Posted 6/14/2023 2:26 PM (GMT 0)
Eight days ago i celebrated 17 years of marriage to the beast.. three days later on the ninth, I celebrated 16 years of marriage to my sweetheart Mandy.
I promised Mandy 30 years together on our wedding day Why wouldn't I? A year previous, my PSA was over 3200. My lungs look like Swiss cheese and I had been peeing blood for weeks! The scans showed bone, lung and lymph node metastasis, and a really crappy prognosis. Flash forward a year to my wedding day and my scans and my PSA were both undetectable
The anniversary of my diagnosis used to be a big deal. This year I completely forgot about it. Maybe I'm just getting old and forgetting stuff. More likely, I just don't think about cancer anymore. I still wake up every morning and take my Zytiga and my prednisone. I still go to my tri annual oncology appointment to receive my Eligguard and I still wait for those PSA test results to pop up in my electronic chart but other than that I just don't think about it much at all.
. I see all of you new guys show up to forums, freaked out, scared, searching for any news that will tell you you were going to live a long life or at the very least let you know how much longer you have. I want you all to know right now, it very well can be a long, long time. When I was diagnosed with this stuff, I was only 42 years old, and my prognosis was a year or less. Dude, I was freaked out! I remember I used to try to make deals with God! Now I canI vaguely remember the side effects of treatment. I continued to work as a pipefitter. It kept my mind off things I would meditate during the sleepless nights. I would seek signs to my longevity everywhere. I think I went a little bit crazy to be honest. I probably would have went completely insane had it not been for the men and the caregivers on forums such as this who were there to help me through. They were God sends.
I used to get angry when people would say I was lucky. I got the good cancer. I would lose it on them. After 17 years of playing this game, I would not say that I got the good cancer but I watched my dad pass away horribly from Cancer of the esophagus and my brother is fighting stage four colon cancer. I have watched him get slammed with bag after bag of chemo and watched as he went through 30 something rounds of radiation. I have watched him go through his surgery where they removed cancer from his liver . In four weeks, I will watch him have another surgery to remove the tumors in his colon.
I know that prostate cancer is a horrible disease, especially when it is aggressive, and nothing seems to work, and my heart goes out to men and their loved ones who must go through this terrible tribulation.
I have been blessed. It really is the only way I can explain it. My life is amazing and wonderful, and because of the men that I met on these patient forums, I have lived my life to the fullest every day. Somebody told me once that it was an inevitable, I was going to die. of something! It might be a die of prostate cancer. It may be that I walk out the front door and keel over from a heart attack today. Maybe it's in a car crash maybe I fall into the river and drown! I don't know! I don't know what I'm going to die of or when and guess what neither do any of you
The biggest lessons I have learned in the 17 years of fighting stage four hormone resistant prostate cancer is that I have today and that is all that I am promised. There are insects whose entire lifespan egg pupa larva adult is 24 hours. That's it one day! It's their entire life! Y'all have today and maybe, God willing, you have tomorrow. Please please please find the joy in today. Be kind to others for you know full well how precious life is. It may be that you are closer to mortality than others are, but you can be a light through it.
OK I'm going to get off my soapbox now! But I want to leave all of you with this. I could've went down the rabbit hole I could've drowned in sorrow and despair the others reach out to me. They showed me a better way. They taught me to cling to victories, hold onto hope, and live for the moment. I'm so glad they did. I'm so glad I took their advice. 17 years would be a long time to be afraid.! Love Y'all. ☮️