180 Days

"Because I could not stop for Death----
He kindly stopped for me---"

Emily Dickinson, "Because I Could not Stop for Death", circa 1862.


"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

Douglas Adams, quoted in Guardian, June 3, 2000.


"It is difficult to predict, especially the future."

Niels Bohr, Danish Physicist, in "Statistics", (1975)(attributing quote to Mark Kac).


I think I like the last the two quotes better, even though I always thought (even back in my American Lit. high school class), that the title of Dickinson's poem would make a great name for a rock song, or for a hard rock/heavy metal band.

I took an MRI on January 8, 2007 and learned that my lung cancer has metastasized through the lymph nodes to my brain. When cancer metastasizes throughout the lymph nodes, it gets into your blood stream and starts popping up everywhere. It grows like wildfire and wherever it goes, and your body's organs begin shutting down. So we planned for the following week to do stereotactic radiation (see 1/18/07 post). I had eight spots on my brain that we "zapped", but for every one that we got, there are probably two more we can't see. My oncologist, Dr. Heddinger, gave me a revised life expectancy of four months without additional radiation and six months with. So July 9, 2007, is my new drop dead date.

For those of you saying "but you already had brain cancer", the easiest way I can explain it is this: The "old" brain tumor was non-cancerous, but had to be controlled in order to stop it from crowding out important brain functions like speaking and thinking. It was nearly baseball size when it was discovered, so it had to be operated on. These kind of tumors can grow but not spread.

I received this news the same week we had our lawsuit with The Worst People in the World (see 1/16/07 post). This all occurred while trying to plan Melissa's surprise party on the January 13th (which I will discuss in a future blog). To say the least it was a stressful week.

I've decided that I can handle the physical pain that cancer causes pretty well, but the psychological beating that you take is really something else. It has come to the point where I ought to feel good about bad news, because even worse news is lurking around the corner. And getting no news, well now that's spec-fucking-tacular.

164 days and counting. Bet the over. :-)

P.S. I will need a person or persons to take over writing this blog at some point. They must be be educated, witty, charming, insightful, thoughtful and clever. Which basically means a friend or relative of mine, since you all meet the criteria. Please contact me if you would be willing to do this. Tom