January 22, 2014 — Time

Time is a funny thing. We live our lives knowing that there is only so much time that is allocated to us, yet we either waste or wish away significant portions of that allocation. The amount of time that I have wasted just waiting for something to happen is ridiculous.  I don’t even want to think of how much time I have wasted sitting in a doctor’s office, or waiting for a red light to turn to green or for the pot of water on the stove to start to boil.  I dare not even try to calculate how much of my life has been wasted on sitting through commercials.

When we are young we think we have all the time in the world.  We also think it takes forever for things to be completed.  I’ll never forget sitting in my little wood desk while in elementary school watching the clock tick at an amazingly slow pace.  Waiting out those last two weeks before Christmas was excruciating.  Crossing out and marking down the numbers of days left until summer vacation on one of my notebooks could not have taken longer.

Things don’t change much as we grow up as we count down the number of hours left until 5 PM on Friday and we finally have our lives back.  For some reason a day at work takes a lot longer than a day of vacation. Time never seems to be on our side.

The thing that really jumps out at me when I take a look at my life is how far away the future seems, yet the past seems so close.  How many times have you tried to guess how long ago a celebrity died? I’m not sure how good you are at it, but I stink. I almost always think they died much closer to the present than they actually did. 

Not sure how many of you are “Gilligan’s Island” fans, but I always have followed the characters as they lived out the rest of their lives. I was always a fan of the “Professor” and when he died last week, I tried to remember how long ago Bob Denver died. I vaguely remembered that it was four or five years ago. It will be nine years in September. How long ago did Jim Backus (Thurston Howell, III) die? Would you be surprised to know that it will be 25 years in July? 

Completely off topic, but I preferred Mary Ann to Ginger.

I’ll never forget when Harold Kidwell, my boss from, oh-so-many-years-ago always talked about how you should double the time that you think something happened when you are trying to pinpoint how long it has been.  I have found this to be pretty accurate when I really don’t know the specific year that something happened.

All of this brings me to the point that it has been five years that I found out that I had cancer.  I’ll never forget the call I received from my doctor stating that my kidneys were in failure and that I was at a high risk of a heart attack and that I had better get myself to the nearest Emergency Room as quickly as possible. It seems like it was yesterday. I still sit at the same desk with the same telephone at my side. It could have happen yesterday if I would believe the vividness of that memory.  Even with all I have gone through, I would never think it has been five years.

When I saw Dr. Mikhael last week to go over my test results, I had to ask him a question that has lingered with me for some time.  Because I am still in remission, I felt a little cocky and I asked him, “When you saw my original results five years ago, did you think I would see 2014?”  I really wasn’t sure what he would say. If you asked me that same question back then, I would have given a definite “No.”  From everything that I had read, I felt that I might have a couple good years left and the inevitable was bound to happen.  Don’t get me wrong, I was going to give it everything I had, but the disease had progressed pretty far and the average life span was 27 months for someone in my condition.

His answer surprised me at bit. He said he thought I had a good chance to make it to five years, but not a great chance.  Funny thing with cancer, you never know what is going to happen.  If there is a 95% chance you will not survive, that means that one out of 20 actually do survive. That is why you never give up. You may be that one out of 20.  He did say that I probably have a better chance of lasting another five years than I did to make the first five years. The miracles of cancer research continue to give all of us survivors hope for a future.  Even though that future may seem to take forever to get here, I’m looking forward to it.