CSTAR

Surgery went well. I threatened the lives of the recovery staff (again), promising to end all of their lives immediately if they didn’t let me go. I don’t know what to say, you wake up in pain, immobilized, and disoriented, and it has its effect on you. Needless to say, they didn’t undo my restraints anytime soon; much to my chagrin.

I’m sick of being in the hospital. I wish I was writing uplifting words of motivation and optimism, but that’s not the case. I am laying here in an anesthesia induced stupor, waiting for the day when someone will tell me whether the lymph nodes they removed represent the aggressive spread of cancer to other parts of my body, or just some wacky effect of the obscene levels of radiation I have voluntarily absorbed.

I hate being here. I am tired of the needles, the drugs, and the boredom. This is why they call it surviving, and not living.

Might as well let everyone know how I feel about the “fight” against cancer. It’s not a fight at all. You no more fight cancer than you fight gravity. The “fight” is to make every day its best while you are in such grave danger, to not let it take over your soul. That’s the fight. The cancer part is a mere mortal toss of the dice. Of course, I eat all the crazy healthy foods, get plenty of sleep, and reduce my exposure to carcinogens, but that isn’t the same as a “fight”. I am surviving, not fighting. If you were thrown overboard in the middle of the ocean, left to fend for yourself, you would never say you were fighting the ocean. If you made it out of that peril, your reward would be to die of something else later in your life. You wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to claim to have “beaten” the ocean, but merely to have survived. It may seem like semantics, but I can assure you it is a different mindset. Every day I am surviving this cancer. Some days are easy, and some days are hard. Today is hard.

You see, the surgery wasn’t as easy as Dr. Pelzer thought it would be. As it turns out, the lymph node that they intended to remove was obscured by my carotid artery on that side. For those who don’t know, the carotid artery is the primary blood vessel that transports oxygenated blood from your heart to your brain. If the surgeons would have touched or manipulated it in any way, the chance of me having a stroke as result would have been very high. So instead of taking out the suspicious lymph node, Dr. Pelzer decided to take out the four lymph nodes most closely associated with it, and get this, at no additional cost to me! That’s a bargain you don’t see every day.

Since spread of the cancer to my lymph nodes would represent systemic cancer metastasis, the other lymph nodes should also show signs of cancer, if that is indeed the cause of the growth.

So now, as I lay here doing my drugs, I wait. I wait to see if I am still surviving. It seems ridiculous sometimes to try to imagine the danger my life is in. If you ever wondered what it feels like to be in great peril, it simply doesn’t. Maybe this is what a dragonfly feels like as it flies across the highway: life is good. I am currently very happy. I feel very healthy. I ran the Soldier Field 10-miler a few weeks ago. I deadlifted 505 lbs a week before that. I feel great, so why does life have to get in the way of that?