It Might Get Messy

OK, sports fans, it’s time to start winding things down. And by “things”, I mean my life. 

Oh, we still have some time together. The course of last-ditch chemotherapy I’m on itself will last weeks. The likelihood of it buying me at least a couple, maybe 6, months, is pretty good. And we can accomplish a lot with that much time to spend. 

Now, if you are anything like me (only the good bits, of course. Believe me, I have no illusions regarding the bulk of what I jocularly refer to as my “personality”), your first thought was something like “uh oh. “Winding down” sounds suspiciously like a logistics nightmare”. Actually, the legal and financial details are indeed abundant, but not intractable. Well, let me rephrase that. If you have a responsible adult running the operation (Cathy, of course, in my case), the heaps of paper can be dealt with without the need to chew off any of your own limbs (you will run into lawyers and financial specialists who will make you want to chew off THEIR limbs, but that’s a topic for another posting). 

With the paperwork neatly compiled and filed and safely in the hands of others, you are now facing the intellectual and emotional blast wave and associated shrapnel and afterburn that will precede and follow your increasingly imminent death. 

But first, there’s the continuing nightmare of physical illness. When you are down to months of life, how much pain and discomfort you are willing to endure is largely up to you. The doctors will continue to treat you for as long as you want to be treated. I’m staying on board for at least this last course of chemotherapy because of simple greed. I have at least a little more life to live, and I need to spend some final time with my family. But I’ll tell you, it’s a tough slog. Today is Friday, second day after my first dose of the chemo drugs. And I have spent the entire day leaning forward over buckets struggling desperately not to barf. Hopefully this will be the worst day. The chemo course has something like 5 more doses spread out one every 3 weeks, so I am going to spend a bunch of my remaining time in physiological hell. We all have to make our choices and live (or, in this case, die) with the outcomes.

Saturday was no better. I don’t know how much more of this I can take—hopefully, tomorrow, things will improve some. 

Hopefully.