Give to The American Cancer Foundation!

A little history for those in my family, who will survive me when I die, only because I believe you will need it.

Cancer is well known to me and my family, but to me personally more than most. It started popping up in my family history through my Grandfather on my mother’s side way back in 1971, when he died of it in a Nursing Home in Waterbury, Connecticut. He suffered from and died from prostate cancer and went at 71 years old. At the time I was young and didn’t get the idea, that someone was taken from us with a deadly disease and what it meant for the rest of us. I would learn over time.

Cancer some Doctors will tell you, is a gene in the human body that they have no idea, of what it is caused, but it is handed down through genetics. No they can’t treat it well or kill it and it attacks in numerous places and forms in the human body. Yes, it has wiped out and killed many billions in the world and is still at it today in 2018, we have no cure as of yet.

Cancer came back to me and my family for the second round, and won again. I spent many years tracing my real father down, because I had to know for myself where I came from and about him. I found him in a small town in New Jersey when I was 18 years old and called and went to visit him, and them saw him two more times alive. We didn’t have much in common other than an artistic streak, and looks, I look just like him almost. The resemblance is so strong my mother hated me for it, so that tells you something right. Anyway, I received a call while in the U.S. Navy in 1984, my father had died of cancer. He died of lung cancer, he smoked two packs a day, and died in a New Jersey Hospital. I went to his funeral and represented my side of his family and did what I could, but cancer doesn’t care about age, sex, or anything else, he was 55 years old.

Time they say passes slowly and the rest of the 1980s did too, I served my time in the Navy, and had a total of 16 years total, before I was forced out on a Medical under Honorable Discharge for back injuries, namely bulging discs from a fall aboard ship. When I did get out it was July 1989, and my marriage and home and family life were gone shortly after by April 1990. I had no place to go and was alone and i returned home to my parents place to get on my feet, they took me in for a month or more. I also ran dead into cancer again, my step-father, the man who had raised us all, was dying of cancer also, he was 59 when he went, lung cancer took him October 1991.

One year and one day later my mother died in a bed in my sister’s home of lung cancer also, it was October 1991. Cancer had ravaged my family, big time. Yet, I knew not what more it was going to do. How could you know right?

Cancer is if nothing else deadly, and a killer  and it is persistent folks, very. I met a woman, and lived with her for seven years before we married and I made her my second wife, it was September of 2000. We had and have a great life together and a great home, the love we have for one another respect shows all over the place and people see it. In 2006, we got hit again by cancer, my second wife came down with breast cancer and it was back to the hospitals and doctors again. This time we fought well and bravely and she survived, breast cancer is deadly folks. We put her through an operation and removed 29 lymph nodes under her left armpit, and then ran her through a series of Chemo and radiation treatments at Danbury Hospital. She survived it all and the cancer went into remission for a while.

Life went on for us and one day I went to the West Haven Veterans Hospital for a check-up. My Doctor down there is really an APRN, and she is one smart cookie and a good person. She asked about my family history with cancer and I explained it all to her, she immediately put me in to a program the Hospital was running to scan all Veterans who have a history with cancer. I didn’t expect anything of course I felt fine.

Two days later my phone would ring, it was August 2013, we had survived my wife’s cancer scare from 2006, but cancer was done it was my turn. My Doctor told me on the phone when she called I needed to get down to the hospital and see her. When I asked why, she said, the Pet Scan she ran me through had revealed I had lung cancer! I was crushed, I cried and I went to see her and the Doctors as fast as possible. On September 4th, 2013, I underwent surgery and lost a lobe and one third of my right lung. I came back fast enough, and even ended up in Boston’s Fenway Park on September 16th, 2013 to see my Red Sox beat the Yankees. I survive still today in 2018. Yet Cancer doesn’t surrender or give up folks it keeps coming.

In 2016 January, my wife’s breast cancer came storming back and of course she was still under the watchful eyes of doctors. Her left arm where all the lymph node were removed is swollen up and won’t do down, and we have reached 2018 now. She had radiation treatments on her arm to try to reduce the pain. In the meantime the cancer has spread in her, by way of her blood stream, she now has it in her bones. It is located in her sternum, her spine, and her shoulder and is spreading outward now into her tissues in her chest wall, shoulder areas and who knows where.

We have called and looked for answers and treatment to Boston, New York, and Yale New Haven, all large cancer treatment hospitals and specialist. No one has invented or found a trial or treatment for this breast cancer she has that works in anyway. So after, months of searching we are now back to her main Occolonist in the Harold Lever Center in Waterbury, Connecticut and we have had a port installed in her once again, for chemo treatments to begin next Thursday.  I shall sit by my wife and watch her take her taxol and do whatever I can for her. Her infusions will begin and we shall do what we can to keep her going for as long as she wants it, she is now 77 years old and will be 78 in September. When it will end I have no idea, how it will end I sure I am know and so do you and anyone else who has had or knows someone who had had cancer knows. The only question really left now is when and where it will happen, that my friends is up to GOD!

Do me a Favor, My Family a Favor, my Wife a Favor and the world a Favor,  Fight Cancer, Give to The American Cancer Foundation! Give so less will die and more will live!