Leaving Your Loved Ones Behind

My dog Dodger, the one I complain about, the one I pretend not to love, is a rescue dog. He was found abandoned in the woods by a local police department. When I met him he was in an old barn in a crate. It took just a minute, love at first sight. He came […]

Tomorrow

Tomorrow, tomorrow…that song is running through my brain. When you have a disease that is likely to take your life, tomorrow has a different tone to it. Like with my IRA. I took some distributions from my IRA account. My expected lifespan was five years. So I took some money from the IRA to pay […]

Testimonial

My head is swimming. I don’t know what to think. I don’t know anyone to ask questions of, no one who has experienced what I have experienced in the past few weeks. My adventure began with a regular 3 month CT scan. Something different and puzzling was discovered. Not something you really want your doctor […]

Playing the What If Game

My tumor is not behaving itself. For some reason it is not spreading as it is expected to. I should be much sicker that I am, my organs crawling with the dreaded cancer, keeping myself comfortable with the assistance of my primary care physician, following instructions I gave him such a short time ago. As […]

What’s Up

I have small cell carcinoma, this cancer strikes 10 to 15 percent of all lung cancer victims. Of those who have small cell, only 50 percent survive 2 years and only 2 percent survive 5 years. I am 27 months into this journey and this cancer is still localized within the same area in my […]

Radiation

Radiation, this is an experience that when I describe it, my friends laugh and probably do not believe me. Most likely because I begin the conversation by referencing the Starship Enterprise. That is the closest I can come to describing the radiation machine. You lay on a table, similar to a gurney. The bulk of […]

Drugs, drugs and more drugs

Once a month I take 15 pills, I do so over 5 days. This is my chemotherapy. I take it in the hopes to keep me alive for as long as possible. Presently I am very healthy, in fact I gained 7 pounds over the past holiday season. I stay at home to minimize my […]

Talk About It

I often think about the ones I love. My husband and children, siblings and their children as well as my beautiful granddaughters. I wonder what this illness does to them, things that they are not going to tell me. We are taught in many ways as children not to talk about bad things, and the […]

Happy Anniversary

Happy Anniversary to me, Happy Anniversary to me; I cannot believe that I am celebrating January 17th as the 2nd anniversary of finding out that I have cancer. As I’ve said before I have small cell carcinoma, 50 percent of the people diagnosed with this type of cancer do not survive to see their second […]