talkingaboutcancer.com

Wow!  What a great experience I had being interviewed on the Andy Barrie show yesterday.  It was my first time on the radio but Andy has a way of making you feel very comfortable.  It was like having a conversation with an old friend.

While we only had a short time to chat, Andy raised an issue we could have discussed for an hour.  “When you die,” he asked, “will you feel that you’ve lost the battle with cancer?”  I responded that, “If you can look back on your life and feel that you’ve lived a good life, that you’ve helped people, that they will remember you, then perhaps you can say you’ve won the battle if not the war.”  I must admit that I do think of that.  When you are faced with a terminal illness, you can’t help but wonder how you’ll feel at the end.  Fear, yes -  Sadness – yes.  Anger – maybe.  I feel that I am helping people with my writing and speaking and the work that I do, and I will continue to do this for as long as I can.  Perhaps this is how I “fight the battle” and, for me, it works.

We all will die sometime and leave behind a lifetime of memories and at least another lifetime of regrets for what we could have accomplished if we had more time.  But we can’t do it all and, unless you do something to get yourself in the history books, your existence won’t even be a distant memory in a hundred years.  Thinking about that can drive you crazy and perhaps even to despair, but most people don’t think about it.  I did and I had to come to grips with it in order to move on.

It is what we do with our lives every minute of every day that defines who we are and if we’ve done some good and helped some others along the way, then we can look back with the confidence that we’ve won a few battles and, if we’re really lucky, we can feel that we’ve won the war.

This is what I aspire to.

Thanks Andy.  Check out this link: http://www.cbc.ca/toronto/features/bad-news/excerpt.html

Posted by Doug

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Life can be such a fleeting thing. When you have a terminal or incurable disease, life and death are always on your mind, sometimes in the forefront and sometimes lying in waiting ….never completely gone.  The uncertainty of how and when is haunting and everyone deals with it differently.  It is on my mind all the time now but I feel infinitely blessed to have time to plan, to live and to love.

Last Wednesday, I was hit head-on by another driver who simply drifted into my lane on a little used industrial side street.  My car was totaled and I ended up strapped to a board in the back of an ambulance.  With the overcrowding in hospitals these days, I spent quite a while on that board and had time to think …. time to think about how I could have been killed.  Here I am, every day, worrying about how many years I have left, and I could have lost it all in a split second of random carelessness by a stranger.  Cancer patients often hear the expression, “Hey, we’re all going to die sometime.  I could get hit by a car tomorrow!”.  I hate hearing this even though it is well-intentioned.  It trivializes the fact that I know that car (the one with my name on it) is just around the corner and it’s going to be more than a fender-bender.  But you can see the irony in all of this.  I consider myself very lucky.

Having said that, I now have to deal with more pain, more medications, and a lot more stress that I could definitely do without.  And the time I now have to spend dealing with the aftermath comes out of my shortened balance of life.  Having cancer or getting hit head-on are both highly traumatic events.  Having both is just not fair.  The other driver was not injured in any way and has been charged, but he has no way of knowing (unless he Googles my name) the impact he has had on me beyond needing a new car.  On the off chance he does Google me and finds this post, I say, “Thanks a lot, buddy.  My own body wants to kill me and it doesn’t need any help from you.”

I just want to find some normalcy in my life for even just a couple of months.  A nice long stretch where I don’t have to worry about new tests, bad results, or more uncertainty.  But I suppose it isn’t meant to be.  I got hit by a car…. but I dodged the bullet!  I’m still here and I still have time to live and to love.

Keep your eyes on the road!

Posted by Doug

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