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Photo Friday: Tamara at Early Retirement Journey has been hiking a lot lately. Here's my favorite hike, Tamara. Right before you get to the nude beach at Noosa National Park in Australia. (My question still stands, though. Does it strike anyone else as funny that while exposing every single body part to the sun, nude sunbathers still don a hat?)
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(Posted in Wellness Wednesdays)
I’m in the sixth grade. I come home from school and plop my books on the entry hall table. I find my mom sitting in the living room, not reading, not watching TV, just sitting.
She asks about my day, I tell her I got a part in our bicentennial play, “Let George Do It,” as a cheerleader—the “ton” in George Washington. I sing the song:
Take a G and an E and an O,
And add a little RGE,
And a double-u,
ASH,
I-N-G.
Then you take two thousand pounds,
That makes a ton,
So what do you got?
You got a lot!
GEORGE WASHINGTON!
She laughs. I’m the smallest kid in class—she gets the joke.
So after she congratulates me, she gets up and asks me to sit in the blue chair where she had been sitting, “Sit here and look this way with the window there at your right. Yeah, like that. Do you see flashing lights up to the right when you sit there?”
I didn’t.
“Maybe turn your head a little this way. Now do you see them?”
Nope.
That was the first sign that my mom had ocular melanoma. The cancer that would take her life only five years later.
Like most parents probably would, my parents tried to protect me from the seriousness of the situation. I knew she had cancer but I never fathomed she would die from it. Maybe they didn’t really know. I’m not even sure the doctors knew then what they know now, perhaps they gave her hope.
Yesterday, I learned more about ocular melanoma than I’ve ever known before. This article in the New York Times brought back all those memories and gave me insight that I never had all those years ago.
There’s a new genetic test for ocular melanoma patients that can very accurately predict a their prognosis:
The test identifies one of two gene patterns in eye melanomas. Almost everyone in Class 1 . . . is cured when the tumor is removed. As for those in Class 2, 70 to 80 percent will die within five years. Their cancers will re-emerge as growths in the liver. For them, there is no cure and no way to slow the disease.
When my mom was diagnosed, there was a spot on her liver. So you can see now which group she was in. The doctors monitored that spot for years before it started growing. When it did, they started chemotherapy.
I don’t remember how long Mom withstood chemo treatments, but I remember it being grueling. She’d be horribly sick the first week following treatment, mildly sick the second week, and even though she felt fine the third week, she would fall into a depression, anticipating the next round of treatment.
After several months it was clear that the treatment had failed. She was admitted to the hospital for an even stronger regimen of chemo.
She was released for a few weeks, long enough to come see me one night in my high-school’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie.” But she couldn’t even sit through the whole performance she felt so awful.
It wasn’t long after that that she fell into a coma, dying several weeks later, right after Thanksgiving.
I think if my mom really knew what her prognosis was, she might not have elected to spend the last year of her life hopelessly trying to cure the incurable. Fighting to stay alive, when all that staying alive meant was to be so sick and so tired that she could barely even endure what was left of her life. Chemo didn’t extend her life, it just made what was left of it miserable, possibly even shorter.
There are some doctors mentioned in the Times’ article that are not offering this genetic test to their patients, claiming that their patients wouldn’t want to know if they had a cancer that they could do nothing about.
Besides the fact that you are taking treatment decisions away from the patient with that approach, the final story of the article shows the other downside of that attitude. In the case of the 18-year old patient profiled in the article, she happily turned out to be in the class of patients that would be cured by removing the tumor, Class 1. Based on the large size of her tumor, without that genetic test, she would have been told that her prognosis was very bad, when actually, her prognosis was that she had been cured.
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For the last two years, I have been working part-time as a CFO for a venture capital firm. Basically the exact same job I retired from five years ago, only this time, it was on a part-time contract basis. When I retired, I never thought I would go back to working. Never. And especially not in my old field. But I’m so glad I did. It was kind of like a career do-over.
There are a few things in life I wish I could get a chance to do over, my bachelorette party for example. It was a beach get-away with my girlfriends, of whom one was mad at me the whole time, three were not drinking, and two were on a diet. A weekend of restraint was not exactly what I had in mind. Plus it was foggy the whole time, which wasn't really anyone’s fault, but it did certainly reinforce the mood.
If I had a do-over in high school, I’d ask the guy I really wanted to take to the Sadie Hawkins dance rather than the one I knew would say yes. And as I said in my last post, if I had a do-over of college, I’d just go ahead and enjoy it more without agonizing about the grades.
This part-time CFO gig was a great do-over. I got a chance to work in an environment that was a little more suited to my strengths. I got a chance to do things that I never really got to do in my old job. And most importantly, I learned that I was really good at it.
In one month, I’ll be done with my part-time working gig. Now I feel like I’m getting a chance for a retirement do-over. I’ll soon have all that glorious time back, not just the time that was spent working, but the time that was spent not working but still thinking about work. That’s the part I’m really excited about.
I’d like to think that I’ll be blogging more frequently in my retirement do-over, that my yard and house will be in better shape, and that I will be in better shape too. I have a backlog of photo albums I want to put together and of closets I want to organize. But this time around I know that some days you get a lot done and some days you don’t. And that’s the beauty of retirement.
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