So, my best friend, my younger brother is diagnosed today with stage 3 colon cancer. He is a 14 year veteran and still currently serving in the Air Force, 32 years old with a wife and 2 boys of 9 and 7.
This news has rocked us all and nobody even remotely expected it, even the doctors.
Our family has been through alot since 2006. In oct of 06 our Dad at 52 years old had emergency 4-way bypass surgery. (never smoked once in his life). The following spring he gets prostate cancer and beats that, thank God. Then several months after that, Dad is diagnosed with an incurable lung disease and has to have a transplant.
Fast forward to June of 2010, my family loses a beloved grandfather unexpectedly. But things swing back to good, and just before Thanksgiving that same year, my Dad gets a lung transplant, and not a minute too soon as his condition had deteriorated quite a bit at that point.
Now things had been going well, Dad is recovered to the point you would hardly know all he had been through in the last few years.
It seems our family has finally proven ourselves.
On Halloween day, my brother goes in to have his gall bladder removed due to gall stones. Things seem good the first couple days until his symptoms return. A week in the hospital of trying to get a supposed blockage to pass, they open him up for exploratory surgery to find and remedy the blockage.
Then it happens, the surgeons find a large tumor in his colon and remove it along with 2 or 3 lymph nodes. Since that day, it seems like a bad dream. We had been holding on to hope that the pathology would reveal a benign tumor. Today, we get the news that it in fact was malignant. I still feel like this is a bad dream. I cannot believe I am looking at my little brother dealing with a problem he doesn't deserve, much less his wife and kids.
I have wished to trade places with my father at many points along his oh so bumpy roads these last few years. But never has that feeling been so strong as when I see my little brother laying in that bed, still himself coming to grips with the fact that the C-word has laid it's icy hand on him and his family. If I could trade places with him right now, I would happily do it. Even though he would be mad at me if I told him that.
My brother is a member here, but I don't think he has ever posted. I hope he doesn't see this, and frankly I'm not sure why I am posting this. I just feel the need to put this down in words to let it out I guess. I know none of this concerns you all personally, but I know many of you have suffered due to this aweful, soulless thing that is cancer. I guess it helps to get it out...
I find myself sometimes trying to get my mind off it by losing myself in the day to day routines of life. But in a way, that seems selfish to me...
Sorry for the long post...
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Originally Posted by RIDE-RED 250r
