When you acquire cancer, you get philosophical about things like considering diseases as metaphors.  I have friends who have various heart conditions whom I think of as living in a kind of “tornado alley” where disaster can strike with little or no warning.  On the other hand, cancer is like living in Florida where you can get wiped out by a hurricane.  But, you know it’s coming and you even know where it is coming from and sometimes how intense it will be, however, you don’t know how devastating it will be until it hits.  Now I have learned that my current cancer hurricane is located in my left lung and that it will make “lung fall” (couldn’t resist that) this Thursday morning when they will pry open my chest to take it out.  I have been told I will remain in the hospital from four to seven days depending how severe the cancercane is (couldn’t resist that one either).  So we’ll brace for the storm’s arrival, get through it, assess the damage and then figure out how to get on with the rebuilding.

Remember the old joke:  “They told me to cheer up, things could be worse. So I cheered up and things got worse.”  That seems to apply to my adventures with cancer.  It seems every time I feel terrific a doctor finds something else bad.  The cheek melanoma was discovered three years ago during a routine physical I passed with flying colors and I felt great.  That was surgery number one.  With that out of the way I was once again feeling terrific so they check the prostrate and bingo!—bad news again.  But before they go after that one they decide to take a full body scan.  Feeling great is evidently no indication of the evil lurking within.  They found the esophageal cancer. After recovering from the horrific experience of chemotherapy and radiation I finally started feeling good again. Really.  Hair came back, tai chi at the Y, playing petanque Saturday mornings, riding the bike, mowing the lawn.  Life is good and once again I feel great.  Then a routine scan to check that the throat cancer crap is still gone shows a spot on my left lung that turns out to be more melanoma!   So now we are about to undergo surgery number two.  But before that I had to see yet another doctor, a cardiologist, who must attest that my heart is working well enough that I will not have a heart attack on the operating table.  The good news is that I feel great and I passed the cardiac nuclear stress test and have less than a five percent chance of expiring on the table so the cardiologist says I can have the lung surgery.  The bad new is the cardiologist says I can have the lung surgery.  Maybe if I felt really lousy these things wouldn’t happen.

Although opponents of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) insist it is absolutely horrible, there are some elements that I believe are actually quite good and very reasonable concepts.  As one who has had an intimate relationship with our health care system, I would love to see the industry adopt electronic health record keeping.  Over the past three years, I have seen 11 doctors at four clinics and had three surgical procedures at two different hospitals.   I am now about to undergo some major surgery (at one of the same hospitals) but before that, I must see yet another doctor, a cardiologist, to reassure the officiating surgeon that I will not croak of a heart attack on the operating table.  For my appointment next Thursday, I have been informed I must stop by the doctor’s office to pick up paperwork I can fill out in advance or arrive a half hour early to do so.  That paperwork, I can assure you, will be very much the same as the paperwork I have already filled out about seven  times.  It’s hard to pin down the exact number since with some clinics I have had to go through all the information again if it was more than 30 days old.  There is no standardization among the forms.  They all ask basically the same information but they vary from office to office and some look as if they were written ten years ago and photocopied several thousand times.  In this day and age where Amazon can tell me everything I have ordered from them in the last ten years and Google has records containing every web site I have ever visited, it does not seem beyond today’s technical capabilities to consolidate health records between hospitals and clinics that are within 300 yards to 30 miles away from each other and several are members of the same health care system. 

Cancer is the Al-Qaeda of diseases. It is sinister, unscrupulous, unpredictable and deadly.  And it is after me again.  A routine PET scan to see if the esophageal cancer was still gone, showed a spot on my left lung which a biopsy determined was melanoma!  Yes, I know, melanoma is supposed to be a skin cancer but as my oncologist explained it can travel through the blood stream and “hide” somewhere inside the body.   Then BAM like a roadside bomb it explodes from its hiding place.  So here we go again.  The good news is I don’t have to go through chemotherapy one more time.  The bad news is we’re going to undergo major surgery.  Let’s see.  I had melanoma surgically removed from my cheek three years ago.  I was diagnosed with prostate cancer (right now the least of my worries).  I had esophageal cancer requiring radiation and massive doses of chemotherapy and now melanoma is in my lung.  Do you think in my case Medicare can get a volume discount?