Fuck You, Cancer
I mentioned in a previous post that my grandfather has cancer. Prostate cancer with some fun, shady, nodes of it on his lungs added for exclamation. He's 84 or 85 (how horrible am I to not know the exact age of my last remaining grandfather? rhetorical question, shut up!) and aside from the random comment about his urination schedule, he barely made note at family functions about it. I'm almost certain that was done more for my frail grandmother's sake than for his own state of mind, but that's what I witnessed the few times I saw him since the diagnosis.
Because of his advanced age, doctors treating the cancer opted for a hormone shot over chemo and radiation. Now, the gory details are too much for my feeble brain to retain, but the results of how the shot affected the prostate cancer have come in and this I do grasp: his prostate function is back to normal. As in, completely normal levels of that prostate hormone that indicates cancerous activity. As in, he pretty much kicked that prostate cancer in the ass and said "I'd like very much if you would fuck right off and leave me alone to tend to my hypochondriac wife". (Not that he would EVER refer to my grandmother in that way - that's me taking editorial license.)
And is if that wasn't the best news I've heard in a long while, the part where the nodes on his lungs up and vanished would probably take the Good News cake. Yeah, lung nodes? You can fuck off and die in a fire because you're not welcome on these lungs mutha fucka.
Now, I know medicine and the medical professionals are fallible and things change and everything I just typed could have been a misinterpretation of the results or another opinion might be on the other end of the spectrum. But I'm taking this small victory over cancer and putting it out there. I thought that maybe if I did this, someone might take heart and regain a bit of the hope that cancer is so good at sucking away. My previous experiences with family members and cancer have NOT had happy endings - or happy chapters for that matter, so in all honesty, when I found out about his cancer, I was steeling myself for the inevitable. And while I know in my head that death is inevitable, my heart takes just enough solace in knowing that it isn't always going to be as right around the corner as you think it is.
Because of his advanced age, doctors treating the cancer opted for a hormone shot over chemo and radiation. Now, the gory details are too much for my feeble brain to retain, but the results of how the shot affected the prostate cancer have come in and this I do grasp: his prostate function is back to normal. As in, completely normal levels of that prostate hormone that indicates cancerous activity. As in, he pretty much kicked that prostate cancer in the ass and said "I'd like very much if you would fuck right off and leave me alone to tend to my hypochondriac wife". (Not that he would EVER refer to my grandmother in that way - that's me taking editorial license.)
And is if that wasn't the best news I've heard in a long while, the part where the nodes on his lungs up and vanished would probably take the Good News cake. Yeah, lung nodes? You can fuck off and die in a fire because you're not welcome on these lungs mutha fucka.
Now, I know medicine and the medical professionals are fallible and things change and everything I just typed could have been a misinterpretation of the results or another opinion might be on the other end of the spectrum. But I'm taking this small victory over cancer and putting it out there. I thought that maybe if I did this, someone might take heart and regain a bit of the hope that cancer is so good at sucking away. My previous experiences with family members and cancer have NOT had happy endings - or happy chapters for that matter, so in all honesty, when I found out about his cancer, I was steeling myself for the inevitable. And while I know in my head that death is inevitable, my heart takes just enough solace in knowing that it isn't always going to be as right around the corner as you think it is.
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