The Good News & The Bad News.

The good news is that three years ago on Memorial Day weekend, I took my wife to the emergency room at St. Mary’s Hospital in Amsterdam and she is still alive. She was diagnosed with third stage, primary peritoneal cancer, a cancer that once it starts behaves just like ovarian cancer. After surgery and seven months of chemotherapy and a year out of work, she fully recovered. So far there has been no sign of the disease returning.

The bad news is that my oldest brother (56 years old) went in for surgery yesterday. He knew going in that either he had lung cancer or pulmonary fibrosis. He called me last night to say that the doctors confirmed he has pulmonary fibrosis. That’s better than lung cancer, but not much better. It means his lungs are all scarred and that his ability to breathe will get worse and worse. He is a non-smoker, so they are not sure how he got it. He is going to be placed on a list for a lung transplant. The prognosis is one to five years. I only hope my brother beats the odds as my wife has.

It came to me yesterday, that coming from a family of thirteen surviving siblings (one sister died of colon cancer), all of us now between the ages of 38-62, that one down side to such a large family is the number of times over the years I am going to get these kind of phone calls.

It’s not something I look forward to.