every day I worried if it was getting worse.  Five months after I received the transplant, my numbers started drifting up and I was certain that the transplant had given me little more than an additional six months of life. It was no way to spend Christmas.

I was so worried that I talked Dr. Mikhael into letting me have a blood test two weeks later to see if things had changed.  The fact that I would suggest to a doctor that I wanted someone to stick a needle in my arm shows exactly how nervous I was about the previous result.  The results were better and the cancer seemed to settle down for the next year as I lived my life without chemotherapy.

Then in January, 2011 it became evident that the transplant had run its course and the cancer was getting stronger with every blood test.  It was slow and gradual, but every test got worse.  In July, I began chemo again. It wasn’t too bad as it was just a pill, but there were some unwanted side affects that would not go away.  I had given the transplant its shot and it helped, but I was never going to be able to say that I was in complete remission.  It was something that I could live with, but not something that I was comfortable with.

Six months later, despite doubling the dosage, it became evident that the drug that worked for most people would not work for me.  My cancer was now almost as bad as when we found it originally, three years earlier.   Like most cancer patients, I was ready to move on to the next chemo.  As a cancer survivor, your hope is that the next therapy will work better than the last. You are not always rewarded, but you continue to hold out that hope.  The next attempt would be a cocktail of two different chemotherapies and a steroid.  I had hope, but I have learned to never get too high or too low, just hang in there.

When I received the results the next month, I couldn’t believe my eyes.  There results were better than I had every received, even better than after my transplant. Could this be the “magic pill” as they say in business? It was so unbelievable that I called Megan Connelly who had been my transplant coordinator to see if there was a typo.  It still wasn’t in the normal range, but the change was drastic from the previous month.

The next month was even better as I entered the normal range for the first time ever.  I remembered the phrase, “no cure but treatable.” It seems that I might actually know how that feels. The months moved on and the results remained amazing even as we extended the time between treatments.  Over the next 14 months I moved from having a treatment every week to once every three weeks, yet still the same results.

In April, 2013 Dr. Mikhael made the decision to move the treatment to once every four weeks and to not have another blood test for three months. I had never gone that long.  The Nervous Nellie that I am was at full strength. Elongating the treatment cycle and not checking for three months, was this man mad? I tried to put it out of my mind, but it was always there. This was going to be the most important test of my life.  Just like on the “Bachelor” when they have the most intense Rose Ceremony EVER, this would be the most important blood test EVER.

The nice thing about going to the Mayo Clinic is that you can get results online in a matter of hours on the majority of tests and within 24 hours on the important cancer number. When I got the results I was able to breathe a sigh of relief as the numbers were as good as I had ever received.  I now knew that I could stay with treatment just one time each month and as a result have less side effects and a more normal life.

That was on Wednesday and I had an appointment with Dr. Mikhael on Friday. I really just expected the same pleasantries that we always have when things are going well. We talk about our lives and schedule the next appointment.  Then my whole life changed. Dr. Mikhael used the “R” word, a word that I had given up using and even hoping.  He said I was in remission.

The words rang in the room. I was in remission.

I was always going to fight the fight, but I never thought I would be here. I never thought I would ever be off chemo for as long as I was alive.  But the words were said. I was in remission.  Now understand, Dr. Mikhael in the same breath said that the cancer would come back. This wasn’t forever. But somehow, that didn’t matter. It could last three months, it could last three years, we won’t know until it is over. But I’m going to be enjoying this time cancer free.

To complete the circle, the first person I told was Megan.  She has moved from stem cell transplant coordinator to being a nurse in the oncology area at the Mayo.  From being the first person to help me through my transplant to being the first person that knew other than Julia and I that I was in remission.  Somehow it just seemed right.

 

Thank you all for keeping me and our family in your prayers through these 4 1/2 years.

 

 

 

March 27, 2013 - Beautiful

When I return to my home town of Dayton, Ohio I always make sure that I go by places from my past, places of familiarity. I always like to run by the house that I grew up in, always hoping that it might be for sale and I could act like an interested buyer and take a look inside.  I’ll even run by the baseball field that I hit my lone home run as a young baseball player.  Lastly, I will run by Calvary Cemetery to visit my parents’ graves. I’m not sure that they can hear me but I always have something to say to them. It always brings me a little closer to my past and all that they meant to me. Familiarity is important to all of us.
 

Nurse Gerri Wensloff at Four Winds Hemotology.

Since I started this journey four years ago there have been many, many people in my life. I have had hundreds and hundreds of blood tests, twenty five radiation treatments, fifteen immunization shots, two cataract surgeries, two bone marrow biopsies, one kidney biopsy, two complete sets of body x-rays, multiple MRIs and somewhere around seventy five injectable chemotherapy treatments. Through all of that I have had four constants, Mr. Mikhael, Dr. Obenchain, Dr. Hogan and Gerri Wensloff.

Gerri works for Dr. Obenchain and she was the very first person to inject me with the poison that has kept me alive for those four years. I’ll never forget the day that I showed up for my first treatment of Velcade and Doxil.  Understand, I have never been one to appreciate having a needle stuck in me. As a kid I even passed out when I received a shot. Let’s don’t even go into how many times I have been a bit shaky when I have had a blood test. The thought of getting an IV and sitting there for four hours was not exactly something that I had on my bucket list. You hear about the horrors of chemo and you just never know what to expect.

Yet Gerri was there for me during the entire four hours even missing lunch to make sure I was comfortable and not dying from some type of allergic reaction to the chemo.  She didn’t have to do that, but that is who she is.  I don’t think that you could find a more likable, caring person to deal with this dreaded disease.

Until you have experienced being in that room, it is impossible to comprehend what is taking place. This isn’t like the dreaded trip to the dentist when you know a filling is coming. That feeling comes and goes and you are pretty much by yourself. When you receive chemotherapy, you are in a room with five, six or seven other people that are going through the same thing.  We are all at different levels of potential death and none of us know who will be back next week. You all hope that this will be the answer, but you never really know for sure.

Some of us like to talk to those around us while others try to sleep away the experience because of the pain, nausea and general tiredness. Yet, Gerri always seemed to know how to deal with each of us. If we wanted our peace, she gave us that. If we wanted to talk about what was happening, she gave us that. As you can imagine, I was a little different.

Over the last four years I have received everything from Gerri from a hug to banners with my name on them to a fake trumpet serenade to a pole dance (yes, you heard that right.)  She even came in on her normal day off just because she knew I was going to be there. She has always known what I needed. But now I will have to continue my journey without her as she will be returning to Indiana to be with her family and a new grandchild. I’m sure we will both move on as you always must, but it will never be the same; I will forever miss that familiarity, that caring touch.

There are younger and prettier nurses than Gerri but I am not sure that I will ever know a more beautiful one.

March 21, 2013 -- Incomplete Cremation?

While Jason was home for spring break, he and I decided to take in a Coyotes hockey game. Neither of us are huge hockey fans but we had gone to a playoff game last year and had a good time. Since he was stuck in Chandler for his week off, I thought that it would be good to get him out of the house as he wasn’t on a beach in Mexico like half of the college kids seem to be doing these days.

The area around the hockey arena is an entertainment complex with restaurants, bars and shopping. In addition, on top of the buildings, they have a number of rather large billboards, one of which caught my eye. It stated that you could get a “Complete cremation for $586.25.” This brought to mind a couple of questions. The first of which was, “What am I getting for that extra $0.25 that is included in the price?” The second question was even more important, “If I can get a complete cremation for $586.25, how much would an incomplete cremation cost and just how big would the chunks be?”

This might seem trivial to most of you but the cost of a funeral can be huge and as much as most of us like to avoid the discussion, we will all have to go through the process of death and a funeral. Julia and I have had an ongoing discussion over the years about how we would like to have our remains handled after we die. We are on opposite ends of the spectrum on this and oddly on ends opposite of where most would think we would be.

As many of you know, I tend to be a bit of a penny pincher. Some would call it being cheap; I prefer to call it being frugal. The possibility of only spending $586.25 for my funeral certainly has its advantages, but it flies in the face of what I have always wanted to do. I would have to say that I am a traditionalist when it comes to funerals and burials. It’s not that I feel like God will be upset with me if I am cremated, I just feel more comfortable with being put in the ground in one piece.

Julia, on the other hand, wants to be cremated. She would then like to have her ashes scattered in the Caribbean as she loves the beauty of the region. The best way to do this would be while on a cruise off the back of the ship in numerous places. For some reason, she isn’t too crazy about it when I ask if she minds if I take a date on this cruise. Geez, sometimes she is just no fun.

This trip to the hockey game came shortly after I went to the funeral of one of my co-workers. Jeff Richards had been suffering from Leukemia that led to complications including pneumonia and ultimately his death. Jeff was as nice of a man that you would ever meet. I don’t think that he ever had a bad word to say about anyone. My boss said it best when he referred to Jeff as a gentleman.

At the funeral, a friend of Jeff’s from his church gave an amazing eulogy that laid out Jeff’s life and all that he had accomplished. It really got me to thinking about what my eulogy would include. I’ve always felt that I have had a good life, but I’m not sure how much material I have created for a gut wrenching, boy what an amazing guy John was, kind of eulogy.

It made me wonder if I should have spent more time in my life creating a better eulogy resume’. In the end, it isn’t about how many toys we have at the end of life, but just what we have done to make the world and the people around us just a little bit better. I think we all hope that we have changed the world for the better. I think I have, but I’ll have to leave that up to the guy that reads my eulogy. I guess I still have some time left on this aging body and as long as I am still breathing I have an opportunity to improve that five minutes of remembrance. Maybe all of us should give a thought as we live our lives, just how we will be remembered on that day.

February 4, 2013 -- Be careful what you wish for

When you either make the decision to become a parent or you find out that the decision has been made for you, your life begins to change. It may be subtle at first, but it tends to gather momentum and in the end, your entire life has changed. It is no longer just about you and your significant other, your top priority becomes that little bundle of trouble.

You don’t realize in the beginning, but the sleepless nights that you have with a newborn are just the start. You think that when they actually start to sleep through the night, you are home free. You do look a little bit less frazzled, but deep down inside you are still engaged 24 hours a day with a sleepless night just around the corner. It goes from having to get up to a screaming child who needs a bottle to one that wakes up from a nightmare or an earache.

You get through all of that and then they get their driver’s license. They start off slow at first, but eventually they are left alone in the car as they run to the grocery store for you. Then they are going over to a friend’s and eventually they are going out on a date and it starts to get later and later that they are out. Eventually, it starts to eat into your sleeping. It doesn’t matter if they are 16 or 22, until you hear that door open and close at 2 AM its tough to sleep with both eyes closed.

The purpose of this whole journey is to create and mold a human being into someone in whom you can be proud. You want your child to be able to stand on their own feet and be successful without your help. You want them to eventually be independent. But then the time comes and you are not so sure that is what you really want.

Several weeks ago Julia and I made the trip to South Dakota to take Jason to school. This is no longer waiving to him as he gets on the bus for the first time as a kindergartener, this is giving him a hug, saying goodbye and leaving him alone 1,000 miles away from home. All of a sudden, you are not sure this is what you signed up for.

For the last 20 years, Julia and I have been caring for Jason in one way or another, either through prenatal care, changing a diaper at three in the morning or talking to him about the girl friend problems every teenager runs into. We loved, cuddled, spanked (yes, I was one of those Neanderthals that actually spanked his kids), read to, played with, instructed and even yelled at (Jason’s room is historically a mess as we often didn’t even know the color of the carpet). Jason and Justin had become a huge part of who we were and now we were shipping one of them off.

The weekend in South Dakota was filled with shopping to get all of the things we couldn’t stuff into a couple suitcases. I think Julia has watched too much HGTV as Jason is now equipped with enough cabinets, hooks, hangers and shelves to last him a lifetime. There is a place for everything and everything was in its place when we left. The question is how long will that be the case? Remember, this is the kid that left the house with who knows what stuffed under his bed to make his bedroom look cleaner.

We spent most of that Sunday sanitizing and arranging his room including creating a bed that is within three feet of the ceiling and has his desk and half of his clothes positioned neatly underneath. It took me three days to get over the aches and pains of that ordeal.

He stayed with us that night in the hotel because the dorm was still pretty empty as classes would not start until Thursday. We cleaned out the hotel the next morning and made our way to the local IHOP. For the most part, we were quiet at breakfast and ate about half of our meals. Eventually we had to get moving because if we missed our plane we might have to take out a third mortgage on the house to afford new tickets because Allegiant only makes two trips a week.

When we got to the dorm, we moved the last things in and said our goodbyes. I kept mine short because I knew the more I talked the more likely I would begin to cry like a 2 year old girl that just had her favorite doll taken away from her. Julia and I made our way to the airport and tried to convince ourselves that everything would be OK and this would be good for him.

Over the next few weeks we did our best to wean ourselves from Jason. After spending almost every day with him for 19+ years, it wasn’t easy. He finally told us he needed some space and we decided to give him that. Then three weeks into the journey he calls and says he has been throwing up and had diarrhea. With all of the publicity about the flu and the fact that it is killing off normal healthy teenagers in days, we felt helpless. For the first time we weren’t able to be parents and feel his forehead and give him chicken soup.

Once again the sleep interrupted nights had returned. Luckily after four days, he was feeling better and we could breathe easy. It seems that it doesn’t matter how old they are or how far away they are, you just can’t turn off that parenting thing. Maybe one day, I will write a book on parenting. The only problem is that it may have 24 blank chapters, because I’m not sure I have yet to figure any of it out.

January 16, 2013 -- Say It Isn’t So

I turned sixty today, yep, six zero. You notice, I didn’t use numbers, I used letters. When I look at the numbers, it scares me. How did this happen so quickly? I still remember playing in my back yard as a seven-year-old. Now I can’t remember what happened yesterday.

I look in the mirror in the morning and I don’t recognize who I see. Part of the problem is now that I had cataract surgery, I can actually see in the mirror in the morning. In the past, I didn’t put my contacts in until right before I was leaving for work. Now I get the full 20-20 view of the mess I am after rolling out of bed.

Starting from the top down, I have more wasteland on the top of my head than in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. When I actually get out of the shower and comb my hair, it takes me longer than when I was in college and had a mop on top of my head. It now takes an Architectural degree to place every stray hair just right so it looks like I still have some. Thank God I can never see my self from behind, or I would have a heart attack.

Then I catch the bags under my eyes. It looks like I am trying out to be Santa’s helper at Christmas because the bags are big enough to hold half of his toys for that evening’s delivery. I tilt my head back so the lighting is just right and the bags disappear and I reassure myself that I don’t look too bad for my age. Now, if I could just walk around that way all day without running into a wall.

Then I notice my neck. I am starting to look like one of those women that have to wear a scarf around her neck all of the time to hide all of the extra skin. To alleviate this, I try to stretch my neck out as much as possible and again I find a solution. Now I just need to learn how to walk with my neck stretched out and my head at a 45 degree angle.

As I continue my journey down the mirror I am reminded of one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes. Kramer and George’s dad came up with the scheme of the manzier. I have now gotten to the point of having bigger boobs that several of the girls that I dated in high school. To top it off, one is bigger and droopier than the other. You think I could at least be symmetrical.

The mirror continues to lie to me because I can’t possibly have love handles that big. I only weigh 20-25 pounds more than I did in high school yet my love handles weigh 30. It just isn’t fair that the scale just yells a little, but the mirror screams bloody murder.

Luckily, it isn’t a full length mirror. I will save you the horrors that have happened as I continue the trip southward. Yet, I shudder to think what all of this will look like if I can pull off a miracle and revisit this at seventy.

It was four years ago that I was just days away from finding out that I had multiple myeloma. After that back breaking news, I wondered if I would ever see this day. It probably sounds bad, but it struck me that I might not live as long as either of my parents, both of whom battled several issues throughout their lives. My father was told at the age of 26 that he probably didn’t have long to live and my mother had cancer at 45. I, on the other hand, only had acne to deal with until I was 56.

I may grumble about the way that gravity has taken me down a path of no return, but I thank God that I have an opportunity to complain about it. I may have gotten thinner on top and thicker in the middle, but I hope that I have gotten better over these sixty years. Not sure how many I have left, but I plan on making the most of them.

My father and his father did not live long enough to hold a grandchild and it is my goal to break that streak. Now that statement should not be taken by either of my boys to do this anytime soon, just a little forewarning that it’s in my plans to find joy in the fact that their children will drive them crazy like they did to their father. Sometimes, you just have to enjoy the simple things in life especially when there is no mirror to look into.

January 11, 2013 - Less is More

At a very early age we learn that we want more. Usually it doesn’t matter what it is, unless it is homework or chores around the house. When Justin was very young, I would grab him by his hands and swing him around like a ride at an amusement park. When my arms were ready to give out and I would set him down, he had just one comment that he would make through his giggles, “Again!”

When a child goes out for Halloween, he wants more candy. It doesn’t matter how much he has, he wants more. When Christmas comes around, it doesn’t matter what is under the tree, there is a glance around the room for one more present when the frenzy to open presents finally stops. When the teenage girl looks in her closet for shoes, there never seems to be enough.

The college freshman looks around his Psychology 101 class and wonders why there aren’t more pretty girls. When he shows up for his first frat party, he wonders why there isn’t more beer. As soon as you get married, you look at your checking account and wonder why there isn’t more money. When you have your first child, you look around the house and want more space.

When you get your first big promotion, you want a bigger office although you know deep down inside that you won’t do a better job with one. When you go on your first cruise, you look at the boat that is docked next to yours at the first port and wish you were leaving on it since it is bigger and must be more fun. When we buy our first SUV, we look at the inside room instead of the price tag and MPG.

As we age, it tends to slow down but never really stops. We do not wonder that we will have enough money to survive when we retire, but how nice we can live when we get to that point. Even after we get to the point of living in a retirement community, it is how many hours we can nap during the day.

We are born wanting more and it usually never stops. When Maria, or first au pair, came to the United States to watch the boys, she was amazed at how big everything was. She could not believe how much we decorated our homes for Christmas. The size of our grocery stores was overwhelming and we have a full aisle of cereal choices rather than a handful. It didn’t matter what it was, it was huge. I had never really thought about it, but she was right.

When I was growing up, my parents owned a grocery store. It wasn’t anything special, but people from the neighborhood would do their shopping there and it had just about everything they needed. Today, however, it would fit inside the produce department at Walmart. You couldn’t buy an oil filter for your car, but you could buy everything you needed to make a meal. Those stores no longer exist. If it isn’t big and offer us everything under the sun, we won’t go there.

In our minds, more is always better. If we don’t have multiple selections of what we need we are disappointed. If we don’t have something more than our neighbor, we wonder what it wrong with our life. We have become spoiled. It isn’t good enough to hit a home run, we need to hit it father than anyone else. Maybe we need to just enjoy what we have and not how big it is. It would certainly make life simpler.

Three months ago I convinced Dr. Mikhael to let me go from receiving chemotherapy every two weeks to every three weeks. In the case of chemotherapy, cavities, bills and wives, more is not better. In this particular case, less was just as good. When I received my results just before the new year, I could not have been more pleased. It was probably the best overall results that I have received. My kidneys were hanging in the with a 1.9 creatinine (which is as good as I ever get), all of my blood counts (red, white and platelets) were all in the normal range and my cancer counts were the lowest they have ever been. If a doctor looked at my results and didn’t know what was wrong with me, he would have no idea that I have cancer. I will not see Dr. Mikhael for three months which is s first.

We go through life always wanting more instead of appreciating what we have. We too often look past the journey and only worry about the result. Too often getting that next big raise or promotion or new car or house consumes us. We need to learn to make the most of who we are and what we have. That doesn’t mean that you cannot strive to be better and have more, it just means that it should not be all encompassing. I made a promise to myself that I would not wish my life away at the beginning of 2012. No more wishing it was 5 o’clock or Friday or time for vacation. I enjoyed what I had and who I was with. In the end, we are not defined by what we have but what we accomplished. Make sure you don’t waste time worrying about that next big thing, just enjoy your life’s journey.