Resignation ….

I spent the majority of my youth working on a farm, a dairy farm.  With it came the long days of milking cows and completing all the chores in-between.  In the spring add to those chores the fitting of ground, readying it for planting crops, oats, corn and some others.  This was followed by summers focused on making hay, baling and storing as many as 1,800 bales on some days.  It was a labor of love and instilled within me a strong work ethic, the idea or characteristic of hard work being part of life.  While many of my mates played sports and worked out to gain strength and endurance, I found those same things in my work.  With all of that work, all of the repetitions of handing 50 pound bales of hay, pitching 3-4 manure spreaders full when cleaning out that accumulated over a winter.  I was strong, had endurance and felt good when challenged with physical work.  It is that same work ethic applied to my professional career that enabled me to succeed, to perform at above average levels.  In all of my time I really never fathomed my working as something that was not my choice, but it would seem cancer is changing the paradigm.

 

Time ….

In a high school biology class during a discussion about genetics we began discussing time, more specifically probabilities for longevity based on our phenotypic indicators.  Some in the class expressed a familial history of heart disease, some of grandparents and great grandparents who lived well into their nineties.  Others, like the teacher himself, expressed a plethora of maladies that plagued their families, not the least of which being cancer.  For me, at the time, I knew of two major issues within my lineage, a maternal grandmother who died of some form of reproductive cancer in her forties and a paternal grandfather who died of a massive coronary in his forties.  Together with these issues was mental illness with my mother and among my maternal aunts and uncle, Alzheimer’s.  Paternally it seemed nearly all my father’s siblings had some form of cardiac irregularity.  For me, it would have seemed the writings suggested I, and my siblings, would not likely live to ‘ripe old ages’, but rather be surviving on borrowed time once turning sixty-five or seventy.  With the discussion I saw time, my time, in terms of decades and found it similarly expired.

 

Rituals ….

Through life we experience a multitude of rituals, weddings and all the nuances within, christenings, parades, sporting events, the list goes on and on.  One ritual that surfaced for me is that associated with funerals.  It is a funny thing in may ways with a variety of possibilities, most of which reside within the realm of what I consider the macabre.  Someone dies and we send them to the undertaker who ‘prepares’ the body based on things like the number of ‘viewing’ days, we place it in a box made of any of a variety of materials and then we put the body on display for those friends and family to mourn.  We then have some sort of ‘service’ performed in order to ensure the deceased, or should  say the spirit of the deceased, is properly launched to wherever they go and then we place them into the ground or should I say typically into a concrete box in the ground.  Lastly, we mark the grave with a marker of sorts, a stone monument offering some bit of information on who lies below.

 

Realities ….

Throughout life we often speculate our reaction, or action, in response to some event.  We think about what we would do if we won the lottery, instantly becoming a millionaire or perhaps what we would do if we faced death.  For some that event never becomes reality, never materializes and so we remain speculative.  In some cases the proverbial ‘rubber meets the road’, the event happens and our speculation can now become reality.  I knew someone who did win the lottery and when buying tickets had always said they would keep their job, trying to retain as normal a life as possible and, for a short while, that was the case.  However with time the lottery winner moved to other things, built the big house and started the business always dreamed of being theirs.  For others, and as is the case for me, their event, their reality, is impending death.

 

Changes ….

For those familiar, you will know I recently relocated, a major move that included leaving a warm climate for one substantially colder.  One may ask the reason, but as I try to humorously put it, ‘there are more folks here to dig the hole’.  In saying that I convey most of my family and friends live here. It is a coming home of sorts, but with a different slant, a coming home after thirteen years of being away.  It is also a chance to reconnect with many old friends, some I’ve not seen for many years.  However, with it comes all the mechanics of relocating, establishing my residency in a new state, finding a barber and, most importantly, identifying several doctors for the day-to-day nuances of dealing with cancer.  Principally, and most urgent, is identifying a primary care physician, a ‘family doctor’ for things such as pre-operative work necessary for things such as my ‘oil changes’.