The Fear Grenade

Today’s topic is a simple one, fear. When you receive a diagnosis that you have cancer in any form, there is fear. We, all those with a diagnosis have it.  Each of us has watched friends battle cancer, very valiantly. We have seen many of them succumb. As soon as the nurse at the facility performing the CAT scan Said to me, your doctor will call you perhaps today, I knew I was in trouble. I have never heard a lab tech give a definitive response after a benign test.  When the doctor’s nurse called later in the afternoon and said I had a tumor in my left kidney I was beside myself.

 Remind you I am not a newbie to this rodeo. 25 years ago, I was told that I probably had lung cancer. It took two or three weeks to get that resolved. During that time, I was crying and praying and nauseous and frightened out of my mind. I think I lost 10% of my bodyweight in sweat over those days. Turned out, it was just some pigeon shit I had inhaled 20 years earlier that had been encapsulated by my body as protective mechanisms for my lung. The phrase, sigh of relief, just doesn’t begin to cover it.

The next time I experienced this roller coaster was about 12 years ago my doctor noticed an uptick in my PSA. It didn’t even warrant further inquiry according to the standards of the time, but he was suspicious.  I was sodomized by the biopsy probe and received a call that simply said, “You have cancer”  

In the words of Spinal Tap my fear turned up to 11. The fear of prostate cancer is very visceral and two pronged. There are two fears when you’re diagnosed with prostate cancer. You are afraid that either you will die or that you’ll be on able to fuck again. In my personal experience the latter fear is the predominant one.

It took about a month to get around to the surgery It was only in the final week of waiting for the knife when the fear of pain or perhaps misadventure during the surgery took hold. But damn, it took hold. It shook me to my very core that I might die on the operating table. For the 10 days prior to the surgery I was sweating, my hands were shaking, I was losing weight and who knows my gums were probably bleeding.

I made it through the wrenching removal of my goo generator, and I am at a decade and two years cancer free from prostate cancer.  Of course, every year when it was time for my annual checkup, I grow nauseous and nervous and afraid that this would be the year they would find the recurrence of the prostate cancer. But it hasn’t happened.

This time I was here feeling some bladder irritation. I have twice now had them run the camera up the inside of my penis (not very pleasant indeed thank you very much) and take samples from inside my bladder. I wasn’t afraid either of those times. Neither of those times did they find cancer. But the fact that I kept feeling bladder irritation lead to a CAT scan.

The CAT scan found a small lump inside my left kidney. Nobody was looking for it, but there it was. The small lump lead to a biopsy.  The biopsy lead to a diagnosis of a slow growing stage one renal cancer and the need to have part or all my kidney removed. 

The fear is here again, and it is as real as I have ever felt fear.  I made the mistake while trying to figure out how the biopsy would work to click on one of the Web MD links. It took me to very informative site about how they would drill into my kidney. I also made the mistake of clicking on another hyperlink. Suddenly, I was looking at survival rates for renal cancer patients. The last time I had to vomit and empty my bowels at the same time I have the flu. This was fear on steroids.

 I met with the doctor shortly thereafter. The doc focused on encouraging me by telling of the cancer was small slow growing and he kept emphasizing stage one. “This is survivable”, he said.

Like any good patient facing major surgery I am seeking out a second opinion. And in seeking that opinion I must coordinate with my primary care doctor who I love and respect greatly. And in telling me how to prep for this visit he was talking about all the documents and things I had to gather, stuff for the next physician. It was then he made the offhand comment about really wanting to make sure we know that this was slow-moving and stage one. What?  Doctor one could be wrong? ARRRGGGH.

Boom, the fear was back.  However, don’t worry it is manageable. For most of the day I put the fear into a little box and stick it on a shelf in the back of my mind. Mostly, I throw myself into the activities of my everyday work life. If it my mind is active the fear does not play a trump card impacting my activity. But late at night when I’m lying in bed trying to sleep, the thought of what happens next in my life always pulls the string that opens the door leaving me looking face-to-face at the fear of cancer.

Perhaps other people have very different experiences of this. I am assuming some do. But for me this is how the term, “you may have cancer” pulls the pen on the fear grenade.

 

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Talking, it is What We Do

Just a thought.  I have been keeping this journal/blog/opinion space for 11 years now.  In reality it has not been a constant thing for me.  However, I have always returned here to spread my thoughts out.  Sometimes my finished ideas have been raw.  Sometimes, probably most times they have been nostalgic.Other times they have been wrongheaded.

But I keep coming back.  I enjoy putting words to paper.  I am not a deep thinker, I am just an average bloke.  But for over seven hundred times I have scribbled a few words onto  a scrap of electronic paper. I have then tied it to a rock called and blog post.  Finally with all my might I have thrown that missile through the wall of reality that separates you from me.

I have loved doing this.  When I put my heart and soul into a long piece, and it feels like I wrote something that is good, there is a feeling of joy I get.  I come from a long oral tradition, storytellers surrounded me as a youth.  I immersed myself in the storytellers of my world, the essayists, the talking heads on TV and people sitting beside me on the bus having that all too public phone call. I have absorbed it all and I want more.

We continue to exist as long as we communicate, as long as we hear and respond.  There will be more posts, not less.

Waiting for the Surgeon or Someone Similar

Cancer.  You have cancer. You have cancer again, but it is a different cancer and it is in a different place.  Still, just like last time we are going to have to cut it out.  Just like last time we will be putting you under anesthesia  and carving up your body.  Just like last time you will hurt for a long, long time. But hey, it looks like we caught it early.

Fuck.  Double Fuck.

My doctor said that I was entitled to a rebate on my body.  Over the years he has treated me it has come to light that I am a specimen of extraordinary defects.  No I am not just talking about the moral ones.  I have a caved in ribcage, I had a heart conduction problem, I have nystagmus, I have arches that would be the envy of Mr.Eiffel of the tower fame.  And the list goes on from there.  A bad appendix, a bad gall bladder, a bad prostate and now a troublesome kidney.

In about a month’s time they will wrench some part of my left kidney out of my body.  If all goes well I will be in recovery mode for about a month.  Thing was they were not even looking for it.  They were looking for something with my bladder and viola, Mr. T. you have renal cancer.

Triple Fuck.

People ask me how am I feeling.  Truth be told I feel not a whit different than I felt the day before the ominous CAT scan that has placed me on this road of fear and imminent pain.  I am still walking five miles a day.  I still am taking photographs of flowers. I am still thinking about what meaning we can take from the natural world, as we live in this time of darkness in all things human made.

In five months, eighteen days I will cease working at my 9 to 5 job.  In six months I will set out on a global adventure.   This assumes all goes well on 09/09/19 and afterwards. Am I mentally different? Not really is the answer that comes to mind.  I am basically in a state of suspended life right now.  Until I deal with the cancer, I cannot take another step forward.  Life goes on, at least for a time.  I will keep posting about what is going on.

I do note that the next step is a second opinion.  I will know when that is soon.  Keep checking back I will keep you informed.

Waiting for Dr. Flink or Someone Like Him

June 20, 2019

Grey dark unceasing rain.  In the midst of this unending precipitation I am sitting at a medical center.  In about an hour I will have a visit with my neurologist.  Dr. Flink will twist my wrists, he will have me follow a stimulus with my eyes and he will prick the bottom of my feet with sharp object.  He will ask me if I have had any migraines in the past year .  I will tell him I was blind for about 15 minutes yesterday.  He’ll shrug.  

Not driving, and because I don’t drive, I am here an hour early.  I am sitting in a little coffee shop drinking some decaffeinated coffee. Normally I could look out through the floor to glass windows at the green space outside; it is a little courtyard. But as I noted at the onset there is a grey dark unceasing rain ongoing.  This has rendered the windows more a mirror than not.  While I can see a hint of the way too lush green outside mostly all I see is a reflection of a portly old man in a peach shirt sitting at a table pounding away on a iPad and keyboard combination.  

As I sit here the staff members behind the counter are not very busy.  They are engaged in a lively conversation about “vampires”.  They are not talking about the blood sucking undead, they are talking about people who spend their lives working the night shift.  One guy is talking about a guy he knows who has worked the night shift for better than 20 years.  The other two are mentioning people they know who love night shift, it seems they all know one person and one person only, who has that predilection.  All of them are talking about not being cut out for such a lifestyle.  The woman says she has pulled two all nighters in her life. Exasperated shudders followed.

Maybe 30 years ago I would have worked nightshift.  Not now.  When I travel internationally and have to deal with the 24-30 hours I usually spend awake, I am a basket case for days.  While I never worked 12-8 shifts, when I was younger I loved working 4-midnight.  

4-midnight was a shift that let me do the stuff I had to in the daytime, bank, shop,etc.  It also let me party for less.  By the time I got to the party or the bar everybody else was trashed and I could simply have a beer or two before closing.   I remember the schedule well.  Midnight to 12:30 am I would close up the ice cream store.  1-3 I hit the bar.  Between 2-3 I would leave the bar and go to a party or a friend’s house and play cards or listen to music and/or smoke dope.  4 am I would usually be be home in bed. 1030 brought a cinnamon roll from Dot’s and a crawl to the beach to work on my tan.  Sleep on the beach, read Shakespeare and body surf until 3 pm.  At 3 pm head up to the house, shower and head back to work to do it again.  Yeah working on a boardwalk by the ocean between 4 pm and midnight was a kind of perfect schedule for a never do well like me.

Oh I know I have told the above part of my life story before.  But there are moments when I go back to it and wonder how it was I did not see those summers for the specialness they held.  If I towed the Buddhist line I should have been listening with an open mind. I should have looked around and realized the impermanence of all things and especially that situation.  Perhaps then I would have realized that I needed to live in and accept the experience as it was , when it was, joyfully accepting the wonder of that fleeting human experience.

This morning I read that the average age of retirement in America ranges between 62-65.  The high end is in the Northeast/New England.  The lowest end is the west coast.  I am 63-1/3rd.  It is time for me to go.  The article talked about the usual financial issues.  A special highlight was the issue of health care costs.  I think my wife and I have that handled.  The next big issue was boredom/loss of meaning.  Given how much I enjoy writing I think I will be able to handle that part of it.  As long as I have access to a source of reading materials and have access to a computer I think the meaning thing will not be a problem.   

Come on January 2020.

Wet Monday in June

I am beginning a week of medical testing. First stop this morning is a stress test. Later in the week I meet with the neurologist. Then I see an orthopedist. Finally I wrap it up with the CAT scan on Friday. 63, the age when it all falls apart.

To prepare for the stress test I am walking the mile from my house to the nearest bus stop. I am trying to keep up enough of a pace that my Apple Watch will count it as exercise. Damn judgmental thing that Apple Watch. My normal walk will not do. I have to get my heart rate up to a certain number of beats per minute or just shrugs. Right now I am at 93 bpm.

My high school class got together for our 45th reunion. Everybody looked happy in the pictures. I didn’t go. Basically between spending all the money I spent on sending my wife and son to Portugal and all the money I’m spending on having my basement steps re-done, it just didn’t make economic sense.

It looked like they had a good time. The picture was of a bunch of smiling happy people enjoying each other‘s company. Really kind of wished I could’ve been there. If the creek don’t rise I’ll go to the 50th.

I should mention I haven’t seen this much wet weather in forever. It has been raining nonstop for weeks now. Nonstop as an exaggeration. We will have a day here in a day there when it’s dry. But the ground never dries out before the next rain. The forecast for this week is rain on four and possibly five of the seven days. All my appendages are wrinkly. Wet too.

My friend Rufus and I have sworn off reading Facebook for the next week. I will be posting my morning walks here on my blog.  I will be responding to messenger. So if you need to get a hold of me message me. Have a great week.

Washed Clean Away

A Modern Atlantan

Yesterday as I was perusing articles that pop up in my news feeds I saw an article on ghost forests.  I didn’t recognize the terminology.  I was thinking it would be something in the unlivable Ukraine called by the nuclear meltdown there.  But I was wrong.  What the article was about were stands of dead trees up and down the eastern coast of the United States drowned by rising ocean salt water that is caused by global warming.

Suddenly it hit me that I had seen some of these down along the coastal routes through the lowlands of the Carolinas.  I have seen these copses of dead timber and thought it must be some invasive bug or fungus that the interconnected world had given our continent.  I was left feeling deeply saddened by the status of our inaction on global warming.  It made me feel that my rant on here a couple of days ago seem less over the top.

Today the body blows keep coming.  One of the more recent studies addressing the places that will fell the impact of rising sea levels first and hardest shook me.  The towns where I grew up, where I went to high school, where my sister lives and where I spent my summer holidays all have a greater than 80 % chance of being more than 90% submerged by 2060.  Soon the water will removed all trace of where I have lived and walked, of the places I have lived and worked, of the people who begat me.   Talk about impermanence.

I am profoundly saddened.

Up Against the Wall

There are some days when I think about the roots of the situation of the world today.  Maybe it was the 1970s children who having avoiding being drafted dropped into about a decade of total self focus.  Maybe we the children of the late 1950s, who came of age as the Vietnam war was winding down,  needed to continue the activism of the 1960s.  Maybe as opposed to drinking, fucking ad smoking dope we should have been watching out for what the tired, wrinkled old white man were doing next..  Maybe we should have been focused on the three card monte game these tired old white men with power were playing.  Navel gazing was fun but it sure has left us in dire straits today.

As we sat there self satisfied at the end of the Vietnam era, with Nixon booted from office, as we were  lifting our celebratory beers at age 18, the invisible merchants of power were already planning to steal our  job security, steal our good paying work, and steal the quality of life from each and everyone from us.  They did not give a flaming fuck about America or American lives or the American middle class.  They were the greediest of bastards wanting more, more money for them, more power for them, more of a legacy for their families and the public welfare be damned.

Without us, we who are now early 60 somethings, being out in the street calling for a focus on improving the life of our people when we were in our 20s and 30s and 40s, it all vanished.  The jobs vanished going off to Bangladesh and Pakistan and Mexico.  Those high paying jobs that didn’t require a college education, well they evaporated.  And as we moved on from pot to coke and from rabbit ears to 157 channels (all QVC) we lost a place that was a good place to live, a good place for families..  We moved on from community and free love to a libertine’s path of decadence.  We had our heads up our collective  selfish asses.

And what can we do now?  The Supreme Court has cloaked corporations with personhood and allowed these “people’s”  unfettered funds to be funneled silently and anonymously into ever political race and ballot question that is out there.  The consolidation of media that Regan okayed has denied us an outlet to speak our views.  The rich own the newspapers, the television stations and are rapidly consolidating their control over the web.  I note there is a move afoot to deal with the troll farms and fake story mongers out there.  But my fear is that in trying to clean up this Wild West quagmire the rich will impose rules that will stifle authentic voices form being heard.  We are fucked.

I am almost back to to point where in the late 1960s where people were talking about revolution.  I am not one to believe in violence, and blowing up government buildings and the like, but I do believe in civil disobedience to the maximum.

Last night I had an extended conversation with my son about the three biggest issues facing us and how we have to focus on them in sequence.  My list was basically, 1. Global warming, 2. Nuclear weapons, 3. And the status of women and the myriad attempts in the name of religious concepts to claw back and strip them of their independence.  If we don’t deal with our warming overpopulated and increasing poisoned world, we are shit out of luck.

Why are we not addressing this?  Our politicians are bought and sold by the money of the polluters, those who want to hold onto to their cash streams.  Even if you don’t believe in global warming you have got to consider how befouled the environment is becoming and how little margin we have before the food wars come.  Shouldn’t we rethink what we are doing and change how our world works? Or die trying?.  Things like reducing the negative effects of beef production and consumption need our attention.  Things like the gyre of floating plastic that is choking our seas and our sea life has to be dealt with.

Wells nukes, uh, if any  of those dicks Trump or, Modi, Putin or some Ayatollah decide to throw down we are totally screwed.  “Nuff said.

The women thing got a bit of argument out of my son.  He was arguing we should be fighting for all those that have been subjected to the retrograde policies that Trump and his ilk have been pushing and enacting.  Blacks, Jews, the LGBTQ community are all taking their hits.  Good people on all side of Charlottesville my flaming asshole.  But I disagreed saying that women stand to lose the most with any rollback of Roe v Wade.  When women lose control of their bodies, they lose their ability to be considered full equals.  IF YOU DON’T WANT AN ABORTION BECAUSE GOD TELLS YOU IT IS WRONG DON’T GET ONE BUT LEAVE EVERYONE ELSE THE FUCK ALONE.  We need women in the majority in the state houses and in the halls of the United States Congress.  They make up more than half our population, fuck this paternalistic shit, let us place them deep into the mix of deciding our priorities.

Yeah I am talking about a revolution.  I refuse to acknowledge that Donald Trump and all that he and his corrupt minions have done is legitimate.  I am not sure have to get the flames of this revolution started but it is time.  Up against the wall you reactionary motherfuckers. Yeah we silver haired children who made love to the blue lights of pioneer amplifiers and the music of Glen Frey and Don Henley need to stand up and say, stop the madness.  We may not have done what we should have done in the 1970s but we need to do it now.  Organize, vote, march, …..you know the drill