Two years ago I was climbing a small hill in a coastal town in Sicily. I was carrying my usual stuff - camera bag, cameras, and stuff. I had been hiking around the town with my wife, whose family's origin comes from this town, but it was late in the day and the trudge up the road really pooped me out. I had had a similar experience in Thailand only two months prior, climbing up hundreds of steps on the way to a temple at the top. Well, in both this cases I am probably lucky to be sitting here two years later and writing this blog. My heart was pretty much ready to explode as I would find out that June. I thought it was age. Everything gets blamed on getting old, or older. It's not the case. Sometimes there's shit that is wrong and paying attention is mandatory.
Before we left for Sicily my onocologist - Fred - said that the lymph nodes in my chest were larger than they should be. So he set me up for an endoscopy when I came back. I knew what the result was going to be before I had the test - the cancer had come back. But in my mind I never felt it had gone away. I knew when I had my kidney removed in 2006 I was stage three. Well, as stages go I am stage four as the disease has spread. If you have been reading this blog you know some of the stuff I have had to do, besides cheating the black hooded fucker taking swipes at me with his scythe, I have survived and continue to do so.
My recent cyber knife event has gone well. While I still have cancer, lurking somewhere in my body. THe major aliens colonies took a direct hit. Having ISIS in your chest is never a good thing. But blasting them back to little puffs of ash is. I will be followed like a shadow on a sunny day by my docs with the reasonable expectation that sometime down the road these colonies of ISIS fuckers will be back, but keeping them penned up is the key thing. Letting them get loose and wreck havoc is not in the cards.
Interestingly, someone with my type of cancer, clear cell carcinoma, may have a more rapid event. Meaning: the cancer may spread more rapidly and find lodging in the bones, brain or the lungs. The last one I have had to be clear about because my the lymph nodes are in my chest and not in my lung. I have anomalies there but I have always had them and they are stable. Could be TB of which I was exposed at a young age while stationed in Korea. Could be scar tissue. The good news is that these anomalies have show no sign of growth or activity. Unfortunately being sick, means a different kind of education. I have had to learn how cancer not only effects me, but how other people with the same affliction suffer more seriously than I do.
The good news is that there are a number of new strategies to fight cancer. Some of them are cutting edge. Which means that you have to be really sick to get slotted into one of the studies to see how well or not that they work. I am not there yet. And my hope is that the cyber knife has so stunted the growth of what is there I will not have to worry about being involved in one of these studies for some time, if ever.
So FU2C, tim's update.