How Smart Are You?

We Have Cancer Again

Last week we were told that Shannon had another spot on her lung, eighteen months ago the doctors delivered the same message and in July 2007 she was opened up to remove a spot of censer no bigger then your pinky finger nail. This wouldn’t be so bad except that in order to assure that there is no dripping of cancer cells the incision starts below her breast and extends under her arm and up to her shoulder blade. The scare looks like she was opened like a tin can. So it looks like Nita and I will be spending a good part of February in Atlanta looking after Aidan.

It becomes evident that different people have different ways of dealing with tragedy. Shannon and I are extremely good at computerizing whereas Nita find a need to get mad and discuss the situation, the possibilities, the ramifications, the injustice, and the all events that led up to the current situation. I think Shannon and I have a better way, we evaluate to determine what we can do to influence, we accept our position, then we deal with it step by step.

Our daughter, Shannon, has cancer; this is something that I accepted eighteen months ago. I knew that this day would come, but I had hoped it wouldn’t come this soon. My mother died of cancer when she was 30 years old. I’m confident that good doctors and the advancements in cancer research will assist Shannon in living a long healthy life. I hope we can get some longer intervals between this bad news.

I'm My Health Advocate

This morning I went for my semi-annual medical check-up. Stuart, my doctor, gave me a clean bill of health then asked me if I had any concerns. I told him that I’ve been running for the past three years and I still have difficulty running any sustained distance without needing some walking recovery time. I’m talking about still having difficulty breathing even for a mile run.

We decided that I need to take a stress test and then a test to evaluate the efficiency of my heart and lungs intake of oxygen. We did a lung X-ray today and I’ll be doing the other test over the next several weeks. I did a stress test in 2004 and the administrator said, “I don’t know what you’re going to die from, but it won’t be your heart.” So I don’t think there is anything wrong.

I’m sharing this information over my blog because I’ve become aware of how important it is that I become my own advocate when it comes to my health. I tell my daughter that she’s lucky because she goes every three months and gets scanned to see if the cancer has reappeared thus she knows what’s going on in her body; most of us don’t know what’s going on until it’s to late. My father died of cancer but didn’t know he had cancer until 3 months before his death and he had been seeing his doctor regularly. He just didn’t ask the right questions and press for the right tests.

If we don’t ask the questions we can only be sure we won’t get the answers that we need.

I’ll keep you posted on what I find out.

22,451 Days and Counting

Thursday Nita and I drove to Cincinnati to attend my Aunt Flo’s funeral. Aunt Flo had lived 30,021 days when she passed last Monday. She was a good Catholic, and the ceremony was fitting for her live. The priest seemed to be familiar with Flo’s life and family mentioning that she enjoyed dancing had enjoyed golf, softball in her younger years, and did a lot of volunteer work in her later years.

She did have a difficult ending to her life and from conversations with her only daughter, Sandy; I gathered that she had been in pain required extensive care in her final months. The whole event coupled with the death of my father a year ago caused me to give thought to my own life and how I would like to see it come to an end.

I’ve now lived 22,451 days and for the most part I’d say I’ve had a good life. I started thinking of my life in days about ten years ago when I attempted to make a list of the days of my life that I could remember. I discovered that at any given time I could only remember about 50 days, but if I worked on building a list I could bring about 500 days of my life to my memory. I also discovered that the days that I could remember had some similarities. They involved friends or family, they were when I tested the boundaries of my envelope of existence, they were when I laughed or cried the hardest, and they were when I experienced that ever growing allusive RUSH.

This is when I pledged to myself that I was going to attempt to gather more memorable days. Since then I’ve driven Talladega at 174 mph, I’ve rifted the Colorado River, I’ve been to China, Russia, the Galapagos, and I’ve enjoyed the people in my life more to recount a few of my resent memorable days. I really think this is and helping others gather memories is what life is all about.

I noticed that Flo’s priest didn’t mention her net worth, what kind of car she drove, or how many square feet her house was… no just dancing, softball, golf, and volunteer work… he even asked those gathered “How many of you have worn a dress made by Flo?”

I got into a discussion with my second cousin Tom Mason, about how I’d like to see my life come to and end, and I shared that I’d like to have a semi violent death. I don’t want to spend any of my life lying in my own waste; I don’t want to live days, weeks or months in pain, I don’t want to become a burden to the people that I love.

I recently read about two guys that died at the end of this years New York Marathon; they died doing something that they enjoyed. That seems to me to be the way to go. Dale Earnhardt died on the 4th turn during the 2001 Daytona 500, could it get any better.

I’ll keep pushing the edges of the envelope and I’ll keep looking for more fulfilling experiences and relationships in my life and hopefully my long term care insurance premiums will end up being a waste of money.