Well, it's been a while since I have been motivated to write a post.
I appreciate many folks asking me how I am doing. And, considering everything, I am doing pretty well, actually. That doesn't mean I am jumping off the cancer train, no, that little engine that could is still steaming down the tracks dragging me along with it. It just means that I have been at this since 2006 and, I don't mean to sound to cavalier about it, but once the initial "what the fuck is this about" emotions are over, the mind sets up a strategy to deal with the conceptual reality of cancer so that everyday shit can carry on. And carry on I am.
In the mean time other folks around me or acquainted with me have also been diagnosed with cancer of one sort or the other. You don't have to dig too deep in the morass of humanity to find someone with cancer or a cancer story. Cancer is a reminder of our mortality. That's all. Sometimes that reminder comes too quickly and we don't have time to sort out the reality of it all. And, sometimes, I think in my case, it comes slowly so that I, or anyone surviving the initial bout, have or has (whatever sounds better to you) to develop a stamina to keep pace with the malady. Keeping pace I am.
Now. Update September 2015.
As you FIVE PLUS readers have been acquainted, my cancer came back about three years ago, discovered to have come back about two and a half years ago. Since then I have had a CABG4 (bypass surgery) Il2 treatment, and then a brief hiatus for a year to see how everything was going. This past January and February I undertook cyberknife radiation treatment to slow down the little buggers that were still growing. I get another scan soon to make sure that enough damage was down to keep me ahead of the terrorists for a while. I don't need a flashlight at night because I have been so radiated I glow when I walk down the street. My brother calls me the Green Lantern...and fuck if I am not....
What I have found to be an important strategy for me throughout, and one I didn't come by casually, is to think about recovery and survival first. I mean really, spending too much time on the bad shit can really mess up a really good day. During some of the darker days of this journey, I have tried to focus upon the things that make me feel better and to understand that recovery from whatever does not happen in a day. It is not trite to say that friends and family are important here.
Recovery to me means adapt, persevere, and overcome whatever challenge that is in front of you.
Thus, stamina is needed. Emotional stamina to help with the relationships with people who want to show sympathy for and to me. Pyschologial Stamina to say fuck you to cancer and to continue to plan and to live in spite of whatever handicaps the illness puts upon me. And physical stamina to get up everyday and to make sure that I stay as physically active as I can. Because the cancer has a stamina of its own. It will continue to eat away at the host until the host ceases to exist. Suicidal little fuckers that they are, this is what drives them forward. They strap on a suicidal vest of cancer explosives everyday with the purpose of destroying the environment within which they live. Me, in this case. Others, too.
The thing I don't like about cancer, at least one of the things, is that it can erode the hosts ability to maintain ones stamina to live first and die second. What cancer does to many is that the second part of the equation becomes the dominating part of our existence while cancer continues to maintain its happy co-existence with us living everyday with the purpose to get bigger and more invasive than the day before. Acquiring the mental focus to put life first when you are in fact dying takes some doing. FIVE PLUS baby! Cancer on the other hand, has no sense of the future. It just does what it does. It is radical, mindless, purposeful in its destruction without a larger understanding (in human terms) of the consequences of its own destruction. It lives and that becomes its sole purpose despite its destruction of its host. It is the germ of our molecular structures and cancer is part of us.
For me cancer has become an engine which I continue to ride. Work is something I do because I refuse to succumb to the idea that I am a victim. I get up everyday and walk my dog. I go to work. I have just finished a draft of what will be my next novel, Love in Exile. I have two other manuscripts to complete. I have shit to do and I will do it. Cancer or no fucking cancer. Everyone has to approach cancer in their own way. My way is to refuse to admit victimization of my own existential reality but to see it as a contest of my desire to be human and to create until my expiration date arrives. That date is still to be determined. It might be stamped on my ass but I can't see back there so I am still uncertain of the date.
I refuse to let the zoombie apocalypse growing colonies within me stop my own self-discovery of who I am, or who we are. I am interested intensely in how civilization rises and falls...see Jared Diamond's book Collapse. I am also interested in how we fail to see the dilemnas around us but put on blinders that make us accept short term resolutions for long term problems. Polictical expediences are those blinders. We have cancers in the world and until we as a civilization demonstrate the will, they will erode what we have known and destroy what we cherish. We will have more Baltimores, Fergusons, migrations of poor toward the wealth, madness before sanity, and hate before love. Acquiesing to the politcs of these things means we will lose our way and thus lose what we believe the future will be.
Get up everyday and say fuck you to cancer. That is the way.
FU2C
another day on planet earth....tim