Battle Stations Again

For many years I thought that all of the attention and money focused on finding a cancer cure was foolish.  To me it was a disease that primarily sacked old people.  Stupidly I concluded that it was a natural happenstance of piling up too many years on your odometer.  Sure, the occasional kid battled it but mostly it was geezers who, like ripe bananas, succumbed to this malady.  My family was relatively cancer free.  My mom had survived breast cancer and added more than twenty years that nearly got her to  ninety.  Even though my wife had lost a father, brother and sister to it, cancer happened to other people.
And then she felt a lump on her neck.

Linda and I spent most of 2014 in doctors offices and in hospitals fighting her lymphoma with chemotherapy and she was cancer free before the end of the year.  This summer another lump--oh, please please let it be something else--told us the cancer had returned.  Time to put on our helmets and kick some cancer ass one more time.  That's why we are in Seattle.

 The Seattle Cancer Care Alliance is the place to go for a stem cell transplant, which is what all of her doctors think is needed for Linda to send this disease packing for good.  It is the foremost facility in the world for this life saving procedure, having pioneered it several years ago.  The staff is second to none and SCCA enjoys a reputation of having the highest rate of successful transplants of any organization in the world.  Linda is in excellent hands.  She has an entire team dedicated to her victory over cancer and a life extension of many years.

My posts on this blog, which began as minor therapy for withdrawal anxiety brought on by the loss of the catharsis of a daily radio show,  have been a regular thing for me for nearly eight years now.  That may change.  Linda's battle is my battle and now it's time for all hands on deck.  I will post when I can but it may become sporadic as her treatment moves along.  I realize this is no big deal but over the years I have constantly been surprised by the number of you who check in frequently to see what snakes have crawled out of my head.  It's good to hear from old friends.

So, we will be busy for the next several weeks.  Cancer is real and it's non-discriminatory.   These days afford us zero opportunity to lapse into self pity.  There are too many children here for that.