9 weeks of Scary
I did it. At the beginning, 9 weeks seemed interminable. It was hard enough to come to terms with walking around knowing I had a tumor taking over my prostate. But to get up every day for 9 weeks with my first thought being, “Well, get your big fat ass going, Sam. As scary as it is to know they are shooting radiation into your body, it is time for you to drive to the clinic for your daily dose.” That was hard. 

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And I did it every day. With nobody here to nag me. I am proud of me. 

What you might call, “a close encounter with a linear accelerator.” I lay there thinking, Well, I guess my days of having kids are over. But wait, I am 70 years old, my days of having kids were over quite a while ago.

The people at the clinic were excellent. They humanized the experience, and made me calm, to lay there getting zapped. I fell in love with every one of them over the weeks. Even Eric, who is cute as a bug.

Now, I have 9 weeks of recuperation from the radiation. One day of recuperation for every day of radiation. I will be elated when the constant fatigue is history. And I have 2 more years of hormone therapy, which really sucks, because I am SOOOO sick and tired of hot flashes all day, and not being able to sleep the night through every night because of sweating, then freezing, then sweating, then freezing. On with the sheet, off with the sheet, over and over. I dream of being able to huddle under the covers without breaking out in sweat all over my body, even my toes, and actually have 6 or 7 hours of uninterrupted sleep. It will happen.
But today, for the first time in a while, I feel like I might beat this cancer. And I don’t want to waste this extra life I have been given. I wanna go out and do stuff. Stuff that makes people feel good. Stuff that helps others realize that life is a hoot, and living is so much better than the alternative.

Writing these stories has been great. I am not out of stories yet, and plan to keep it up. Writing them has been cathartic. On my worst days, when I felt so horrible all day, at least when I was writing, I was able to ignore the awfulness for the time it took to write the next story. I have been hoping that my authorial efforts have gone a little way to show the people who have donated to my gofundme page that I appreciate them, and that this therapy would not have been possible without their largesse. <3

Like I have said many times, I am truly a lucky boy, with a good support network of people that I am thankful to have in my life. How much better could my life be?
Thank you everybody for reading my stories, and hopefully they have brought a bright note into your lives as you read them. Stay tuned, the best are yet to come.

– Lucky Boy Sam