On Today’s Very Important Holiday

Today is National Coffee Day, and who could not celebrate!

I have often told my kids that besides the human being, God’s most perfect creation is the coffee bean.  There are great suns in this universe – many times bigger than our sun – and huge mountains that require breathing equipment to surmount, and there is the Empire State Building itself, but this one small bean – no bigger than an pea – outclasses them all and is essential to many being able to negotiate the morning.

Me getting my free coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts Drive-Thru window

Historically I was not a coffee drinker, though I lived among those who would brew the bean in something of a grand science. Some people take their hunting seriously and others their job, but these coffee connoisseurs were serious about their bean and the cup it would eventually fill.  I lived with a dear man who would not stoop to pour pre-ground coffee in his filters; no, most mornings I would hear the whirr of the coffee grinder, follow by the sweet chocolate smell of the coffee brewing, and like the sun rising in the East, we knew it was morning.

I was not a coffee drinker then, so it was all lost on me.  I drank tea, and I think to my dear coffee loving friend, tea was some sort of an odd cult.  Tea?  Who drinks tea?

A man can turn over a new leaf, and so did I.  Slowly, methodically, in an attempt to gain entrance to the very hallways of legitimate civilization, I tried a cup of coffee every once in a while when I was out.   Now, mind you, I had to pour a healthy amount of milk and sugar in it so it was more of a milk shake – and the coffee taste thus deadened – but drink it I did, and suddenly I was a man, though a wimpy one, because all real men drink  their coffee black.

I drank more and more coffee, and my esteem among man rose and rose, and soon the taste began to appeal to me, but I was still an infant in the coffee world.  Not only did I make it like a milkshake, but the coffee could not have too much of a bite or I would recoil and spit it back into the cup.  It had to be smooth, and with just enough milk and sugar to please, but for me, on a cold day and with a pastry, it was delightful.

Now I inhabit a house with teenagers who – guess what – like coffee, so all my hard work liking the stuff has paid off.  Who can respect a Dad who drinks only tea?  No one can.  My twelve year old tells his mother to make sure there’s a pot in the morning, and my older son often asks, “What is better than the first cup of coffee?” and the answer is always the same: the second!

There is a toaster to brown bread and a blender to mix smoothies, but the coffee maker reigns supreme.

So here’s to National Coffee Day!  It’s only appropriate that it have its own holiday.  A medium is free today at Dunkin’ Donuts.  Enjoy a cup!

Roswell Results

First, I would like to thank everyone who posted in response to my last blog about my recent re-occurrence. The support was overwhelming and very touching. That I have such excellent friends on this dark Earth in these dark days – it is truly amazing!

Thanks so much!

I feel compelled to give an update on my visit to Roswell. We had a very, very good session with the surgeon, who ended up taking over half an hour with us, going over our situation and answering all our questions. The bottom line: surgery doesn’t make sense in my situation. If the two tumors the PET scan found were just sitting in my lower left lung, holding hands and looking up and with belated eyes saying, “Remove us surgically,” then perhaps it would make sense to do as they requested, but it is not so. One tumor in particular is in a bad spot, and trying to remove it would not get us to where we want to go.

Angela and I go to Niagara Falls (American side) after Roswell Appointment

Regarding what all this means, I knew a woman who spent years in a wheelchair with nurses and friends taking care most of her most basic needs. Not an easy life. I will never forget once when she asked me, “How is it going, Dave?” and I gave her the party line. She thought for a minute and, looking up at me, said, “Ok, but how is it really going?” Can you guess what I did? I told her how it was really going.

In that spirit, it would have been better if the tumors could have been surgically removed; even better if the entire lower lobe could be taken out in one fell swoop. But that is not possible. Cyberknife and chemotherapy will definitely help the situation but medically we are past the “silver bullet” stage. We’ll just have to live with Stage IV cancer – control it not kill it – though we shouldn’t forget that I’ve been Stage IV for the last three years, so this is nothing new in itself.

In the short term I’ve got a biopsy in my future. In case you don’t know what a biopsy is, they numb you up as an act of charity and then stick a needle into you while at the same time putting you through a CT scan machine. It has to be experienced to be appreciated. All my doctors are convinced the tumor is cancerous, as we have four strong indications that way, but we want to make sure it’s esophageal cancer and not lung cancer, and we also want to make sure the esophageal cancer’s DNA is the same.  After the biopsy, there’s a meeting with the radiation doctor and another one with the medical oncologist, and then the actual treatment – whatever that may be. Stay tuned.

None of us are guaranteed any more days than today, so any discussion about this nebulous thing called the “future” is purely academic. We might as well be talking about alien beings on the plant Xarvsta which swirls around the star system Remulagu. It’s all the same. The takeaway: be thankful for today.

“Humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, and he will exalt you in the proper time.” (1 Peter 5:6) Cancer is a great opportunity to do this, but guess what: it can be used in any situation. Try it.

The dastardly tumor…

Let us be blunt: my cancer is back.

This episode of “The Cancer Chronicles – The Dastardly Tumor Finally Shows His Face” started last spring, when a CEA tumor marker kept going up and up, and we responded with scans, biopsies and surgery on a maybe and whim (meaning a dimly lit area on a PET scan) – but no tumor. Dr. said, “Well, go home. Not much more we can do,” so I did.

Seasons ended and others started, and soon we were in Summer – August to be exact. A blood test was in order to see if the CEA tumor had risen. Most people’s CEA marker is at 2.5; yours is probably 2.5, except if you smoke – in which case it is 5. Mine had risen to around 9, then to 16, then 24 and finally 60 by the spring, when we went to action, but no tumor. We then agreed that if the CEA doubled from 60 to 120, we go to action again, but not before.

Angela and I at Fairhaven Park, the Night before going to Roswell Park in Buffalo

The results from the August blood test came in: the tumor marker was at – and here we need a drum roll – 330!

That’s a lot!

Scans followed, first a CT scan and then a Pet scan. The CT scan showed four spots in my lower left lung. The PET scan showed a fair sized tumor on my lower lobe of my left lung at rib number 9. (Ribs are numbered, I guess. Who knew?) It also showed another spot in that lower left lobe. Both were “hot,” according to the PET.

So that’s where we stand. The dastardly tumor has shown its face; before it was like a guerilla army in the hills, but now it’s come into the open field to fight. The only question is: how.

Angela and I are on our way to Roswell Cancer Center in Buffalo today to answer that question. Our first meeting will be with a surgeon, and my effort will be to pour on the charm and get him to take the lower left lung out. They don’t like to do surgery on metastatic cancer patients, and I don’t even know if it makes sense. But my reasoning is such: the lower left lung has been ground 0 for the last three re-occurrances, so why not yank it out?

A good question, I think.

Besides surgery, Cyberknife might also be a possibility, and if worse comes to worse, chemotherapy might be in my future (but I hope not).

By the way, God knows what he is doing with all this. That point must not be lost.

More later.

*Round 1 – 2007, Round 2 – 2015, Round 3 – 2016

Be Thankful for the Fat on Your Butt

Standing in my kitchen today with my wife, I told her, “I don’t like my body anymore.”  She raised her eyebrows and smiled, since she is the one who usually says things like this to me.  I continued, “I really don’t. It’s not that I have too much fat, it’s that I don’t have any!”

And it is true: if I were a display in the grocery case at Wegmans (a great grocery store in our area) I would be the very lean cut, and quite expensive.

At my largest before cancer, I was 172 pounds (78 kg), but then cancer hit and I was involuntarily enrolled in this great weight-loss program called The Medieval Torture Cancer Weight Loss Program with the byline Guaranteed to Work.  Before even being diagnosed, I lost about 10 pounds (4.5 kg) in an ingenious act of nutritional absence:  I didn’t eat for a week.  Not many people have done that, but I did.  I hardly ate anything, but I was full as if from a Thanksgiving dinner.  This led me to think that perhaps something was wrong – very wrong – and perhaps – just perhaps – I should see a doctor, which I actually did.  I am not a fan of doctors.  Now I see tons of them.

It turned out I had a tumor the size of a lemon in the upper part of my stomach; that’s why I was full.

A few weeks later I had an Ivor Lewis operation, which in itself led to my future weight issues.  The doctors lobbed off 60 percent of my stomach off and pulled it up behind my heart – where is still happily resides – and in the process cut the vagus nerve going from my brain to my stomach.  The result: the loss of another 15 pounds (6.8 kg), no questions asked. Then they threw me on chemotherapy for six weeks, and that lobbed off another 10 pounds (4.5 kg) .  Thus 137 pounds (62.1 kg) .

Me at 137 Pounds!

You may not know what 137 pounds (62.1 kg) means for me, but it meant that when I sat on a hard surface, I could feel the bones in my butt.  It was very uncomfortable.  You out there who belabor the size of your butt:  be thankful that there is padding therein.  I will say it again: be thankful!

I hung out at 137 (62.1 kg) for a while.  In those days I was as happy as could be eating only 750 calories a day, and if I splurged I would pig out and get 900 calories in.  Honestly.  I had very little appetite, especially in the first two to three years.  Seven hundred and fifty calories:  that’s all my body was calling for, and when I gave it that, I felt as if I had eaten enough for the day, and all was well.

But all was not well, as you can’t sustain life on this planet eating 750 calories a day.  And what is eating all about – and here I go against everything American:  eating is ultimately to sustain life on this planet, and at 750 calories a day, life (that is me) would eventually perish.

So, since perishing was not one of my life goals, I hooked myself up to a feeding tube every night and slowly gained weight until I nearly cracked 160 (72.5 kg) ; I also slowly implemented disciplined eating and eventually got off the feeding tube.  I was going solo now, eating on my own like all the other creatures on this great Earth.  It was fantastic.  I stabilized eventually at around 150 pounds (68 kg) , though sometimes I would dip to 145 (65.7 kg) but then eat my way back to 150 (68 kg).  This is where I’ve been for a few years now.

All this unraveled this spring, when my appetite went south and my weight with it.  I’m not sure why this happened, but it came with a massive amount of fatigue.   I knew I was thin, but when I weighed myself at my Mom’s house (the kids broke my scale), I was a bit shocked at the number:  137 (62.1 kg).  The same weight I had been in the depths of chemotherapy.  I found another scale just to make sure, because the first one was obviously wrong.  What did the second one say?  137 (62.1 kg).

I was going backwards!

When I tell people about this, I always get the same thing.  Everyone always wants to give me – in an amazing act of altruism – their fat and always around 30 pounds (13.6 kg).  I’m always the victim of other people’s fat!  If I took all these offers, I would be 500 pounds (226 kg); I would take up half the couch, with my little legs sticking out of a blob of fat on its bottom and my head like a tomato on top.  Thirty pounds times x number of people adds up!

I could make a business out of this.  I’d just take the 30 pounds (13.6 kg) from someone who is always glad to get rid of it and then happily eat my 750 calories a day for a month, and poof:  I’d be back to where I started.  Then be all set to take another 30 pounds from someone else.  Hey, if I charged like $20 a pound, I could quit my day job and afford to buy the kids Meals on the McDonald’s menu, not just items on the Value Menu.  I could be rich.

But unfortunately, alas, science hasn’t perfected a system of fat transportation so I am left with the old-fashioned method: eating.  I am universally admired that I can eat anything anytime anywhere, and it could be I’m the only person in America like this, but someone has to do it, and the Lord picked me.

So feel a bit of pity for me, me who has to eat day after day without a break; I can’t even take the weekends off! No, every day I have to eat and not only that:  three times a day!  How oppressive is that!  So I should go and feed my belly.  One of my sons bought me a candy bar, and it’s calling my name.  Such is my lot in life.

 

This Stuff Really Happened…

One of the dumbest things I’ve ever done

One of my sons is 16 in a week – no drivers permit quite yet – and we are driving on a lonely country road and I pull over. No one is around, nor is there ever anyone around, much less – of all things – a cop.

“Do you want to drive?” I ask. “Just for a bit.”

“Sure,” he says, and gets behind the wheel. He is happy to do this – to actually drive – even though he is 16 in a week. I’ve had my kids drive in a parking lot before they were 16, so this is just one level up, I think.

“No one’s ever on this road,” I say. “We should be fine.”

He drives toward a big hill about a quarter mile down the road; he is doing quite well, staying in his lane and able to regulate his speed, and all is well until IT happens.

IT is a cop car that crests the hill in the opposite lane and comes toward us. A cop! We continue on, making it to the top of the hill ourselves, and I say, “At the bottom, pull over. I’ll take over.”

At the bottom of the hill, we switch. We are no longer having a good time.

This is the hill that saved the day!

We continue on our way, with me driving. I figure all is well now, but it is not.

Yes, in my rear view mirror, I see the cop crest over the hill coming toward us; he had apparently turned around. In a minute, he following me. I turn onto the main road, and his lights flash, with luminosity like that found on the sun.

He walks up to my car, carefully. Do I know why he stopped me? No, I don’t, I answer. My registration: I have a temporary registration on the window, and he was checking to make sure that was valid.

My heart is in my hand, but I manage to be cool as a cucumber.

“Oh,” I say.

“I your license clean.”

“It is.”

He goes back to his car and soon comes back, handing me my license. He says all is well, and I can go one my way. Have a good day.

I thank him.

Me and my son look at each other. I have never seen a cop on that road – indeed, hardly even a car – but today – of all days – this cop stops us. Today.

Wow.

If it wasn’t for the hill, we would be dead. He would have seen us switch drivers, but the hill blocked him.

I learned my lesson – big time.

Where to Have a Heart Attack

I drive to one of my clients in my beat up bomb van, the ghettomobile we call it. It is 11 years old, and there’s no AC or heat, and the power steering leaks, the passenger’s door handle is about to fall off and the electric doors mostly don’t work but, when they are in the mood, they do, and the front bumper has fallen off and it’s banged up on every side from much use and teenage drivers with their learners permit, and it overheats every month but adding antifreeze keeps us going for another month, and we can go on.

My client happens to be a repair facility in Syracuse, and when I try to move the van since its blocking another car, it doesn’t start. They are so busy, I often have to move my car from spot to spot to get another vehicle out. But this time, it makes this sound: Click, click, click. One of the mechanics must have heard the clicking, because he comes over and hooks up a portable charger, and the van starts. We move the van to another spot, and all seems well.

A little while later, I go to leave but when I try to start the van, I hear the clicking again. Well, we’re dead again. I go into the office and tell the service manager about my problem, and he says, “Oh, it’s probably the battery if it died in such a short time. I’ll give you an old battery for free.”

Well, that’s exactly what happens. A mechanic puts it in in about ten minutes, and the van fires right up, just like that.

If you’re going to break down, do it at your mechanic’s garage. If you’re going to have a heart attack, do it while visiting your grandmother in the hospital, or in the hospital parking garage as you leave. That’s the moral of the story.

There are no Guarantees in Life

We have drumlins in the area where we live, and driving consists of going up and down hills as if on a flattened roller coaster, and that’s the background for this story.

My son and I are traveling thought the countryside and are talking about life. I say, “Hey, life is not guaranteed. See that hill up there? When I come over that hill, there could be another car veering over into my lane, and we could all be killed.”

We reach the hill and are almost at the crest of it when I see something out of my right peripheral vision.

A teenager, racing out of his driveway on a bike and plugged into his device – oblivious to everything – darts right in front of my car.

I swerve.

He swerves.

The screech of the tires…

I miss him by six inches, no more.

I stop.

He stops.

Down I lower the passenger’s window.

“You know I almost killed you,” I say.

He takes off his ear-buds and looks around, realizing that he was almost dead.

“My bad,” he says.

I agree.

The moral: life is not guaranteed. And be careful when you are plugged in. Life still exists around you.

A Friend in Need…

We have a task at hand: load many 80 pound bags of concrete into my ghettovan and onto the little travel trailer I have attached to it, and get it all home, along with some wood. My friend and I have calculated the weight beforehand, and we thought the van and trailer could hold the bags, but we were wrong.

The wheels on the van are flattened, and it is worse on the trailer: they are squished like a donut and we’re afraid one is going to pop.

We need these materials by tomorrow, and they are all bought and paid for, and loaded.

What to do?

Just then, we see a friend who we happened to see inside, and he pulls up next to us in his car and – guess what – he is pulling a trailer, but this one is much more substantial than mine. I am wondering what to do, and hit on an idea: how about asking him to take some of my concrete? He drives right by my house on the way home. What could be more perfect.

Now, he could have been a different part of the store and never ran into me, or he could have had a cup of coffee before he left and missed me by 10 minutes, or he could have gone to a different store first and arrived after I left.

But he didn’t. He was there.

So I ask him. No problem, he says, and he and my boys start moving the bags of concrete over to his rig. Half is left with me, half with him, but the tires go up and up with each bag off-loaded, and away we go.

I get my concrete just like that.

Tell me there isn’t a God.

Fifty-Five Alive

My wife is 55 years old as of today, so we can say that I am officially married to someone who is we-should-not-say old but can more appropriately categorize as approaching the older years of life.

 

Fifty Five is a watershed year.  At 55 you get tons of AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) mail landing in the mailbox about once or twice a week, offering life insurance (which you may now need), car insurance, offers for AARP membership so you – now at 55 – can get the elderly discounts at stores and events.  Who said getting old was all bad?

Which brings me to another point: fifty five is somewhat of a bewitching number. You are safe at 53, since you can reverse the numbers and get 35, and that’s always a happy thought. Or if you’re 72 you can also reverse this number and get an even better 27.  But 55? You can try to reverse this number but still come back to where you started – 55. Yes, no matter how many times you do itit’s all the same: 55. You’re stuck.

That can be one reason why people don’t like to be 55.

My wife also claims that she doesn’t want to get older, and I understand that. She’s good about the whole process but also laments its implications.  Fifty-five represents yet another year down in the march to 78.7 – the average age an American woman lives to these days.  The thing is, the more years that go by, the less years there are between your present age and that magic number.  It’s serious.  You would think that by bemoaning the years passing, suddenly they would go backward, so once you hit 55 your next birthday would be 54, then 53 … all the way back to 18.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.  Is there a complaint department in this universe?

I should give my testimony.  I was fifty five once and progressed beyond that point just fine.  I’m 56 now and all systems are still operational, for which I very thankful.  For me, every birthday is a victory.  I knew a developmental person who believed that everyone liked him and every day was his birthday.  That’s how to have it.

So here’s to my dear beautiful, wonderful wife, a great mother, wife and believer: may she have many more good years in the future, with both her family and her Church, and in the Lord.

Happy birthday!

Maybe I’m Amazed

The years just fly by, and every once in a while its good to reflect on it all.

It so happened that when I worked the Syracuse Amphitheater three weeks ago, the rock band Styx was playing. Styx is a 1970s\1980s band that I happened to like at the time and even went to one of their concerts at the Rochester War Memorial in about 1977. My wife asked me who I went with, and I don’t remember. I don’t remember much about the entire time, except the size of the War Memorial and the fact that all the seats were full, but that’s about it.

How many years have passed since then? The math says 40. That’s a lot of years, at least for me, and back then if you told me: “Some day – 2017 to be exact – you will once again hear Styx in concert and, by the way, you would have been married 24 years and have eight children and – we should not forget – will have been a 10 year survivor of one of the worse cancers known to man, but luckily you will be a Christian, so you will be living the best life possible.” If you had told me that back then, when I was a green under the ears 17 year old not knowing what to do in life or where it would lead me, I would not have believed you.

Back then, 2000 seemed a long way off, like a Looooooooooong way. Who could comprehend it? Let’s talk about 2050 right now, in 2017; the year 2050 is abstract, like a huge number of mathematical formulas scrawled across the blackboard – and dark, unknown and unsure. But this is what happened: 2000 came and went. We were up against it, and then in it, and now somehow it is 17 years behind us.

Paul McCartney Then and Now

Paul McCarthy comes to the Syracuse Carrier Dome this September. He’s the same guy with the mop head who sang, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” before the Vietnam war was even an issue and gas was about 25 cents a gallon. The years pass, and now he washes up in Syracuse, New York, at about the age of 75 (I’m not sure – a good guess I think), a rocker with a lot of wrinkles and who knows: maybe he can still put on a show. It’s as if he has re-appeared in 2017, stepping out of a time machine, coming back from another long lost era, back when America was a great country (everyone knew that) and all the cars were American. They had to be. And now POP – he appears, as if we have fast-forwarded a movie to the closing scenes.

Then there is Bob Dylan, whom I saw in concert also when I was about 18 and also washed up in Syracuse recently. I also worked that concert when our Church sold concessions as a fundraiser. My impression: Bob seemed his best doing his re-hashes of Frank Sinatra songs that have been the hallmark of his last two albums rather than trying to be a rocker at 77. I was almost embarrassed for him. He almost seemed irrelevant – the great Bob Dylan – and only 3,000 people came to the Amphitheater to hear him. The years take their toll.

If they are getting older, then so am I. Every year my kids have more birthdays, and that leads me to the conclusion that I’m probably having more birthdays also. I’m not so old – only 56 – but a fair part of my life is behind me already, lived already, and I’m hoping for many more. The decisions I made as a youth are coming back on me now. That’s why all youth should make good decisions. You have to live with what you choose.

Our Church will be selling concessions at the Carrier Dome for the upcoming Paul McCartney concert. We’ll probably hear Silly Love Songs and Maybe I’m Amazed – and I will be amazed that this guy can really rock, fifty years later. Maybe he can. But I saw a recent picture of him, and the years have worn him down, as they do everyone. Forget the mop head. He’s an old man.