I Am Doing Fine

I have gotten a lot of phone calls from many of you this past week. Some of you wanted to know how I was doing and others wanted to know why I didn’t tell anyone.

I want to thank all of you who are genuinely concerned about me. Like I said before I started this Web Log to let everyone know how I am doing, both in health and in retirement.

In spite of the prostate cancer, I continue to feel good and I am having a lots of fun writing, taking a writing class at MATC (look out if you thought I had words before. Now I am going to be dangerous), photography workshops in Chicago and desktop publishing at UW. I am still working on a book about my family’s history. I don’t know how I ever got any of this fun stuff done when I worked full time.

I am not in any pain or suffering or anything like that as a result of the cancer. For now, it’s just the inconvenience of having to go for treatment every day. But then again, going to treatment every day is far better than being dead. I have a really professional, great, cool and caring Treatment Team at the Cancer Clinic. It makes going there more tolerable.

I know the word was out that I had some sort of terminal illness. I heard that in late July. Some people had me pushing up daisies already. I chose not to deal with the rumor at that time because I had other issues that were more immediate. Like mamma’s death, putting Beau to sleep, and most of all getting the strength and finding the time to tell all my siblings and family members. It just never seemed like the right time. It’s hard to tell someone about something that you really don’t understand. So I had to find out more about prostate cancer before I could talk about it. It’s more than just telling people, “Hey I got prostate cancer.” It became more about “What is it”, “Why do I have it”, “Where does it come from”, “What does it look like”, “What am I going to do about it”, and “How will it affect my quality of life.” I had to get those questions answered first. While I have most of the questions answered, I still have to deal with the uncertainty of the outcome for which there are no answers until treatment is done.

I got most of the talking done with my siblings, but there are more, especially Barb’s family that I need to talk to. I continue to work on that daily. Anyways, that is why nobody knew.

Again, thanks for your genuine concern about me and I will keep all of you "Up To Speed" with information that you can find here in my Blog.

Later!