Repaying my debt...

If you are ever in my situation and your family member is prescribed Clindomycin, ASK FOR AN ALTERNATIVE!!! Without going into graphic detail, it causes the recipient to have diarrhea, and lots of it. It's totally uncontrollable and occurs, for Pop at least, about every two hours. Thank God that scrip has been changed. I may not sleep again tonight, but perhaps..perhaps, tomorrow.

That's the day I've had. Well, two days...since about 4:30 yesterday morning.

Balance that with the fact that we still haven't started radiation therapy yet. The cancer is so aggressive, yet we have to wait until Monday for them to draw some fluid from around his right lung. I blistered the phone lines (to no avail) trying to find out why we were experiencing this delay in treatment. I got nil, until I involved our primary in this. So, tomorrow, I will be at the office of the pulmonologist / oncologist to get answers. I will get answers, and yes I will be a prick if necessary. I don't care.

From all the research I've done, the prognosis for this cancer is...wait for it...anywhere from seven months to five years. Think about that, the survivability ranges from seven months to five years, and it all depends on how soon the cancer is discovered. As I mentioned previously, Pop didn't have it in late August, yet it took only five weeks to take over his right lung. Five weeks, and we've yet to start radiation? At this point five years seems way too optomistic. I'm gonna' light a fire under someone's ass tomorrow.

As an aside, I tried to get the American Cancer Society to allow me to use their logo on this blog. While they were very supportive and understanding, they disallowed the use of that logo. Really, all I wanted to do was to give people the opportunity to link to their official site, but they pleasantly (truly, they were quite pleasant) denied me that opportunity. They cannot, however, stop me from asking you to support them. Simply Google "American Cancer Society", visit their site, and support them if you can.

Like so many other's with family members with cancer, I need rest. Good night.

So what kind of cancer is it?

If you expect that someone that has smoked for sixty-seven of his eighty years might contract lung cancer, you'd be correct. Yes, dad started smoking at the age of thirteen using the only 'tobacco' available to country folk at the time, "rabbit tobacco". It is, apparently, what the kid's of that day and time smoked.

It did not, according to Pop, have any hallucinatory side effects. Which, should that have been the case, would have provided for a law banning the inhalation of said weed. And it is from I've gleaned, just that, a weed. A weed that, to this day, still grows wild wherever wild weeds grow.

Anyway, back to the cancer. The diagnosis is that of "poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma'. It is aggressive (it wasn't there in late August) and, surprisingly, is prevalent not only in smokers, but also in women and those that have NEVER smoked.

I'll try to provide more detail later. Today has been long and, frankly, in the past two days I've been bombarded with so much information, I'm still trying to process everything.