HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!

A belated Merry Christmas and a very happy and successful New Year to all of you!!!

Sorry for the time it has taken me to get this latest blog entry out - December has been a tough month for me. Actually, it has been the toughest part of the whole process - and it doesn't make any sense.

The reason it doesn't make any sense for December to be the toughest month is that my son Scott, and I, just returned from Houston on December 20th from a follow up check up and the news was great! All of the doctors were genuinely excited about the results of the tests we had this time. Everything is perfect! All internal repairs have healed properly and the best news is there is no more cancer. As a result of this report, there will not be any more chemotherapy (Thank God) unless something else turns up, which they don't expect.

This is absolutely fantastic news - what more could a person want? I guess until we were down there and actually face to face with the doctors, I wasn't all that sure that everything was okay. The recovery period has really been tough on me.

In fact at one point I scheduled appointments with my own primary care doctor and pulmonary doctor here in Albuquerque as I was certain that something dreadful was wrong. They both examined me, took x-rays, had lab work and both said everything was fine. They both emphasized that I had gone through a very major surgery and considering what I had gone through - everything was great. In fact, they both kind of treated me like some kind of a hero. The pulmonary doctor told me that a lot of people don't survive this surgery. I am sure happy I didn't discuss this with him before the surgery. My primary care doctor is a wonderful person and a wonderful doctor. He is Navajo and has practiced medicine for some time and is very knowledgeable and always takes plenty of time to explain in detail everything about your condition. He said he had patients who had almost every kind of surgical procedure including some of the most extreme involving heart and pulmonary, but he never had a patient who had gone through this particular surgery called the Whipple Procedure. I was his first! He even called me a hero!

Since being discharged from the hospital and coming home for recovery, I have experienced one of the most miserable times in my life. I have had a lot of pain from the incision on my stomach which was nearly 50 staples, then there was a lot of internal surgery where they removed a big part on the pancreas, a large part of the small intestine, my gall bladder and several other things they discovered and didn't know what to do with. Then to do all of this, they had to spread my rib cage apart and that left me with a really sore frontal area which went all the way around to my back.

I worried a lot about all the pain I had and couldn't help but relate what I had gone through to another experience of mine. I am not a handyman. On occasion I have had to try to fix a leaky pipe under the sink or somewhere else in the house. The routine is (1) try to find the tools I need. This is usually a one to two hour process as I finally end up finding the pair of pliers I am looking for in a kitchen drawer because my wife has decided that is a handy place for her to find them when she needs them. Then the nice long screwdriver - it has obviously been used to stir paint and is in a corner in the garage and the crescent wrench is laying exactly where someone dropped it when the finished using it six months ago. (2) go to hardware store to get parts I will need to fix leak. (3), (4), (5) repeat step (2) as I return to hardware store because I got the wrong part or it didn't fit or something else caused it to be a rejection. (6) crawl into a little space under the sink through a door that was made to accommodate a midget, twist around until you are on your back facing the repair job you need to make, your back is killing you because you have your spine resting on the edge of the bottom of the shelf, and now that your are facing the work to be done, you realize your arms are still outside the little cubby hole you have forced yourself into. (7) extract yourself and with careful study and calculations get your arms and tools inside the little space below the sink and start the repair job. (8) let wrench slip at least one time and come crashing down on the bridge of your nose or your forehead, disconnect old pipe and allow stagnant water to pour down on your face and then call your wrench, the sink, and anything else in site - all kinds of horrible names. (9) Complete repair job and extract yourself from the cubby hole and look in bathroom mirror with a sense of pride as you have fixed the leak and it only took nine hours. (10) turn on the faucet and watch as your shoes get wet and everything under the sink is now soaked as water is spraying from six different directions from the one pipe you just fixed. (11) call the damn plumber! He is only going to charge $300.00 but he can't get to you until next Wednesday and you will have to take the day off because he can't say exactly when he will be there - sometime between 7:00 am and 6:00 pm.

Now every time my belly would start hurting - which was almost constantly, I couldn't help but wonder if something might have come loose down there or if something was leaking. They did some major repair work - creating new connections, moving things from one place to another, etc. Did they use enough duct tape, did they tie a double knot on the string, did they get the right pipes connected? They closed me up and didn't leave a window to check on how things were going down there. With my own personal experiences with plumbing mishaps - can you blame me for wondering?

When I first came home they gave me an ample supply of pain medication with few restrictions on using it. I used it extensively for about the first ten days but I didn't like the side affects. I was having goofy dreams, waking up thinking I was in conversation with someone who wasn't even there and then remembering things and not being able to tell if this was one of my dreams or if it actually happened. The pain medicine also made me very lethargic. I was content to sit in a chair all day long and just stare off into space. I didn't want to do anything. I didn't even want to eat. I was very happy to just sit there until I dozed off. I didn't like anything about the pain medicine except it was great for eliminating the pain. But, I decided I would rather deal with the pain than the side affects, so discontinued the pain pills.

In addition to the pain from the surgery, I have a bad back and I just can not lay on my back for more than a few minutes without my back killing me. It is like a body sized tooth ache. When I was in the hospital I was in a hospital bed which hurt my back - but I was on the pain pills and even had an IV that I could turn on any time I wanted to which would increase the pain medication. From the time I was discharged - November 5th, until December 20th - 45 days total, I did not sleep in a bed. I had to sleep in a recliner chair. I could not sleep on either side or my stomach because of the stitches, and my back was now worse than it had ever been because of pulling my ribs apart. The recliner chair was not perfect - in fact I would wake up roughly every hour to hour and a half - but the bed was impossible. This whole thing added to me being tired most of the time too.

The big issue has been my weight. Weight has always been a BIG issue with me, but a little different than what I am dealing with now. Where do you think some unkind person came up with the name - "FAT ALBERT" ? One day someone saw me going into the Post Office and said - "There goes Fat Albert - Hey - that would be a great name for a cartoon character on TV." Another time some big shot military types saw me at the airport and said - "There goes Fat Albert - Hey - that would be a great nickname for that big clumsy looking slow airplane we have in the fleet." Now I am getting even - they are going to have to cancel the TV cartoon and put the airplane in the junk yard. An abbreviated diary of my weight is as follows:

250 - When tumor was first discovered - Feb16th, 2007

245 - First visit to MD Anderson in Houston - Mid May

237 - After two weeks of daily chemotherapy twice a day plus radiation once a day

232 - After 4 eight hour sessions of chemotherapy in Albuquerque

227 - Night before surgery in Houston

209 - Day I was discharged from hospital in Houston

189 - After two weeks recovery at home

179 - Houston on December 20th

172 - Today - December 30th

My weight loss has been just a little under 80 pounds during this time. I have had little to no appetite, almost any food I think about eating just doesn't taste good at all and I can't eat it, and almost anything I eat almost immediately causes pain in my stomach. This adds to my tiredness and lack of interest in doing anything - including things I normally really enjoy doing - like this blog. I also apologize to many of you for not being too responsive to emails since the first of December. I have just been wiped out. Finally I came in one day and discovered I had more than 500 unread emails. I am so very sorry and hope I haven't offended anyone - I have just not had the ambition to do even something so simple as that.

A year ago - 2006 my wife was in London to celebrate New Year's Eve with her granddaughter. I was at home by myself taking care of all the chores, feeding sheep, milking the cows, cooking, sewing, domesticating all over the place. Also at this time we had a record breaking snow fall. We had between 16 and 18 inches of snow at my house. I am sure that amount of snow does not impress many of you, but for Albuquerque - it is a whole bunch. As I said - it was a record breaking snow fall.

Exactly one year ago today, I went out on the drive way and slipped and fell hard on my left knee. This was a knee that needed surgery but they had not done the surgery because of an aneurysm they found behind that knee and an aortic aneurysm they found in my chest. In any event - I now had all this snow to deal with and a knee that was hurting.

They next day - New Year's Eve (while my wife was in London enjoying all the sites, watching the fire works, enjoying champagne, living the life) I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico shoveling snow. As an old farm boy, I wasn't going to mess around with one of those sissy aluminum snow shovels that you would send your wife out with - no way. I had me a big old scoop shovel that you use to move grain with in big heaping loads. I started putting heaping loads of snow on my trusty scoop shovel and hurling the load out into the middle of the street like a man should do. Now this snow was wet so these loads were even heavier than they normally would be. There was a snap - then a sharp pain and then the left arm went limp - as I tore a muscle in my left arm.

New Year's Day - I went to work and we had something like 300 cars we had to move and practically park on top of each other so we could plow the rest of the lot and then move the cars back. Right in front on the show room on the concrete apron, one of my co-workers slipped on the ice and started to go down. I grabbed for him and both of my feet went straight up in the air and I came down on the concrete on the back of my head. Those who were there said my head bounced off the concrete at least six to eight inches.

I spent New Year's day in the emergency room. Did I mention that at this very moment - my wife was in London having a good time while I was in pain in the emergency room?

So, 2007 did not start off in a very positive manner from my point of view. But this wasn't the end. I had been having this shooting pain in my chest for several weeks and finally decided it wasn't going to go away. In fact I started to become a tiny bit nervous about it. So I called the cardiac doctor and left a message that I was concerned there was a problem with my aneurysm. It took his nurse a week or ten days to call back but she said there was no problem. If it was my aneurysm, she said, I would be on the floor. She said she thought it was a hernia and to call my primary care doctor. I left a message with my primary care doctor and it didn't take his nurse long to call me back. I was having lunch with a co-worker and they had just delivered this huge hamburger with french fries and a beer when my cell phone rang. The nurse said they were sure it was my heart because of my medical record. We argued a bit as I assured her it wasn't my heart, but she insisted and told me to get to the emergency room immediately. Are you kidding me? They just brought my hamburger, fries and beer. She called back almost immediately and wanted to know if I had someone to drive me and we got into
another argument as I insisted that I would drive myself and I would go slow.

The date of this little episode was February 16th - just shortly after the start of the year, and I will always remember that date because that is the day of my son Scott's birthday. On this day I spent 7 hours in the emergency room and this is the day they discovered the tumor on my pancreas which turned out to be cancer.

With this kind of beginning in the first 45 days of the year, it would be easy to just give up and go under cover for the rest of the year. However, even though they discovered I had cancer early in the year, this in itself was a blessing and even though I went through some pain and suffering with the treatment prior to surgery, then the surgery, and now the recovery - these events from start to finish have been filled with blessings. First they found the cancer, next I discovered MD Anderson, I had successful chemotherapy and radiation treatment in Houston and in Albuquerque, I had the best of the best for surgeons, I survived the surgery and the very last thing in the report that everything is great and they got all the cancer.

God Bless my family, all of you and hundreds of people - many I don't even know who have made this a truly blessed year for me.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OF YOU!!