Saturday, August 9, 2014

My Personal Civil War

Ok I got to put some of this down on paper get it out of my mind. It all started in May of this year when I fell victum to pneumonia. At first I thought that it was a bad flu but when I started coughing up a little blood in my sputum, I went to the non-emergency clinic at a local hospital and had x-rays and was diagnosed with pneumonia, which I was treated for and cured. The doctor however discovered something else which turned out after many tests and day surgery to be stage 3 cancer. It has progressed outside the lung to the lymph nodes around my esophagus. I've had a bone scan two days ago and according to the radiation oncologist it was clear. I'm scheduled for a brain scan next week and a couple of CT scans to follow. Non of this bothers me as I understand that it is necessary. The crappy add on to this that the cancer is in the left lung and I'll have to have my pace maker moved before treatment can begin. The waiting line for this is longer the one for U2 tickets. I'm not pounding my chest and crying WHY ME. Why not me for that matter. I'm as likely a candidate as any one, being that I smoked for forty years, not that I believe for one moment that smoking was the single cause for my cancer. I accept that there is a civil war going on in my body at a cellular level, where the radical cells are intent on destroying the healthy ones and in so doing destroying the very vessel they depend on to live. Does anyone see the similarity of this happening at an environmental level, with humans being likened to the cancer? At any rate, that's where it all stands. Radiation and Chemo therepy on the not to distant horizon. Word of advice for anyone reading this. Get regular check ups and chest x-rays. If I had not contacted pneumonia where I needed to have one, who knows how far it would have progressed before it made it's presence felt. Maybe someone is watching over me after all.