Lets see. What do you need to know about me? Besides I consider myself on the "old" end of life.

Well, life. That's a good place to start.

Not much of a life anymore. This May, it will be two years since we discovered I have cancer. Talk about a kick in the ass! That was a monster kick. It was one of those things that NEVER happened to me. It was always a "happened to someone else" kind of things.

I have Melanoma. Yeah, skin cancer. The amazing thing is that for the last thirty or so years, I have worked night shift. Yeah, I spent all my time working and living at night. Even days off, vacation, long weekends, weekends, I kept to the same schedule. I would go to bed around 9:00 AM and get up at 4-4:30.

I had several hours to wake up and get ready for work. So, if I spent thirty years OUT of the sun, where did the skin cancer, Melanoma, come from. I had always heard or read that if you had even one serious (like blistered from the sun) sunburn, even as a small child, you can get Melanoma many, many years from then. Yeah, I can remember several serious sunburns as a kid. Especially at the start of Summer. So, maybe that is where I got it from.

The only reason we found I had the cancer is because there was a seriously large lump in my left armpit. When I say "large" I am saying in the neighborhood of the size of a baseball. No, that wasn't right. It shouldn't be like that. I have a tenth grade education, but even I knew that wasn't right.

So, surgery was in order, to, first remove the lump, and secondly, once they had it out was to diagnose it. Yep, Melanoma.

Needless to say, that was a rather shocking thing to have dumped on me and the Old Lady. Melanoma is un-treatable. Nothing can be done about it. They (the Oncologist's, yeah, more than one. I figured a second opinion was in order) wanted to experiment on me. They wanted to send me to a "Trial." Experiment with different drugs, six in my case, to compare the results with a known drug, Interferon."

I could not pick which "Arm" of the Trial. A computer would do that for me. As I don't like hospitals, the computer picked me to go in the hospital. So, I got six different drugs pumped in me over the course of six days.

Somewhere between taking my clothes off and putting that idiot hospital gown on and then finding myself dressed and standing out on a street corner waiting for my wife to pick me up, I had blacked out, somehow, all of my time in the hospital. I do not remember one single solitary thing about my hospital stay. Nothing...

I was to do this three different times. Go in the hospital, get the six days done, stay home for twenty to twenty-five days and go back in and start all over.

I had to go back in to the hospital three days after I got out the first time. It was an emergency room kind of trip. It seems like I was severely dehydrated and bordering on the edge of starvation. It seems like I had not eaten anything in something like nine days.

So I stayed a couple of days and had fluids pumped in me and was given "soft" foods to eat. Very bland and tasteless crap.

When I got out of the hospital again and I had time to regain some of my strength and I could sit for longer than ten minutes without drifting off to sleep, the Old Lady and I had a conversation about me doing this again. I put her through things I swore I would never put her through.

I needed help getting up and down, whether it was from the bed or from the chair in the living room. If I couldn't get her in the bedroom to get me up fast enough I would crap all over myself. So, she had to drag me to the shower and clean me up and then would have to clean up the bed. Those were some of the things I swore I would not do to her. I broke that.

We decided together, over several days of conversation, that we would just take whatever time I had left (or whatever God gives me) and enjoy ourselves.

The Trial was in December of 2006. By the time August, 2007 hit, it was evident that I would not be able to continue to work. I had to put in for disability retirement. What's that comment above I said? Something about a "kick in the ass." Yep, same thing.

So, after six months of waiting, I finally got approved for my retirement. It is a good thing the Old Lady and I had some jingle laid back or we would have lost everything. As it is, we are starting to get a bit low. I guess I should lay off buying games for a while, huh?

Naw. I gotta play. You think sitting (or laying) around the house is easy? I am going bug, uh, er, ah, poop, yeah, that it, I am going bug poop sitting here. So a game or two ain't gonna hurt. Especially if the Old Lady don't find out. Then it will probably hurt. In my current condition, she can probably take me two out of three times. Sheesh...

OK, enough for today. I probably put some of you to sleep.

Oh yeah. This is a "just in case" kind of thing.

For us, this is not a real big problem. Well, maybe. We have accepted. It happens. It just happened to me this time. I didn't write this to bum anyone out. Just some background about me and mine. Peace, Brothers and my little Sisters.

D.