Song for a Friend (Music)

A picture is worth a thousand words…and so is a melody. I’ve written music since I was five or six years old. I studied composition at university, but eventually dropped out of music school. But one thing I’ve found is that I can somehow express my deepest feelings with music where words would just fail me.

 Here's an instrumental track I wrote and recorded in my kitchen in 2009. This tune was written for my dear old friend, Kirk, who I’ve known for over 20 years. Kirk and I live less than an hour apart, but I swear it’s been ten years since we’ve seen each other in person, which just ain’t right…

Kirk and I usually send each other silly emails each Christmas. But I hadn't sent one the last two holidays because I was going through chemo each time. I finally decided to send that silly email, and like always, we were reconnected. Before I could tell him I had been diagnosed with incurable cancer, he told me his wife of many years had just died of cancer in the last year. Kirk is a curmudgeon and a grump old fart who is funny and a pleasure to be around. Even though it was an email, I could hear his heartbreak through the wires.

Listen 

When Goodbye Really Means Goodbye

Goodbye. It’s a word we use all the time. We may also say something like: see ya later, so long, farewell, bye-bye, and others, but goodbye has a more formal ring to it. But despite that, our intended meaning is often something like "until we meet again.”

I had a couple of cancer friends who died last year. In both cases, the last time I saw them we hugged and said goodbye to one another. I had no reason to believe that we would never see each other again.

Cancer is a cruel and unmerciful taskmaster. Alas, another lesson learned that bites like the bitter winter wind and knocked me off my feet like a right hook would from a champion boxer.

Always say goodbye like it may be the last. Sometimes goodbye really means goodbye.

I'm alive, I'm alive

I'm one month out from my last and final chemo. My PSA last week on the three-week checkup was 0.97. That's pretty amazing considering I started at 5,306 a mere 16 months ago. My first line-treatment (docetaxel and Lupron) only lasted about six months before my PSA started going back up, but we did get it from 5,306 down to 22, and that's a hell of a decrease. I started with such a high PSA that an improvement was almost a given during my first round of chemo. When my PSA started going up, I finally learned what cancer treatment disappointment is. I'm stage 4, so my cancer is incurable, but I had hoped the first-line treatment would have kept my PSA in the normal range for months, if not years. It was like the first time you nick a precious porcelain tea cup and you know it will never be the same even though the whole time you knew it was inevitable. But no matter how much time you have to prepare, you're never quite ready for it.

Today I read a post from a guy in a metastatic prostate cancer support group who said that his PSA had started going up after 20 months of being on abiraterone acetate (Zytiga), the same medicine I started a few months ago. This made me think of the stage 4 cancer as a chronic disease debate. Truthfully, as long as my medicine works, I can actually think of it that way. But once my medication quits working, and the medication after that quits working, and then when I'm all out of options, well there you have it, end of story.

Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely grateful that there are medications (even the chemo) and options that can keep me a alive a wee bit longer. But the fact is, in the end I will run out of options. I play this over and over in my head, imaging how I'll feel the day my "chronic condition" goes terminal. I'm in this odd position of uncertainty and shaky middle ground, feeling somehow that despite have incurable cancer, I'm not sick enough to be in the "cancer club" (imposter syndrome) yet knowing the day will come when I most definitely will be.

I mostly focus on the present, enjoying life moment to moment. I still feel that I have so much to give before I go and that somehow I'm helping others. So the time spent feeling helpless is relatively small, which leaves me plenty of time to feel fearless. I have my bad days, don't ever think that I don't. But I do have really good days, days where all the little pieces of life seem to fit together. It's at those times when I want to scream, "I'm alive, I'm alive!" and know that I really am.