44 and Counting

Upon hearing my diagnosis one of the first things that I, apparently (I was still “influenced” by anesthesia) said was...

“Well, it’s been a good run”  Indeed it has.

As I stare down the barrel of my mid-40s, I get reflective both in nostalgic remembrance and in where the fuck did the time go.  I have a lot of memories and subsequently a lot of stories. Someone once told me that you could bring up damn near any topic and I would have a story for it. From skinny dipping in Utah to storming the castle at Edinburgh, it has been a ride.

Recently though a couple of very close acquaintances brought up some points that had not crossed my mind yet ring very true.  One stated that when my symptoms first appeared, my life was at the best point that it had been at in quite awhile. I had a great job, a girlfriend, a stable living situation and inner peace with myself, my past and my future.  She then went on to state that what if my body was holding things back while I dealt with them and once things were stabilized, it couldn’t hold them back anymore. My body wanted to make sure that I was at a good point and had experienced life. And as my other dear friend stated “At least you got to live a full life before this”,

Truer words were never spoken. My life has been a figurative and literal journey of memorable proportions. But don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean that I’m done. Not by a long shot. I have not given up, I will not give up. Not now, not ever. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a stubborn one and I am not going to let my body’s shortcomings stop me from doing the things that I am still able to do. Yes I do have limitations but they are hurdles not roadblocks.

I have often said that life is one long fun road with occasional serious off ramps. I say this mainly because I think that some people take life too seriously and you have some fun

“Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in awhile you could miss it” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

So as I move into my mid-40s, I see this as more of a turning point. I’m not done living yet; I don’t even think or feel like I’m halfway done. That long road of life may now be under construction, but it is not approaching a dead-end; it is simply a detour and rebuilding towards a different path. I may get frustrated, I hate road construction, but I will try to keep it moving forward. Like a cyclist, I have people along the way cheering me on. The road may be going downhill, but I’m picking up speed.

“What a long strange trip it’s been” –  Truckin - Jerry Garcia. (The Grateful Dead)

 Indeed it has.

8.5.7

The Chronicles of Biff - Volume 5 - 05/14/11

Prologue: Thank you one and all for taking the time to listen to my rants

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The rest of my life.

I swallow 27 pills a day just to make it through yet that is the hardest one to swallow. I’d like to think that I’m only halfway through my journey and it sucks to think that this illness will, in some way, control the remainder.  I try to make light as much as I can by cracking jokes about it, naming it or finding humorous aspects of it at least. But when you strip it all down to its core, I’m scared and angry.

I’d like to think I have the patience of Job but when it comes to this, my temper shows up in earnest. Most of you don’t see it and that is on purpose. This is my battle, my struggle and I don’t think you all should be exposed to every aspect of it.  Maybe that is selfish of me.  To a person, you all have been amazingly supportive and helpful. I don’t think I would have made this far with my sanity as in tact as it is, without all of you. But frankly there are some aspects that I keep to myself. When it boils right down to it, it’s a war that I have to fight and deal with. And it sucks. Majorly. More than anything I’ve ever dealt with and I have dealt with a lot.

There are times when I breakdown, I cry, I scream, I pound my fists. I want it all to just stop. I wonder why me. It’s not pretty when I do and very few of you have actually seen it happen. I keep that to myself. I know you all would be there for me if it did happen around you and would do what you can to make it easier and for that I am eternally appreciative. But I still feel like I am burdening people when I do.

I am horrible at asking for help, I am a horrible, stubborn patient. Just ask Melissa. There have been 2, possibly 3, separate instances where I probably should’ve gone to the hospital. She thought so, my doctor concurred after the fact but I just didn’t want to. I thought it would pass and I’d be okay eventually. It did and I was. In retrospect I should’ve. Why suffer when I don’t have to. In the future I will. But I hope there will be no future of needing to.

I go to the doctor at least once a month just to check in. There really isn’t much she can do for me though. Here is a typical appointment:

Dr: How have things been over the past month?

Me: Some days good, some days bad.

Dr: Is it more good than bad or more bad than good?

(Insert which side of the spectrum it falls on)

Dr: Well, we have the same options to manage the pain, higher of this or this or more of this or this

Me: Let's do this and this and see what works.

(writes prescription)

Lather, rinse, repeat. She has told me that the visits are not a waste of time. I know she feels as helpless as I am frustrated but there really isn’t much more that can be done. Her primary role is to help make the pain manageable and give me the chance to get as much out of life as I can.

The rest of my life.  I am slowly working on accepting that fact.

The Chronicles of Biff - Volume 4 - (written 03/17/2011)

Approximately one year ago today, Biff first reared its ugly head. So do I regret that green beer and the shot of Jameson one year ago today? Absolutely not. Why you ask? Well sit a spell and let’s talk about it.

Everybody has regrets; we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t. That decision we made that seemed to make sense to us at the time but in retrospect, turned out not to be so wise. While it’s true that hindsight is 20/20 think about it; while the decision may have been regretful you have to look at the big picture to truly see its impact. Many a pot of gold has arisen from some bumps along life’s path.  Be honest, would you really take back that one drunken night if it meant that you wouldn’t have that friend that has stuck with you through thick and thin ever since? There are jobs that I regret leaving, places that I regret moving from and friends that I regret leaving but time and age has shown me that I wouldn’t be exactly where I am now, if I hadn’t made those decisions when I did. One thing that people forget nowadays is to take life as a Monet; see the big picture.

I have made the joke more than once that I regretted and would give back every drop of alcohol that I ever drank in exchange to not have to feel like I do on a daily basis. Then I pause, both thoughtfully and for dramatic effect, and say “Nahh, I’d only give back half for half the pain”. I have far too many good memories, good times and did indeed make some good friends during times that involved alcohol of some sort. Anyone who has spent any time around me at all has probably heard me spin some yarn about a drunken adventure I had. Be it doing 26 shots of Apfelkorn (a tasty apple-flavored German liqueur) and having a two-day hangover or being advised by a friends mom that she didn’t know D & D meant drunk and disorderly.

I can’t remember at what age I had my first drink of alcohol. I’m sure it was somewhere in my high school years and earlier than I probably should have. And throughout life, I never was a heavy, at one sitting, drinker. Sometimes though, as in my case, it’s the body of work not the individual moments that will do you in.  Frankly I’d say the number of times that I drank more than 6-8 drinks at once is much lower than most would expect for 20-plus years of drinking. I was a social drinker. I would hang out at bars or with friends and drinks would almost always be involved. Did I think that drinking almost every day was a problem then, not at all. Do I think so now? Honestly I’d say that despite the circumstances, the jury is still out. Most of you may respond to that with

“Seriously? With all the pain that you go through daily, all the pills you have to take, the drastic lifestyle change and all the “whining bitching and moaning that you do on here? How can you say the jury is still out?”

And I would reiterate, through a wincing pained smile, that these things are a part of life. Decisions are a part of our every day and each one we make affects our lives and the lives around us. Call it a kind of butterfly effect I guess. Look closely every little thing you say and do. Analyze its impact on your own life and the people around you. Change one little thing in any aspect and the whole balance of your existence is modified ever so slightly. Put enough of those moments together and you start to lose memories and pieces of our lives.   If we regret those decisions that resulted in something with an immediately negative connotation, then we’d probably shelter ourselves from that reality of life that surrounds us.

So, looking back one year now, do I regret anything I did in my life up to that point? Absolutely not. They are what gave me the wonderful family, amazing friends and endless memories that I hang onto now when I need them most.

Thank you.

The Chronicles of Biff - Volume 3 - (written 11/16/2010)

 I try not to sound melodramatic, that isn't nor ever has been my nature, Sometimes though, my words may come out as such. They are just my true expressions of what is bouncing around in my head, this is my avenue for letting them come out and play for a bit. I do hope you take them as such. Some days I will write more than others, frankly because some days I have more energy and a clearer mindset than others. Now on with the show..

Right now, I am in the greatest battle of my life. I fight everyday with all my energy to make it through as normal and easy as possible. It is tiring, it is draining and its flat out no fun. But battles are something I have grown accustomed to, I have been through some figurative and literal battles. With Veteran's Day come and gone, I was given cause to reflect back to a simpler, younger time in my life as we are want to do often, I want to recall one of the more memorable, positive ones.

It all started with a cake. I don't even remember the reason for it.  On a warm August morning in Las Vegas, like any other late summer day in the desert, I followed my normal routine. Wake up late, rush around, stop for coffee and a Big Gulp and hit my desk with a minute to spare. I had my own office so no one would really know if I was late or not but the days I did happen to be late were the days that someone was looking for me. Ain't that always the case?

As I stopped for my coffee, a headline in the Las Vegas Review Journal caught my eye "Iraqi forces advance towards Kuwaiti border". Well that sucks, I think with a degree of sarcastic sensitivity, but I'm here safe in the USA so go me. I get to my desk and begin my daily routine of doing paperwork for the first hour and a half before doing anything resembling productivity. You see I didn't schedule appointments or do much more than brainless, necessary busy work until about 9 or so. Most people in the office would not even approach me until they were sure I'd had at least one cup of coffee. Around 10, the rumblings began. People milling around with minor urgency, some hush-hush phone calls for the higher-ups and then around noon the information trickled down to us; they were deploying (or sending) a group of people from our base to some undisclosed place for some undisclosed reason. I was still wondering how this impacted me when our boss stated that were sending 3 people from our office to go. You now have my attention.

Now comes the cake. In selecting who was to go, our boss had to balance knowledge and experience of personnel for both the mission and the office. Being the most experienced of the lower tier I was right in the middle, but figured they would keep me back (wishful hoping is more like it) but he said it was down to 2 of us; myself and my co-worker Joe. I suggested a coin flip which did not meet with as much humor as I expected. When the boss said he was considering me because of said experience, Joe began to protest saying something like "Cmon man, why can't I go" as he walked backwards and sat right in the middle of a cake we had a birthday in the office. "THAT is why you are not going, congratulations Jerry" Great, thanks for that Joe. And for the record, yes he's on here and will read this and agree with and corroborate most of what I am saying. If not,Joe and Moe, that's how I remember it.

I could go on about the Desert Shield/Storm experience for pages and pages but that is not wholly the purpose of this rant. Needless to say that 18 hours later, I was sitting on a plane bound for Myrtle Beach, SC then to parts unknown (they never even told us as we took off from Barcelona headed there and I'm not wholly sure I ever really knew where we were). My attendance at The World's Largest Beach Party, as I affectionately called it, lasted from early September 1990 until about mid-March of 1991 (wow it has been 20 years). During that time I learned to play Spades, played a lot of Boggle and Rummy, did a lot of training and about once a night or so, awoke to Saddam's scud alarm clock.

I sometimes don't feel like I really "fought" for my country as much as I was just holding down a place for America's security. When I came back, the first thing my grandfather, may he RIP, did was to sign me up and take me to VFW. Being a veteran himself, he beamed with pride as he introduced me around to the other veteran's. A part of me didn't feel like I really belonged there, I mean these were guys that were in armed combat, stormed hills and beachheads and protect forts and outposts. I played games, trained a lot, killed flies on guard duty and wrote a lot of letters. However one of the WW II veterans put it in perspective for me. He said "You signed up to defend your country, you went halfway around the world to defend your country and put in the same position as us, you have done the same things we did"  He did have a point.

I wear my veteran's status with pride. I still have my uniform and yes it still fits, I'll get some pictures sometime to prove it. I wear it from time to time in remembrance of my service, of those good, simpler times and and to prove that no matter whether the battle I'm fighting is against a foreign enemy, a 10 of spades or a chronic illness, I am a fighter and I am a soldier and I always will be.

Thank you for taking the time once again.

The Chronicles of Biff - Volume 2 - (written 11/02/2010)

Apparently Biff likes ice cream. Who would have thunk it. He also likes Count Chocula, Double Stuf Oreos and lemon drops. This is a good thing because I do too.

I think one of the biggest casualties in this whole thing has been my appetite.  When I first when to the doctor about this around the end of March, I weighed a svelte 195 lbs, more than I had weighed in a long while. This was probably due to the new anti-depressants that I was taking. Once the cramps and pain started kicking into full gear, the weight started dropping. At my lowest point, right around diagnosis time at the end of May, I was 176.

Try the new pancreatitis diet plan and watch the pounds just melt away.

The lbs were slowly dropping off with each doctor’s visit and new test. First came the sonogram checking my pancreas (just the surface) and found nothing. That was followed by an endoscopy looking for ulcers or infections, nothing, the a CAT scan looking at my pancreas again, 0 for 2 on that one and then a nuclear gall bladder scan (which was really cool because I got to see my gall bladder glow) which resulted in no answers either.  By this point it was going on two months and I had resorted to Web MD, and Mystery Diagnosis for any inkling of an answer.

By this point I was seriously starting to wonder if this was all in my head. All of the tests were showing nothing and there were no physical symptoms to justify what I was feeling. I began to wonder if I was really stuck with this until it "passed” or just stopped as suddenly as it started. My doctor/savior was still curious and undaunted in her quest to get answers. I was and still am very thankful for her being as stubborn as I am. She really believed it was my pancreas despite all the other tests being negative but I began to see her frustration with it as well. She said that she wanted to try one more thing before referring me to a specialist. Let me back up a second, I talk in lots of medical terms lately and have become very familiar with my abdominal area and any and all tests involving it.  This time they wanted to put another tube into my throat, this time with an ultrasound monitor on it, to further look at my pancreatic area.

One more time...with feeling!

This one seemed a bit more serious and I actually was feeling a combination of hope and fear that this would find out a) what was wrong and b) that I wasn't crazy. Well, I am crazy but that's another rant for another time. Thus I digress as I usually do.  Once again they wheeled me in, numbed my throat, put me to sleep and once again, I remember nothing but the nurse saying something followed immediately by waking up in the recovery room. It was really quite odd to just lose pieces of my life like that. After trying unsuccessfully to wake me up a few times, the doctor gave up and the nurse was there when I came to. She told me that they found out that it was chronic pancreatitis. Then my girlfriend walked ib and apparently, I say apparently because I don't completely recall bits and pieces when I come out from anesthesia, I raised my hands in the air and said

Me: "We have a winner!"

She: "What is it"

Me: "Chronic Pancreatitis

Nurse: That means you can't drink anymore

Me: Does that mean I can't drink anymore?

Nurse: Yes

Me: Well, it was a good run

One thing this has not taken and will not take from me is my sense of humor. When it does, it means I have given up. And anyone who knows me knows that I am nothing if not stubborn. And so the journey began from there. I don't think I truly and immediately grasped the meaning of my situation until I went back to the doctor (to whom I repeated the "we have a winner" speech) told me what this diagnosis meant going forward. Words like, no cure, rest of your life, take all these pills everyday, rest of your life, don't drink anymore, rest of your life! Those words echo in my head, every day, they consume me at times. In those moments my sense of humor is gone. I want to give up. I want to give in. I want to just lay in bed and let it win. Take medicine, do nothing, be on disability and basically become nothing more than a shell of who I used to be.

But in those moments, I hear the echoes of my mothers voice in my head when she told me "You control the disease, do not let the disease control you, this thing does not define who you are and you cannot let it, or it wins" Stubborn I am and I don't like to lose. Rest of my life?? Bring it on!

The Chronicles of Biff - Volume 1 - (written 10/25/2010)

PROLOGUE:  Anyone who knows me, knows that I have stories, and I love to tell them. Some say I even have a knack for it, I just enjoy sharing my experiences, emotions and feelings in words. I find it therapeutic and cathartic and if there’s anything I need right now, its something to make me feel better.  All that being said, I have decided to jump start my writing again as I embark on this new phase in my life.  I will chronicle things as the words come to me and my health allows me.  I cannot promise that these will be happy, inspiring or entertaining writings but they will always be honest and a true representation of what I am feeling and thinking at the moment. So without further adieu..away we go

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Days like this are the hardest.

I have come to accept the fact that I will never be completely well ever again.  I really didn’t have much of a choice. Acceptance of a brutal truth is one of the hardest things that one can do and I have been forced to either accept the cards that I have been dealt or fold my hand and pack it in.  And I don’t give up that easily. For once, my stubbornness comes in handy.  But I am only human and there is only so much that any human being can handle before beginning to show cracks and my cracks become evident with each passing day. I breakdown on a weekly basis, I have frustrating crying fits, I swear, I punch the air and I scream. But I never say why me. I think it, but I also know that the events that lead to this were most likely caused by my own actions and indiscretions. Some may think my words here are over dramatic or whiny but I am going to be blunt here; if you felt what I feel and had to live with what I live with on a daily basis, I would defy you not to be.

I live with chronic pain on a daily basis due to chronic pancreatitis. Basically my pancreas, which aids in the digestion process, doesn’t work like it should thereby causing a traffic jam in my abdomen resulting in almost constant, sometimes debilitating pain. And the hardest part? There is no fix for it. This will be with me for the rest of my life. The rest of my life; a phrase that most commonly causes above stated breakdowns and is the hardest part of this whole thing to live with. The only treatment per se is to take pills. Pills to aid in digestion and pills to try and help to make the pain manageable. Manageable, that’s a laugh. Pain is never manageable, it is omnipresent and intense. The only difference is that it waxes and wanes depending on..hell, depending on its mood. There is no rhyme or reason to it. So just to “manage” through any given day, I take  23 pills at least 27 pills a day, not optionally. I have to or else it only makes him (Biff, I’ve named it in an effort to find humor and make it somehow easier to deal with) angrier.

Back to today, it is one of the bad ones. I do have good ones, meaning that the pain is lessened but still there. This could be due to Biff’s mood or the meds or hell, the tides and cycles of the moon. I don’t know, it’s unpredictable.  What I feel varies as well, Biff has his different incarnations, all of which are equally annoying.  Sometimes it feels like a pins and needles consistent pressing just below my ribs, sometimes it feels like a muscle tensing throughout my abdomen and most times it feels like that bloated ache that you feel after you eaten a big meal; except that this one doesn’t go away.  Then add on top of any combination of those, the side effects of the 8 different types of medicines that I take, such as dizziness, queasiness, exhaustion or headaches and such you have about 75% of my current and future existence. Just in case any of you ever wanted to relate to or imagine what I’m going through, there ya go.

In the past 7 months, I have learned more about the pancreas and the digestive process than I ever really cared to know.  It always seemed like a very enigmatic organ in that I didn’t really know its purpose was. From my mom being diabetic, all I really knew was that it was responsible for producing insulin and that diabetic’s pancreases didn’t work very well. I once remember asking my mom “Can’t they just take it out and put in a good one?” Seems rather prophetic now in retrospect. 

In actuality, the pancreas has two functions. In addition to the production of insulin to regulate blood sugar, it also produces enzymes that aid in breaking down food.  Apparently mine has decided that it doesn’t want to break things down as much anymore. Why?  It seems like the experts don’t know how exactly it gets damaged, why the pain exists exactly and why it doesn’t heal itself.  Apparently mine has scars, I have pictures, but these scars will not heal. What kind of body part doesn’t, in some way, heal itself?? Scars on your skin do, burns do, bones heal, muscles and tendons do but no, the pancreas has to be the odd man out and give up once injured. Like the kid who gets knocked down in the dirt during baseball and just gets up and goes home, vowing to never play the game again. What kind of sense does that make?

If I start searching for things that make sense in all of this, I will just exhaust myself. All I can do is make it from one day to the next, knowing that I could feel okay one day and crummy the next. Tis the nature of the beast, and the beast is cranky today.

8.5.7