Throat cancer is an Unwanted Visitor

I spent time with my friend who has stage four throat cancer yesterday. He has been very sick after the treatments he has endured.


The testing, the diagnosis, the treatment have left him angry, a shell of the man he was in body and in spirit. All his sixty-one years he was a healthy, active non smoking son of a gun.

It took too long to diagnose he says. By the time they got him into treatment the cancer was advanced into the lymph nodes. Ravaging his body wherever it could take hold.

He was a big man in body. A well rounded stomach that hung around his middle and six feet tall with a big beard.

An intelligence that loved to argue his point until you had to just give it to him.

Now he is left with a body that responds slowly, a loss of the girth (maybe a good thing), no beard and a slack face where the skin now hangs.

He Showed me the tattoo on his chest where they put the radiation gun. It was the target to get the radiation to the point of the problem.

The keemo was used to soften up the tissue so the radiation would be more effective, A double dose of death to bring him back to life.

He was taken to deaths door over six weeks of treatment five days a week. A relentless procedure to fight a relentless disease.

Now he waits. Slowly healing from the loss of taste buds, his beard and a stomach that rejects most foods he tries to eat.

He sits day after day after he rises from his bed to watch television and boringly let the healing take place for one more day.

He says he would not eat if he didn’t have to. Everything tastes like shit. Actually it tastes like nothing and it hurts when it goes down.

He will get his results in a couple of months which will be four months after finishing his aggressive therapy. If it has not worked ...well, he says then it was all a waste of time. There is no next option.

I was taken back to being a ten year old when my mother was dying of Leukemia. Back then they did not have much treatment. They tried blood transfusions but they did not work I lost a parent very dear to my heart and yesterday I felt the loss of my friend as I used to know him. He has few resources to fight with. The cancer took away his physical resource, the one thing about my friend he held so dear.

I was taken back to my own experience with cancer a few years ago, The aggressive treatment, the loss of health and the loss of those aspects of myself I held so dear.

Cancer is a dangerous and relentless visitor that wants to be a resident. My friend has fight left in him and I hold a vigil for his recovery. The world may lose him no matter what.

He is a fighter and he will not admit to giving up. Yet, I see the fear in his face. I hear it in his voice. His wife of some forty years has not yet accepted the potential fate.

At sixty-one years of age any of us would say it’s just too young.

We live on the edge of Grace every day. Now is not the time to waste any of it.