I Hate Cathaeters

I hate cathaeters!

 

I understand what they do.

 

I understand why they are important in the type of surgery I had.

 

Perhaps having one for a couple of days wouldn't be too bad.

 

Having one for fifteen days

 

SUCKS.

 

If you have never had a cathaeter

 

Hit the prayer bones and give thanks.

 

I have worked out the hours until this thing will be romoved on October 30th.

 

After I publish this I will work out the minutes.

Surgery

Back in May I announced I had Prostate Cancer.  The doctor also said I was too heavy to have surgery to remove the prostate.  That launched me on a diet.  The first one I have ever taken seriously in my life.

As time went on I slipped off the straight and narrow from time to time but made a discovery.  The success of the diet wasn't so much a testiment to the supervised fast I was on as it was an indictment of the way I used to eat.  One piece of fried chicken became a guilty pleasure.  I didn't need four, with two mashed potatoes...and gravy.

By September I has lost sixty five pounds.  The Doctor scheduled me to have a prostatectomy on October 15.  We arrived at the Medical Center at 5:30 AM and got all the paperwork taken care of.  Finally I went in to the little room, changed into the hospital gown and put my fate in the hand of the doctors and God.

The surgery was prefromed as scheduled.  I had a superb team working on me.  I expected great discomfort when I woke up, but that didn't happen.

This was mainly due to the pain meds I know, but they did it right.  Most of Monday was spent drifting in and out of lala land.  I have no memory of many of the folks that came to see me.  Sorry about that folks.  Because of that fuzzy state of affairs I wasn't sure what I had heard from the doctor until he came back on Tuesday to look me over one more time before sending me home.

Something I have not shared here earlier was that I had been told I was not looking at a cure, but a long fight.  Due to the aggressive nature of my cancer, and the size of the mass that appeared on the sonogram it was probably not contained in the prostate.  This was going to be round one.

Fine - bring it on!

But the report from the doctor was that the female hormone implant (Yes guys, you too can exerience hot flashes!) had done a good job of shrinking the tumor and the prostate.

What I hadn't expected to hear was that there was on sign of the tumor penetrating the prostate wall.  It appeared to be cantained.  The doctor took a number of samples, and found nothing malignant in the ones he had recieved results on.  I don't want to jinx it, but he may have gotten it all.

The doctor is good, and I take nothing away from him.  I also think the prayers, candles, drums and good thoughts from family and friends went a long way toward helping me out here.  I've been like the guy in the fox hole that is wearing a cross, a star of David, Ankh, Turkish moon, and Pentagram.  I'll take all the help I can get.  I want to thank everyone who appealed to the powers that be on my behalf.

I go back in two weeks for the follow up.  I'll let you know what I learn then.

 

Good By S-10

Good by S-10

It was right around Christmas of 2010. I was finishing up some shopping in Bryan, Texas and getting ready to head home. I pulled the Chevy S-10 out of Sam’s Club and was and was just building speed to enter Hwy. Six when the damn thing died. Being a standard I tried a rolling restart but no go. As speed bled off I timed my entrance to the Cinemark parking lot (thank you dead stick landing drills from another lifetime). If it weren’t for the other vehicles on the road and lights in the parking lot I would have been looking for the UFO.

By eleven that night we determined the truck was not going to be an easy fix and our son came with a trailer to pick the two of us up. That night was the last time the S-10 moved under its own power in almost a year. 2011 was the year of transportation hell. I will spare you details, mostly.

We have always considered our isolation here at HomePlace a great asset. Lack of mobility went a long way toward wreaking our finances. Having to depend on other people for transportation is a losing battle.

Suddenly getting to jobs, getting to meetings, Helene’s substitute teaching assignments, even selling young rabbits at Easter was either difficult or impossible. Few things are more heart breaking than turning down a job because I can’t get to it. Our isolation had become a huge impediment.

Finances got harder and we cut corners, made partial payments and delayed what could be delayed. We made a point of staying up to date on property payments. I will be the first to say getting behind on property taxes is stupid, but went faced with groceries and utilities the delay didn’t seem that bad. We had already worked out a schedule with the taxing entities to get caught up. With only a few years left on the note the bank is latching onto the tax situation for a land grab.

We are beating bushes, already black and blue, to raise the needed funds. Not that a new complication was needed but my prostate cancer (under control) has made it necessary to travel back and forth to the doctor frequently. Our son has lent us a truck until our ford’s engine is rebuilt, but the S-10 has resisted all attempts at repair. The two times we got it running it lasted less than twenty four hours before going down again.

So the treacherous Chevy is being sacrificed for the cause. We pulled the fuel tank, hauled it up on the trailer, and then removed the tires. The battery wasn’t powering the windows so in order to exit the vehicle once it was on the trailer the driver’s window was broken out.

Yesterday I took it to the crusher and added the funds received to the tax kitty. This is just one of many paths taken to save the property. Another was a difficult choice, requesting assistance through a fund raising site called Indiegogo. I have been surprised and humbled by the response and generosity of both friends, and people we have never met. I am posting a link to that site here;

http://www.indiegogo.com/SaveSeniorsFarm?a=1007680

Followers of this Blog have come to know me after a fashion. Other come here from Face Book and are learning who I am. If you have ever listened to anything I have said, please pay attention now.

I do not want ANYONE to feel obligated to do this.

If this fund raiser strikes a cord with anyone, we would be grateful for whatever you felt like sending. If you would rather not, please don’t.

We will keep you posted.

Monsters

I remember watching monster movies as a kid. King Kong and Godzilla didn’t scare me that much. They were sixty feet tall for crying out loud! You could see them coming for miles. I figured anyone they caught had it coming.

Vampires and Werewolves scared the hell out of me. They could hide under my bed or in my closet. That didn’t keep me out of the movies (still doesn’t) but I paid for it.

What’s with this business about Vampires having to be invited into your house? Once they are, you can’t keep them out. Then I saw an old movie when I was a kid in Nevada where a vampire looked down a door mat that said "Welcome" and replied "Thank you" and went in. I don't think my Mother ever knew why our door mats that said welcome either disappeared or got something spilled on them.

Those monsters were scary, but they were fun. Other monsters are not. I do what I can to guard against home invaders and have shown folks how they can protect themselves against stalkers. Regardless how well you prepare bad things still happen.

There are other monsters, one that has haunted me since I was old enough to grasp its existence. This one puts Godzilla, and Vampires, and even home invaders to shame.

Cancer is the monster that hides inside me. I had known of it even as a child, but it was something terrible that happened to someone else. There are different kinds of cancer. In my twenties I watched a friend in his thirties get eaten alive with it in a matter of months.

A few years ago I sat in a hospital room and watched my Mother die by inches. Her last week she was gone, but the body was still breathing. I held her hand, looked into sightless eyes, and remembered the woman she had been.

Not long ago I got the news myself. It was all I could do not to go screaming into the woods when the doctor told me I was positive for prostate cancer. The good news (and trust me friends and neighbors – that was a hard sell) is that prostate cancer is very slow moving. I now realize that rather than months I still have years even if it goes untreated. I will assure you all now I have not wasted any time with my doctor even discussing not seeking treatment.

The doctor assures me we caught it early enough for treatment. He says I’m young (nice to know someone considers 59 young) and in reasonably good health. We discussed options.

To me, the only realistic option is surgery, but the doctor assures me I am too fat to survive it at the moment. I guess he knows what he’s talking about.

So…I am now on the Nutrimed diet system. This is more a supervised fast than a diet. My regular doctor assures me it’s better than starvation. I’ll get back to you on that. The most telling aspect of the situation, for folks who have known me, is that I haven’t been tempted to cheat – even once.

I don’t plan to make this blog a place to whine about my problems, but there will be a new topic heading that deals with my new battle from time to time.

I promise the next post will be much more fun and interesting.