Feeling Good

After my last post I decided I needed to post the next time I felt really good. Fortunately, it wasn’t that long. The last week has been very typical of the end of the Lupron effect for me.  Sunday and Monday were absolutely terrible, then suddenly Wednesday and Thursday were quite good, at least in the evenings. That seems to be a recurring theme, Pre-evening is iffy and the evenings are much better. Today, Thursday, I wound up taking Xanax to help me sleep through the afternoon, and awoke to a really good evening.

Despite my cancer I feel incredibly lucky. I managed to live the American dream. After my father’s death when I was 7, my mother and I were thrown into financial chaos. For over ten years we lived below the poverty line, although I didn’t know it t the time. It was just the way life was as far as I was concerned. At one point it looked like we’d have to move into government housing, the projects, but my grandmother had some land with timber on it that a company wanted to buy and it saved us, as well as, providing funds for my college education (supplemented by numerous loans from the University). I graduated, got a great job at Texas Instruments and moved up the corporate ladder. Eventually, I married and my wife and I started a software business that served the Department of Defense and the National Cancer Institute. We were able to retire early with enough money to live comfortably. As I said, I have been incredibly lucky.

As I was transitioning into retirement, The Stage I cancer diagnosis came. By the time I was almost fully retired, the Stage IV diagnosis came. It’s now almost 2.5 years later. We’ve traveled a lot, bucket list kinds of trips, but Lupron has been a consistent problem. Timing trips so I’m not affected by Lupron has been pretty much impossible.

I don’t know what to do about Lupron. On the one hand, it is unquestionably extending my life, but we don’t know by how much. On the other hand, I feel horrible 25-50% of the time. The depressions are often so bad that  I pray for a brain aneurism to end it all.

Enough history, right now I feel great. The Lupron has subsided and a cocktail or two tonight has enhanced my view of life that much more.

I want to thank all my followers for your support. Your likes, comments, and encouragement mean the world to me. I suspect that one of the reasons I’m more inclined to post when I’m under Lupron’s spell is to get your support. It helps so much in helping me to get past the low points.

The future. It scares me. At this point it’s mostly fear of the pain that is waiting for me. The docs tell me that there are very powerful painkillers and I’ll be OK, but I still have my doubts. I take comfort in knowing that there is an option to put me in a chemically induced coma until I die. If the painkillers fail, that’s what I want.

I haven’t gotten to the point where I am scared about being dead. I may not get there at all, but I’ll certainly be more apprehensive at the very minimum. I’ve been reading the books about people who “died” and were brought back to life in the hospital. There are so many cases of this I find it hard to brush off. It also helps that I really like the experiences they report. I figure if this doesn’t happen, then when I die that’s it.

Thank you for your support!