A little late in getting this week's posting out - got distracted working on taxes for Uncle Sam. Another big upside to getting cancer - maybe now I can finally get that medical deduction in this year's taxes. OK, maybe that's not such a great thing, but the list of advantages to having cancer is really pretty short. There have to be more advantages besides getting out of jury duty, taxes, and getting out of crummy business trips - otherwise why would people keep getting cancer anyway? Awright, I'll be honest - I can't really recommend it.
I had a new marker number count last Thursday, which Dr. Gold was good enough to share with me personally on Friday (what can I say about a doctor who makes the time to make a call to his patients - a rare breed). Unfortunately, the number didn't really change from the last one two weeks ago, so we're still at 13. He still says I'm the man, and that we'll keep on with the Erbitux treatments until we get down to zero. We'll get a new PET scan (which will provide hundreds of possible images for me to tinker with) on April 17th, and hope that the collection of glowing spots (indicating live tumors) on the scan has disappeared or shrunk to much smaller spots.
My hero this week is Elizabeth Edwards. I was greatly saddened to hear that her cancer had returned, and in a far more serious and "incurable" form. For those of us in this club, it's tough to hear that we have another new member, and perhaps even tougher to hear that someone who we thought was cured is back in the club again. She and her husband made an extremely difficult decision in announcing her illness to the public, and perhaps more surprisingly, that they would continue on despite her illness. For those of you who don't have cancer, it may be hard to comprehend why a person would willingly commit to something as grueling as a presidential campaign after being diagnosed with cancer. The campaign trail is tough enough for a healthy person, but seems almost impossible for someone undergoing the rigors of chemotherapy. It's going to be extremely difficult. So why do it? I think that she explains it pretty well in this quote:
"You know, you really have two choices here. I mean, either you push forward with the things that you were doing yesterday, or you start dying," she said. "If I had given up everything that my life was about, first of all, I'd let cancer win before it needed to. You know, maybe eventually it will win. But I'd let it win before I needed to."
That's it - we're just not ready to start dying yet.
Elizabeth's spirit reminded me of another cancer patient who put it more simply. This week's picture is of another patient who wasn't ready to give in to cancer - former NC State basketball coach Jim Valvano, who died from metastatic adenocarcinoma in 1993. The title of this week's blog is his advice from the speech he gave at the 1993 ESPY Awards and the motto for the Jimmy V Foundation for Cancer Research - "Don't give up, don't ever give up". It's the same message and one that's worth repeating often.
