You'll regret the things you haven't done

Writing/Cancer support group

Assignment: Thoughts and feelings regarding an important emotional issue that has affected you and that might affect recovery.

You might think that getting cancer –and then a recurrence, would be my current big emotional issue. I'd think that. But it's not as depressing to me as I'd think it ought to be. Now, I have to figure out why that is.

When my wife and I got married, I asked her to make a deal with me. The deal was that we wouldn't have any kids who were more than 30 years younger than us.

That wouldn't be so difficult. We were 21 when we married. Our youngest daughter, Miriam, came to us when we were 31, but she was an unplanned adopted child, and she was 11 months old—so she slipped in right under the wire. Our other two kids are two and three years older than Miriam.

So what does that have to do with an emotional issue from cancer? The kids are kind of elderly right now. They're 38, 37, and 35. One might, if one were feeling expansive and generous, consider them to be adults.

That's a weight of responsibility off my mind. Even if my cancer comes back, I've raised my kids. They could be considered adults, and, more importantly, they're doing a very nice job of raising their kids.

When Carolyn and I were younger, and raising our family, our parents were not as accepting of our choices as we'd have liked. Particularly the choice to adopt two of our three kids—biracial--half black, half white.

But all the kids turned out OK other than the one little problem that one of them seems to have become a lawyer.

So, now, you'd think—if he's so accepting that he's done his job in life—he won't fight, battle if you will, as hard against the cancer. And there was the temptation to refuse the treatment with “curative intent” that they offered me at the Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center when my cancer recurred and was stage four. I thought, at the time, that the “curative intent” was just a ploy so they could make me feel truly miserable during the treatment without them having to feel bad at all. They offered to use a new radiation machine that they'd only just installed the previous week, the Trilogy. I figured they were using me as a guinea pig, and that at the end, my cancer would still be incurable.

And that still might happen. My wife and kids (adults?) weighed in on the side of going for the possibly curative treatment, although they pretty much knew I'd have to make the decision myself. I have to say, having been in a situation where I needed to decide for myself, and where I knew I, personally, would have the last word, that I still wanted to have a consensus with my family.

It's been about seven months since the treatment, which did make me feel truly miserable for about a month, has ended. Since then, I've been free of detectable cancer. More importantly, I've been free of cancer treatment, and I just had a negative scan, so that guarantees me three more months of not being poisoned or irradiated. And that's pretty good.