Things To Do.

July 16, 2016
Lots of things to do this weekend. I need to work on the garage door, mount a wall clock, get a hair cut, do some yard work, practice, laundry, and yes, get ready for my trip. I am also supposed to help at interfaith, and make it to church. Lots of things to do. Oh yea, I just traded my boat for a kick ass Taylor acoustic electric guitar. I need to hit the music store and get a decent acoustic guitar amp!!

It is seven thirty in the morning, and I am up - coffee in hand, taking Snowey to the poo park. Once the deed is done, We are back and I begin to replace the garage door rollers. They have been worn for some time, and it sounds like a Sherman tank is coming through the house every time it is opened. Like most things you put off for way too long, it doesn't take that long at all to actually do , and I was cooking breakfast by nine. Off to a great start.
  Then a fellow member of a cancer support forum that I belong to commented on a post that I had made. He and I have ad a few exchanges over the past few months. He is without a doubt one of the most positive and inspiring people on the forum. He has also been dealing with the ravages of cancer longer than almost anyone in the group. He has been fighting his battle for sixteen years. He succeeded in squashing it twice, and is now fighting in the third round. I can not begin to imagine all the at he has been through - both physically and emotionally. Though all of that, he has been a continual guidepost  to many - myself included - in our own journeys. Yet in his comment, he referred to me as "a brave man". WTH??!! This man has been though every imaginable reality of prostate cancer for over one and a half decades, yet can still smile at life, and then calls me brave? It just flat ass does not compute. I can not begin to put myself in his position. The thought of still doing all of this in 2032. Just, No! Not only no, but fuck,no.
 I sent him a private message to ask how he was doing. It wasn't long before he replied. That was the beginning of a chat that lasted well over an hour. We really began to get to know each other - our lives, our hobbies, families, children. we were chatting while simultaneously facebook stalking each other. The conversation was all over the map - from politics to art - speckled with pieces of very personal information concerning health, fears, and eventualities. I can not describe how I felt hearing someone discuss their own death. I know that I was humbled that he would share such things with me - a total stranger. I will not get into all of the details, because that was between He and I. Although he is pretty much an open book on the forum, it is his story to tell. Not mine. I know for a fact that it was time well spent.Yet another person that I have gotten to know and admire on my journey. I hope that he enjoyed the exchange as well. Of course, I am now way behind schedule, and need to hurry to get to Sam's barber shop. They close at 2PM, but you really don't want their 1:45 haircut. I guess I will have to postpone some stuff. It's all good though, because I had much better things to do.
         Made it to Sam's by 1:30 - no sweat. Sam is my favorite barber. He actually cut my hair when I was a kid. My dad would have him give me a crew cut, but leave a tuft in front to comb back with old spice short cut gel.

  To this day, Sam is the only one that really knows how to deal with my wavy-assed hair. He is been doing it since I was seven, so I guess that he should have it down by now. I have absolutely no idea how old he is, but there isn't a grey hair on him. The Rolling Stone of barbers, I guess..
With my haircut done, time for lunch. It just so happens that Lorito's Italian kitchen is one door down from the barbers. Imagine that! almost like I had planned it.  They have the best cheeseburger in town.
with a fresh haircut and full belly, I decide to head to the consignment shop at the other end and walk off my burger (or at least part of it). We have picked up a lot of stuff for the house there - from major furniture to decorations. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, just browsing. Lots of cool and interesting things, but nothing really strikes a chord - until I poke my head into the bargain closet. Everything there is five bucks. Then I see this old school aluminum stove top coffee pot. Hand painted with a covered bridge scene. I don't know why, but I immediately grab this thing up. It has some dust and dents, but just cool as hell. Every single pot of coffee my mom ever made cane out of one of these things. I remember when Mr. Coffee coffee makers first came out. She would have none of it. Coffee was to be percolated. and not by one of those damned electric coffee pots either. Stove top only. I can only imagine the disgusted look that she would give, had she ever seen the modern day Keurig contraptions. I remember her last couple of years. She would continually lose the glass top to her pot, and I would have to constantly go to Reddick Brother's Hardware in Micanopy and buy replacements. When I explained to them what was going on with her dementia, they promised to keep one in stock for me at all times. Local hardware stores are good about things like that. Thinking back, she might have been intentionally "losing" them just to make me feel like I was doing something of value. In her more lucid moments, which were often her hardest, she knew that there was nothing any of us could do to fix things. But she knew the importance of keeping busy. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop, and lead to stinkin thinkin". something she said often. So yea, it is very possible that she purposely lost them just to give me something to do. Anyway, the pot is mine, and it is now perched high in the kitchen on top of the cabinets. Funny how such a small thing will trigger a memory.
It is now almost four. I promised some friends that  I would help serve dinner at the Interfaith homeless shelter. The original group had backed out at the last moment, so this was a last minute deal. I had helped before though our church, so I knew what to expect. If you have never done this before, it is an experience like none other. We served probably 30-40 meals - all brought in by volunteers. When you see these people, and the thankfulness in their eyes, your heart melts. These are people - mostly women and children (the men eat whatever is left over later), are genuinely in a tough spot, and genuinely grateful and polite. Even the young kids. One of the most striking things is the way that they lookout for each other. The way that they make sure that food is set aside for others that have not arrived yet due to a job or something. Even though they themselves are homeless and hurting, their first instinct is to reach out to others. In many ways, very similar to how we on the cancer support group try to support each other. Maybe the willingness to love our neighbor is much closer to a reality than we realize. But why does it take hard times to do the right thing??
It is now 6pm. Time to hit Guitar Center and look at that amp. Yea, it's pretty cool, but I really cant get excited about it. I am trying really hard to like it, but just not there. On the way home, I begin to think about the day. What a day. I didn't get half of the stuff done that I had planned on, but some really great things happened instead. Important things happened. Human things happened. It was a good day.

And that guitar amp? Never mind. They can keep it.  It's just a thing. It is pretty insignificant compared to all the good things.

...And Beyond.

I guess it was sometime in October of 2014. Bill and I were eating lunch and decided to plan a trip to Quetico. By December, we had recruited Larry & Mark as well. By Feb 2015 we had decided on the time frame of late summer 2016 and selected our outfitter. It was going to be an epic fishing trip. Two weeks of remote wilderness fishing, camping, and canoeing. Then came July 1015 When I was first diagnosed. As my long term treatment plan began to unfold, what began as a fishing trip became my personal end game goal. The dangling carrot, if you will. I regularly mentioned it to both my urologist and later my oncologist - making my intentions clear. "Do what you need to do, but come August 2016, If I am still alive, I am going to Quetico." I set about a personal plan to try and be ready and attempt to stave off the well documented side effects of the treatments that lay ahead. Within a week after surgery, I was back to walking a mile. After six weeks, I was back on a bike and lifting light weights. I started doing local 5k runs in November, and kept this up all through the 39 radiation treatments that followed in 2016.  My colleague at work and I would also walk 2.5 miles every day at work as well. My hardest effort was to fight the lupron based urge to start backing off. That famous lupron fatigue. I was due for my next 4 month shot the week before we left, but got the approval from my medical team to defer it until after the trip. My argument was simple. If two weeks or so made that much difference in my outcome, it in reality made no difference at all. Game, Set, and Match. With much support and encouragement from many, off to Canada!
 
           The trip was a huge success - beyond my wildest dreams. There are many fish tales to tell and scenes to describe. Many pictures -none that even begin to do it justice. They just serve as visual reminders of the bring-you-to-tears indescribable beauty that I was blessed to experience. But I will focus on one story. It is a story of day nine. The day things went wrong. The trip had been going along fine - though a little fast paced for my liking, but fine. There never seemed to be enough time in the day to just sit and reflect. I was hoping for some really meditative quiet moments to recount my past year. At first, I could not understand why the others did not seem to feel the same way. Or at least understand my need. Then I started to realize that they too had their own agenda and sense of urgency. A couple of my friends are older than I (by over a decade). They both love the outdoors, and they sort of knew that this might be their last big adventure, thanks to none other than father time. I think that is an important lesson for me. Just because someone doesn't have cancer, or doesn't seem to "get" all of cancers implications, does not mean that they are not wrestling with their own personal set of demons - that are no less emotionally taxing than my own. perhaps we had all developed a personal plan to make sure that we made this trip. But I digress. Back to day nine. After eight days of great fishing and weather, we began to realize that we were way behind on our traveling in order to reach the designated pick-up point on Sunday at 1pm. So with that in mind, we would make day nine an all out travel day. 0530. First civil daylight, we are up. Mark began making coffee and a quick breakfast as I began to break down our gear. Bill began doing the same, and prepping the other gear to travel, as Larry began to stow the bear hang. We had a lot of canoeing ahead as well as seven or eight portages in store. One portage was a treacherous 190 rods over steep terrain - as indicated by the elevation contour plots on the map. A "rod" is a unit of measure that is unique to this type of thing, and equates to approximately 16.5 feet. Over each portage, we have to carry both canoes (46 pounds each) as well as six gear bags that weigh 40 ish pounds each, plus paddles, fishing rods, etc. So each portage requires multiple trips.
As we get ready to break camp, Bill walks over to a tree and begins to throw up. This is not good. We have all taken precautions for proper sanitary concerns, and either filtered or boiled all of our water. Even with all of that, he was clearly not well. After a couple of episodes, he said that he felt good enough to travel, so we set out - keeping a watchful eye. We had a hard time finding the first portage due to a downed tree, but eventually located it and made it through. It was only 22 rods and mostly flat. Two miles of paddling to the big portage of the day. The gps showed two portages side by side - each leading to a different lake. We were to take the left one. So we started on the left one, and in short order, it came to a fork as well. We started on the left of that fork, but after a short while, I was convinced that it was the wrong one, so I convinced everyone to go back and take the other. After about 3/4 of a mile, it came out to a lake. Some of us went back for the rest of the gear while Mark hung back with Bill to make sure that he hydrated and rested. When we got all the gear there, we broke out the paper maps and gps. It was then that we discovered that I had been wrong. I had sent us to the wrong lake. How could I have done this!!?? I was furious with myself for making a mistake that cost us so much time and effort - especially with one man down. On our already hardest day. Without saying a word, I immediately grabbed a pack and began backtracking. Cursing myself  the whole way. As it then began to rain. Of course - why wouldn't it? I couldn't imagine what the rest of the guys were thinking of me about this. In actuality - they were not upset much at all, as I found out later. They knew that I was upset, but they - having been here before - knew how easy it was to make such a mistake. Meanwhile, I was busy making a mental mountain out of a molehill - something that those of us on Lupron are more than capable of doing at a moment's notice.
Somewhere along the way rushing up the rocky pass in a personal fury, heart about to leap out completely out of my chest, it occurred to me that I needed to let it go and focus on helping Mark & Larry get everything over while keeping an eye on Bill - who at this point is still sub-par. Things got a little better. On the next and final trip over the pass, something else happened. I realized that in a moment of need, I was still able to step up to the plate and get it done. Despite all of my assorted treatments and side effects, I could still reach down deep inside and summon the man that I was before all of this cancer crap started. It was at that point that life got better. I began to stride up that pass with confidence and a cadence saying  'Fuck you, cancer, Fuck you, lupron, I'll race you both to the top!" the whole damn way. I was alive again. Really and truly 100% alive. Invincibly alive for the first time since I was told those famous words "you have cancer" over a year ago.

After finally finishing that portage, we had a snack, some water, loaded our canoes and headed for the next of several portages, creeks, and beaver dams. I met each portage with a smile and relished every slippery and rocky step. This was my day to shine. Carrying the last of the gear at the end of the final portage, I showed up with two packs - (one on front, and one on back) doing my best Michael Jackson moon walk. Larry noted that delirium had obviously set in..lol. We finally made camp around 6:30 pm. All completely exhausted, but it was a good exhausted - at least for me. My worst day had become my best and most memorable day as well. I slept soundly - with a little help from a nip of Yukon Jack . And we came close to our travel goal. Bill made a full recovery the next day as well.
As I sit here reflecting on the trip and this particular day, I am smiling ear to ear. But I also wonder what lies in store now that the trip is over. It has been by end goal for a while now - even the name of this blog "The trip From The Operating Room To The Outfitter". I guess I need to add a couple of words. How about "The trip From The Operating Room To The Outfitter...and Beyond"? I think I like it.
To quote Martin Sheen's character, President Josiah Bartlet in The West Wing series, "OK, What's next?".