More I Don't Know About Cancer

It's all very strange!

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Cancer is a strange creature. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t come across it somehow, whether through personal experience or a friend or family member, but what has surprised me most is that everyone seems to have a different impression of the disease, how it works, or how it’s dealt with. I think I’m one of the most naive of the bunch, even though my mother fought it for twenty years before me. Almost all of my impressions of the disease come from her decline, and I was in the room with her when she took her last breath twenty years ago this coming August.

I don’t talk about it much, and I only write about some of it on my daily blog, such as fatigue events or changes in something. People often ask how I’m doing, and about 90% of the time I don’t know what to say exactly because I have no idea where I am in the progression of the disease. I don’t want to say I’m beating it, because I’m not, and it would be bad juju to say otherwise. It’s more like it’s constantly pounding on the door, and I’m on the other side making sure the door holds. Sooner or later, one of us gives up.

As I write this, I have no way of writing a prognosis with any accuracy. There are three probabilities. The least likely is a twenty-year extension on my life. I don’t even know if that’s possible today. One more likely scenario is that I go suddenly because of a drug reaction or some other schism I didn’t see coming. The other is a slow decline brought on by cancer drug side effects or the disease itself, hence the drug side effects scenario. I can never tell when I am in a decline, much like my mother, where the good days were really good and the bad days were scary, but now it’s me, and I still can’t put it in any context. How far ahead should I plan my future? I have no idea. It’s an odd way to live, especially while running another company. I’m making company plans I may never get to experience.

In my CEO role at Hudson Cloud, I’m often working in both long-term and short-term objectives. My goal is to make sure that when and if I do step down, the company is in good hands. It’s never lost on me that we’re sitting on a very valuable asset that will only grow in value. The responsibility is tremendous, but I’m very much up for the job. We see a clear path to a very high valuation, so none of this is trivial and that’s my objective. I’m out to make that a reality.

That’s the weird part about this. I could outlive the estimates. I have no way of knowing. I just can’t plan for it. I follow my oncologist’s recommendations, to the letter, but sometimes they are in conflict with other specialists, so one yells at me while the other is pleased. No, they don’t always talk.

I wish I could give you all a clean status and something to hold onto, but I just don’t have one. This is no exaggeration. How I feel can change in a matter of seconds and come out of nowhere. Some of it is laugh-out-loud funny, too. Some of it is scary, but I kind of know my floor, so it’s not as terrifying as it was. My first chemo low was the worst because I had no idea how sick I’d get. Once I knew baseline, it was no biggie.

The pills I can’t take with food happen every morning at 3 AM. They are these large chalky pills that easily get caught in your throat, so I have to be upright to take them. They bring on the nausea, but two hours later it’s gone. I’ll eat something with the morning pills that are to be taken with food. Then I check a bunch of things, then get up, assuming I can. Some mornings I’m puffing like a freight train, but it passes. It’s rare now that I have an entire day of fatigue, but it does happen. Every day is something small as a reminder. It could be a second-long bone pain or some other weird thing that passes. I laugh at the bone pain because it’s so sudden and brief. It feels like a bratty ghost stabbing me with a fork. Mom?

I still have Zoom calls and don’t pretend I’m not weak when I am. I’ll work from bed, pillow behind my head, and it’s comfortable, like it’s not happening. I only need pain meds now and then and the lowest dose I have. Tests seem to run about every other week from someone. I don’t mind except for the IV they take from my hand. That hurts like hell. I’ve had episodes of liver distress, kidney distress, and so on. I just roll with it. The episode of liver distress made me sleepy so I didn’t mind. I slept through the worst part.

Right now, it’s behaving more like a chronic annoyance, so I’m not thinking about it much. I treat the obstacles as just that and find a work-around so I can focus on other things. I have Hudson Cloud to run, and that takes all my attention. I’ll still travel in a split second if the company needs me, but most of the time everything has kind of settled down until it hasn’t. It’s like Whack-a-Mole. Attitude is everything. I remind myself, it’s all about the “tude.”

The short answer is that I’m fine. I’m working 99.9% as if none of this happened. Yeah, once in a while the meds might make me want to poop in the yard next to my dog, but that’s a different story. It’s fun.