Ten months and counting

Today is more or less the ten month mark of my endurance contest with pancreatic cancer. I wish I could make a celebration of it. But I can't get the juice to celebrate. It's not over, there is no cavalry riding in over the hill with bugles blaring, not respite from the drama. Just another day of feeling crappy, taking more pills and wondering what is going to happen. I don't have the usual nausea and other problems that other patients have. For that I am thankful. I do have the constant reminders of my mortality. That is enough to raise my blood pressure every time I think about it, several hundred times per day. I'm not anything special, nobody made me out out be immortal, or a celebrity. I'm just a guy whose life is now hanging by a thread because of a cancer that is almost certain to kill me. Just when remains the big question.

To look at me I would seem the perfect specimen. A nurse the other day was surprised by my age, she thought I was 20 years younger. I have a nice trim figure, some 70 or so pounds down from two years ago. A very long two years ago. My skin is nice and smooth, no belly roll, the bags under my eyes are even improving. (My doctor recommended Preparation H for the bags, to draw up the lose skin. It works, it also helped the dark circles under my eyes. Laugh if you will but somebody out there is gonna try it and like the results.) I take so many pills that I lose track of what to take when and usually screw up the intake of at least one or two a day. Today I think I screwed up my insulin and my magnesium. I really need to make a list and a schedule so I can check it off each day like a good little bureaucrat. Someday.

Well, it is after midnight and suddenly I am tired. I tried to write something else but you just read what came out. It is ten months into my ordeal and I am still ticking. A walking miracle some say. I don't know, I am just trying to make it through life the same as everybody else, I just have a few more issues than some.