In Closing

It’s come time for me to stop blogging, at least for awhile. This blog has served its purpose. It was an invaluable tool for my mental well being while I fought cancer. There is a lot of ugly and a lot of inspirational (i think) passages in this blog. You really can follow the roller coaster that was my emotional state since last August.

In closing I want to thank my family from the bottom of my heart. You guys really made the entire ordeal so much easier to handle. Sorry about being such a bear at the end of it all. Love you guys. Thank you to my co-workers who made sure my fridge was constantly stocked and keeping my spirits high. Thank you to my friends who kept by my side, I owe you all a great debt of gratitude. And Thank you to all the beautiful people fighting the good fight who have left wonderful comments on my blog. You truely inspired me to keep fighting during the bleakest of times. Particularly you Laura. Thank you all, plain and simple. Your kindness and compassion has helped soften many rough edges of my outlook on the world.

I’m really doing great. Life has pretty much returned to a normalcy I’ve never felt before. I will still have my semi-frequent doctor visits to attend. But all in all, I go to work, I play my bass, I go on dates, I live. I have been deeply and profoundly changed by this experience. If anything I have a much healthier respect for just how fragile life can be. I want to now do everything in my life with meaning, rather than just out of habit. I walk a little bit slower on my way to work. My first impressions of people take longer to form, looking at the person not the stereotype. I still curse and I still drink single malt scotch. I joke to myself that I’m pretty indestructible, neither getting hit by a car in The Netherlands (that story is for another blog) nor Cancer could bring me down. And then I wonder if I really believe I’m joking.

I also have a seeping calmness to me now. I thought I would be even more eager to live life to the fullest every single day as before. Not quite. I’ve learned its not so much the quantity of things, but the quality. I’m still not the sort to settle, I’m simply enjoying the ride. My anxiety seems to be floating away. Everything feels new and exciting. I’m thirty, I’m cancer free, I’m stable in my career, I have a wonderful home complete with great cat. Life doesn’t suck, I’m enjoying it again.

In many ways, not worth getting into, cancer may have saved my life.

On to the funny story!! A couple weeks ago I got very drunk. Sometime during the evening I decided to buy plane tickets to Los Angeles. SO… I wake up in the morning to check my email and there is a confirmation from Delta. As well as, an email from my friend Erica telling me how excited she was to see me. I thought to myself, “Well shit, looks like I’m going to LA” and “Damn! I got a good price!!”. I just got back a couple days ago, tanned, well rested and relaxed. The universe provides and the dude abides.

The story that is my experience with Cancer has a fortunate and happy ending. I was lucky to catch it when I did, find great doctors (A very special thanks to all my doctors and oncology nurses) and come through the other side mostly unscathed. Albeit sans a testicle. There are many wonderful people out there fighting their own fight with courage, conviction, anger and tears. I am humbled by the bravery of so many who are still so sick. You are not alone.

I guess I would give my left nut for… perspective, inner peace and a new healthy outlook on life. I may post occasionally if I have drastic news on the medical front. But for now my writing will return to journals and candle lit bars.

Always remember: This too shall pass.

Devastated

And once again, she walks out of my loft and out of my life, for perhaps the very last time. I will always love her like no other. Goodbye pretty blue eyes.

I won’t be posting for awhile, I’m getting on a plane in the morning.

“I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time - namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and open doors to you I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

- Joseph Campbell

Why I like Obama

“It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The above quote (from Obama at a fundraising event) has caused a furor from the Clinton campaign, saying that Obama is an elitist. Maybe I’m an elitist as well, because I can’t find anything wrong with those words. Lets face it, a good majority of the American population are… well… freaking idiots with no clue. And it’s our own damn fault. I’m not going to let this post turn into a long rant, but folks… America is in the shitter, politically, economically, when it comes to education and most definitely the arts.

I mean COME ON people… we allowed eight years of Bush, we can only blame ourselves, problem is most of our population is too ignorant and borderline retarded to realize it.

OH!! Okay one more thing… this is one of the quotes from Clinton in response:

“I also disagree with Senator Obama’s assertion that people in this country ‘cling to guns’ and have certain attitudes about immigration or trade simply out of frustration…”

I’m pretty sure she did inhale… people do cling to what they know in times of frustration. That is the most ass backwards statement I’ve heard in a very long time. It makes perfect sense to me, in my mind if there was ever an out of touch elitist, it would be the Clintons. (Chelsea is pretty hot though, even for a Clinton)

Olympic Torch

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably well aware of the fiasco that is the Olympic Torch Relay. I absolutely adhore the Chinese government, but DON’T mess with the Olympic Torch people!! I’m all for protests and popular unrest, but the Olympics is NOT the place to air your grievences. The Olympics should be above all of this political crap (even when the hosting country is as messed up as China). The Olympics are a time for us all to take a deep breath and honor our top athletes, put aside our differences and bring together cultures from around the globe.

I’d be willing to bet that most of the protesters in Paris, London and San Fransico couldn’t even find Tibet or Sudan on a map. If you want to do something useful; don’t purchase items from companies advertising during the Olympics, I plan on (for the first time in my life) not watching the summer games. This is very difficult for me, my internal clock works on the passage of the FIFA World Cup and the Olympics.

To the Chinese government… you’re a bunch of fucks… To the (non-tibetan) protesters… the 60s ended over forty years ago, take that last ‘lude you’ve been saving and chill out.

The phone call

I got the call from my doctor this morning. The biopsy came back negative, what does that mean? Dr. White put it perfectly on the phone this morning, “I want you to continue living your life as normal.” Of course, with cancer, I don’t think it’s truely ever over. I will have to be monitored closely, tests every other month for the time being to track my situation.

How am I feeling right now? I really don’t know… I’m in a state of shock perhaps, I feel as though I should be much happier than I am. I am NOT in a bad mood however, this is all wonderful news. I might go get a tattoo during my lunch break.

That wasn’t so bad.

That wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I don’t recall anything from the actual procedure at all. The sedatives they gave me put me completely out. I woke up a few hours later in a recovery room with my parents watching over me. I’m a little woozy & loopy still and it feels like I’ve been sucker punched in the kidney, but all in all I’m doing pretty damn okay. It’s just a waiting game now to see what comes back from the biopsy. That should come back early next week.

I’m going to get a good nights sleep, my parents are going to come check on me in the morning, but I expect to go back to work tomorrow afternoon.

The date is set

My “surgical procedure” is happening this Wednesday at 10am. I am extremely nervous. I don’t know how I feel about being awake (albeit heavily sedated) while somebody shoves a needle into my back very near a major artery. At some point you have to trust the medical community, their suggested course of actions and, of course, their skill.

I read back over this entire blog this afternoon to get a little perspective. I don’t know if I got the perspective I was looking for, but man has it been a ride. I sometimes think about taking this blog down as there has been little to no filter to the content and at times I’m a little ashamed of myself. But then again, it’s real, it’s all real. I watch my blog stats occasionally. At the beginning this blog was getting around 200 to 300 hits a day. Now it’s anywhere from zero to 20 or so. Every now and again there is a day like yesterday with 124 hits and nearly every post read and I hope that somebody has found this blog while trying to deal with their own battle. And maybe it has brought them some comfort, so I leave it be.

This past week has been a very odd one to say the least. It has been extremely stressful and blissful at the same time. Work is extremely stressful these days, at some point you have to say enough is enough and focus on your physical and mental health. I am extremely poor at doing that however. It’s that god damned Graham work ethic. It seems though that during the bleakest of times there is a ray of goodness, generally unexpected that comes out of nowhere. Even if it’s just for an evening, even if it’s just for a single moment everything in the world is absolutely perfect.

On a completely seperate note: I owe you an apology Barbara, I did snap at you on this blog and I apologize. You have been nothing but kind, supportive and warm to me when you really didn’t have to, given everything. Again, I apologize and I thank you, both you and Jim and the rest of your family, thank you for everything.

work ethic vs malaise

First an update on the medical front. The surgery is cancelled or at least postponed. My surgeon passed my file by somebody who thinks that I am a prime candidate for a much less invasive procedure. Instead of opening me up they are just going to sedate me and stick a needle into my back and suck out portions of the mass for biopsy. This is in lieu of removing the entire lymph-node as was the plan. I’m not exactly sure when this is going to happen, but it will be soon. The good part of this is I won’t have to stay in the hospital as it is out-patient and my recovery time will only be around 48 hours. If the biopsy comes back negative (which for some reason I’m really thinking it wont) then I’m basically done with all this crap. If it comes back positive then more decisions will have to be made.

A couple weeks ago I went to Vegas for five days to celebrate my 30th birthday with my best friend. It was a blur and not at all a “relaxing” vacation. Right now I’m fighting off a pretty serious depression. I’ve finally fallen apart from all of this, I’ve reached that level of stress where I’m completely “locked up”. I’m really not doing anything with myself at all. I go to work try and care, go get dinner somewhere by myself then go home play my bass then go to sleep that is my weekday routine. I do have a limited social life in that I’m casually dating, but I’m concerned that I’m not in a good head space for all of that right now.

I’m just kind of floating, I feel like life is passing me by and I only have myself to blame for it. The big question on my mind is, “What the hell do I do now?”

I was choosen to attend the LiveStrong Summit this summer in Columbus Ohio… *shrug*

Tiger Mountain

Yesterday was an absolutely gorgeous day here in Seattle and it wasn’t put to waste. A friend picked me up, we headed east into the mountains and did the Tiger Montain West day hike. I grew up hiking and camping, for a city boy I’m completely comfortable out in the wilderness, man was that exactly what I needed. Today my body is aching in that really good way, my calves, thighs and buttocks feel well used. Thanks, you know who you are, that was perfect.

Lap Retroperitonea ? open

Fancy word for they’re gonna go into my gut with a microscope and scalpel. March 17th is the date. The results of my CT scan from a couple days ago show that the masses in my lungs are almost completely gone as they’ve shrunk considerably since my last CT scan right after I finished chemo. My valscular surgeon thinks they may be nothing but scar tissue. However, the mass sitting right of my kidney is still the same size and there is concern that it could be cancerous. Since I’ve already gone through chemo there is a less than 10% chance that they wont be able to navigate with the microscope and it will be necessary to cut me open, due to scar tissue getting in the way. The biggest concern with this surgery is the very close proximity to a major artery and thus blood loss. The mass will be removed and sent off for a biopsy, if that comes back negative then I’m done (sans continued monitoring and what not). If it comes back positive then we will revisit the option of chemotherapy once again or perhaps more surgery into my lungs to go after those masses.

I’m doing pretty okay emotionally I guess. I know myself well enough to know that I’m shutting down. It’s easier to deal with work than my own body. I’m a very efficient state machine when my stress levels get to this point. If you’re close to me at all, I’m not being mean, I just need my space.