When I understood the challenge ahead in my personal battle with a cancer still to find a cure, and a projected two year longevity prediction, it was time to dig in for answers—all while avoiding the world of quackery and misinformation.
There’s often news of such patients overcoming the incurable and substantially extending projected survival times. Admittedly, those patients hold infinite amounts of discipline that I’ve yet to achieve.
Honestly, I do not like wearing a mask. It’s not comfortable, I feel like others don’t know if I’m smiling when I speak or not. I can’t see the mouth expressions of others wearing a mask. And it just plain muffles me.
So how is it that a wily novel coronavirus plays havoc with modern standards of living, further pushes impoverished people into a hell hole of hunger, sickness and premature death, all while showing us what it is like to see mountains without a cloud of particulate pollutants?
I understand how corporations are mandated by law to bring profit to shareholders. Fair enough. But at the well-being of humanity? This, in my opinion is where our leadership shows no sign of moral judgement unless it is for profit.
When faced with an unpleasant reality, like being told I have an incurable rare cancer, I first take 10 deep breaths. But there’s more to it than… Read more “Coping with Unpleasant Realities”
But by this June, the bad boy tumor grew back from its reduced 6 cm to 8 cm. In other words, my continued digestive discomfort was not from a stuck camera capsule. Actually, the CT scan showed that the capsule had left my system.
This was a call to war. And the war ignited into full regalia when my guardian angels pulled the plug on my body on Halloween 2018 while I was in a second-opinion consult with a Mayo Clinic gynecologic oncologist. As pale as white paper, and barely able to breath, and worse — unable to control myself, I hurled and splattered volumes of gastrointestinal debris all over her office. Rushed to the ER, the final report read: severe anemia, hemorrhage gostrointestinal upper, malignant neoplasm of endocervix (HCC), and dyspnea — NOS (labored breathing).
Halloween 2018 became a nightmarish, blood-curdling horror story—a story I have yet to share publicly. And I won’t share all of it publicly. But I will… Read more “The Halloween Nightmare I’ll Now Share”
Through these 12 months, a medical cancer did strike my friends and colleagues. It was as if a deluge of rogue cells from what I call cancer-world rained on many people I know. And at the same time it never dawned on me that, I, a breast cancer survivor, should have kept my umbrella at hand.
Like a 15-second jingle, I pretty much forgot everything that I ever learned about Bartolomeo Cristofori’s grand creation, the piano. My upright piano where I expressed every emotion that played through me at the time transitioned from my secret love to a forlorn and neglected, out of tune, collector of dust.
The Muse Pallet 