Firedrake
03-15-09, 12:15 am
Non workout related . . .
This whole board is devoted to things that improve health, strength, and make life worth living. For striving toward some undefinable goal, ever onwards in our journey. This isn't about that.
(Insert many nasty, unpleasant, rude and otherwise obscene words here . . . ) Please don't read if you're squeamish.
Just for the reference: I HATE CANCER. I've lost my maternal grandparents, my mother, and way too many relatives and friends to various forms. And everyone is different. I've known some folks who survive for years. My former mother-in-law has survived breast cancer twice, lung cancer once, and is still going strong 20 years after the first instance.
Another friend lost a breast and is still running around with high tumor markers in her bloodstream, on a low level of chemo most of the time. Yet, another friend was diagnosed with liver cancer in July of 2001, and was dead before the end of September that same year. For all of that, I had an encapsulated tumor removed from my tail end when I was eighteen, have had two basal cell carcinomas removed from my scalp, and I'm still here at nearly 55.
I've spent much of today with a dying friend. Until about six weeks ago, she was beating the tumor that had grown at the area between the right shoulder and her neck. A set of drugs that cut off blood supply to the tumor had shrunk it to a patch of necrotic tissue.
Then it mutated.
In six weeks, it's grown to look like an obscene blackish slug draped around her neck and crawling down her chest. They had to put a stent in her windpipe to keep the tumor from crushing it. That was two weeks ago. The tumor crawled under the stent.
It's interfering with her breathing, painful as all help, and she has an Atavan pump for the pain. She can barely keep anything down, and she's easily tired.
She's 32 years old, has a 12-year-old, precocious daughter who needs to have her mother as she grows. I know. I lost my own mother at age 12 to cancer, so this hurts even more.
This woman is an incredibly creative, talented, stubborn woman, who lost an arm at age 7, and went on to become incredible dexterous with out it. She became pregnant young, and has raised her daughter mostly on her own till she found and married the love of her life a few years ago, and they have become a loving family, and her husband has become the father her daughter always wanted.
IT'S NOT F--KING FAIR!
I'm being selfish, I know. I don't want this person to not be here anymore. I don't want that delightful young woman to grow up without her mother. I'm not ready for this soul to leave yet.
I am reminded the gods have their own reasons for taking a soul off the plane. I just wish they'd let me in on the joke.
This whole board is devoted to things that improve health, strength, and make life worth living. For striving toward some undefinable goal, ever onwards in our journey. This isn't about that.
(Insert many nasty, unpleasant, rude and otherwise obscene words here . . . ) Please don't read if you're squeamish.
Just for the reference: I HATE CANCER. I've lost my maternal grandparents, my mother, and way too many relatives and friends to various forms. And everyone is different. I've known some folks who survive for years. My former mother-in-law has survived breast cancer twice, lung cancer once, and is still going strong 20 years after the first instance.
Another friend lost a breast and is still running around with high tumor markers in her bloodstream, on a low level of chemo most of the time. Yet, another friend was diagnosed with liver cancer in July of 2001, and was dead before the end of September that same year. For all of that, I had an encapsulated tumor removed from my tail end when I was eighteen, have had two basal cell carcinomas removed from my scalp, and I'm still here at nearly 55.
I've spent much of today with a dying friend. Until about six weeks ago, she was beating the tumor that had grown at the area between the right shoulder and her neck. A set of drugs that cut off blood supply to the tumor had shrunk it to a patch of necrotic tissue.
Then it mutated.
In six weeks, it's grown to look like an obscene blackish slug draped around her neck and crawling down her chest. They had to put a stent in her windpipe to keep the tumor from crushing it. That was two weeks ago. The tumor crawled under the stent.
It's interfering with her breathing, painful as all help, and she has an Atavan pump for the pain. She can barely keep anything down, and she's easily tired.
She's 32 years old, has a 12-year-old, precocious daughter who needs to have her mother as she grows. I know. I lost my own mother at age 12 to cancer, so this hurts even more.
This woman is an incredibly creative, talented, stubborn woman, who lost an arm at age 7, and went on to become incredible dexterous with out it. She became pregnant young, and has raised her daughter mostly on her own till she found and married the love of her life a few years ago, and they have become a loving family, and her husband has become the father her daughter always wanted.
IT'S NOT F--KING FAIR!
I'm being selfish, I know. I don't want this person to not be here anymore. I don't want that delightful young woman to grow up without her mother. I'm not ready for this soul to leave yet.
I am reminded the gods have their own reasons for taking a soul off the plane. I just wish they'd let me in on the joke.