The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre...
The Falcon cannot hear the falconer

Auto or Allo? In-patient or out-patient? BEAM or CBV? In state or out-of-state? If out-of-state, where to go? MD Anderson? Seattle? Minnesota? How to pay for it?

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

Will I ever play again? Make it back to school? Get on my feet? Where will I find health insurance once I turn 25? Children's or P/SL? Will my siblings match? Will CCM drop me?


The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of the innocence is drowned;

Is ICE working? Even if this works how much time does it buy? Is this reasoned or simple chaos?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre...

Glad that is out of the way. Time to get up and get on with things. The time for feeling sorry for one's self is over...

Do Not Go Gentle...

This has been one of my favorite poems since high school and captures everything I feel at the moment about the will to live in it's repeated statements

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-Dylan Thomas

Amendment

After doing a lot of blog reading today I felt I should amend my position on blogging a little. It would appear that I have spent too much time reading the blogs of high schoolers and 40 year old unemployed unmarried men (just kidding, looking at either would be pretty sketchy). This evening I had a chance to read many blogs from one of the lymphoma messages boards I am a member of, www.lymphoma.com, and found them to be invaluable to someone in my position. Many times it was hard to read about the pain that is invariably in my future, but ultimately it was empowering to know that I am walking on a well traveled path that many have survived. Thanks to all that have come before me and had the courage to tell about it.

I awoke to find myself in a dark wood...

"I awoke to find myself in a dark wood..."

How else does one find yourself writing a blog? I am, in general, not a fan of the voyeurism that blogging breeds, and have found that a lot of the blogs I read to be a bit shallow and narcissistic. They tend to be more about that persons position at the center of a world wide pity party than anything interesting or insightful. Alas, I have reached a point where this provides a number of things that can't be found elsewhere and thus a find myself here.

With that long run-on mess out of the way, I guess I should tell you how I got here. It might interesting even to some of you that already know...

As I said, " I awoke to find myself in a dark wood"

That line is actually found at the beginning of Dante's Inferno and seem fitting as I, too, am beginning my decent into unknown pits

I've always said that I am always right and that I hate that fact. When my Pet scan in Nov. came back with areas of hyper metabolic uptake (i.e. CANCER!) I knew right then that this thing was back. My doctors told my parents that things like this happen all the time and the 25% of scans come back with positive areas that aren't cancer and there was nothing to worry about. Under physical exam I looked healthy and that we should wait 6 weeks and repeat the scans just to be sure. "...but I am 99% sure it is nothing" Where have I heard that before?

Six weeks later nothing had turned into something. More hyper metabolic uptake and more nodal involvement. Suddenly something we weren't' worried about required surgery to be looked at. When my doctor told me it was back, he was the only person wearing a look of surprise in the room...

I guess I should back up from there for those of you that don't know.

In May, I was Dx with Hodgkin's after visiting my family doctor multiple times with the symptoms over a 4 month period! ("Don't worry this is nothing") I told my girlfriend at the time the night before I was Dx that I had cancer. She told me to stop being so morbid and we laughed. But I felt the truth in what I said the next morning in the doctors office after my chest x-ray. I under went 4 rounds of ABVE-PC chemo and 20 days of radiation at 3060 cYn. A little fever here, a little nerve damage there, but over all I tolerated things just fine. Not a lot of damage and now I could move on.

"The best laid plans of Mice and Men."

But now it's back and this time it is a new game...
This is the story of ICE and BEAM chemo, Stem cell transplant, and the life after, not pretty but real. This is my Chemical Romance

"I awoke to find myself in a dark wood"