June 7, 2009 The Simple Things in Life

You know that your life is running in slow motion when the most exciting thing that you do in a 24 hour period is go to the bathroom. Those of you familiar with my “$5,000 Enema” are well aware of my fear of constipation. Over the last few rounds of chemo, I was able to stay away from any difficulties because I was also doing radiation that tended to loosen things up and I stayed away from pain killers.

After being in the hospital since Tuesday and having no luck, I panicked on Sunday and asked for a little help. A laxative was provided, but nothing seemed to be happening. As late afternoon approach, I asked for another. This might have been my undoing.

Shortly after starting one of my three daily 10 minute walks around the corridor, I realized that my prayers might be answered. Minutes later, I was walking on top of the world. My biggest fear had been taken away. However, two hours later, my insides started grabbing my attention again.

This time, it seemed to me that my little vacation here had taken a side trip to Mexico and I had sampled some of the water. So within two hours, I go from being in the middle of a drought to finding myself in the middle of a flood. Hopefully, this second trip was a one hit wonder, but from the noise that my insides are making now, I’m not going to bet the house on it.

My blood work continues to look pretty good. The white count continues to drop and is now down to 2.5 (standard 4.2-10.2). This is expected as there is nothing available to make any new ones. The old ones are dying off as my body waits for the stem cells to do their thing. They should now be in my bone marrow giving some thought to going back to work.

Luckily, my red cells and platelets are holding their own. Should this continue, I will avoid getting any blood products. This is a day to day battle, just waiting for my 4AM blood results to come in.

As you know, yesterday I lost my good friend Terry Quinn . to this awful disease, cancer. There are so many kinds of cancer that they are hardly countable, but they take us all down a road that we pray to God never happens. We give it our best and in the end we sometimes come out the winner. However, when cancer wins, it hurts us all, not just the one receiving the treatment.

We work our entire live to gain a certain level of dignity that cancer gradually takes away. In the end, it makes us long for the end. This is not the way that we should end our lives. We should be drinking an ice tea on some beach in an unpronounceable country. Instead, we find ourselves hooked up to more machines than we can count.

I pray that through the research efforts of so many and the donations of many others that we can get to a point that more of us are sipping ice tea when God comes calling.