Why am I doing this?

Obviously I don't have the time for it. I have a more than full-time job that requires my attention  7-days a week (I would say 24-7, but I do sleep about six-hours per night and I have been spending a lot of fruitless time in the bathroom).

If you are my friend, some of this stuff you heard before in bits in pieces at parties or budget meetings at a newspaper.

While, I hope my friends care and that they are worried about my family and will jump in to help them if something horrible happens, I am not looking for sympathy.

I really do find all of this interesting.

When I first learned I had prostate cancer, I had a very difficult time finding any useful information.

It was either so technical that I couldn't understand it, or so dumbed down and lacking in detail that it was useless.

The other night I got a call from a friend telling me that her father-in-law was having a prostate screening and she needed to give her husband some words of encouragement.

For one thing, he heard, that the biopsy he was about to have was very painful.

"It's not," I said. "It certainly sounds painful. It's not fun. It's uncomfortable. It is not something a reasonable person would look forward to, but it is not something to dread."

I described the procedure in an earlier post but I will reiterate here.

A TRANSRECTAL NEEDLE BIOPSY OF THE PROSTATE GLAND, WHILE UNCOMFORTABLE AND DISTURBING, IS NOT PAINFUL.

You don't get up off the table and want to dance a jig. You have to stay off a riding lawnmower, bicycle or motorcycle for a while. You have blood in your urine and in your semen. But, I can guarantee you have had more pain on the dentist chair.

My current situation:

I'm on my last week of radiation therapy and my last week of chemotherapy for treatment of my rectal cancer.

The radiation fields are being reduced to two – they will be shooting the beam at either hip beginning today and skipping the shot at the middle of my back (butt). I will still get the same amount of radiation – just concentrated more.

The chemo therapy is being administered by a pump that is attached to the port in my chest. At this moment I have had 8.3 ml of 5FU administered since about 11 a.m. yesterday. The total amount I will receive is 55 ml. I should be done at 11 a.m. on Saturday, May 27.

Thursday is my 10th wedding anniversary. Last night we decided that we would do little to mark it. The preliminary plan is to wait until we get a bunch of stuff behind us this summer and have a Graser Family Thanksgiving (maybe in September). Then we can still celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving.

I weigh about 240 pounds now, the most in my life (I played defensive line, noseguard, at good old PHS at 160 pounds and was a varsity wrestler in the 119 pound weight class (I was horrible). The weight now is good. The doctors want me to keep it on. Weight loss, I suppose, is a sign that the cancer is winning.

I was in the treatment room at the oncologist's office yesterday with two older women who were asking everybody who came in a ton of questions. It was their first treatment and they figured everybody else was a veteran. I know they had talked to the doctor and to the nurses before they got to this stage of their treatment, but now, they wanted real answers from real people. "They told us what is going to happen – but what happened to you?"

That's another reason for this blog.

I was a little hesitant to tell them. One of the ladies was getting 5FU but she was getting it in five sessions at the office rather than through a continuous pump – like me. She was also being treated for stomach cancer and had already had an operation. All very different from my situation.

I would hate to tell her that the 5FU as a piece of cake. It has been easy for me, but I have spoken with other people that had a horrible time with it.

"I have found through my treatments," I said. "That you can get used to just about anything."

They agreed.

One of the women was 84 and had some sort of bone cancer. She told me she wasn't interested in any treatment at first. She was going to leave it up to God. Her doctor convinced her that God might want her to have the treatment – without it she would surely die, with it she had a chance for many more years. You would never guess she was 84 – she looked to be in pretty good shape.

I don't want to be fighting cancer when I am 84, but if I have to, I will. Even at 47, there have been times when I thought that maybe it would have been so much easier to not say anything about my situation and let nature happen.

Then Lucy comes in the house all covered in mud and magic markers and I resolve to never give up.

Next time, I will write more about my recovery from prostate cancer. In the meantime, if you have any specific questions let me know. I can only tell you what I know from my experience and everybody's differs, but still, it's an answer you might not find anywhere else.

Check out An Inch an Hour for more day to day stuff with my current treatment.