Breaths and being breathless

We will know if the new treatment strategy for reducing the tumor size has been effective when I get my next CT scan in 8 weeks. What I do know now is that transplantation is no longer an option for me. With the tumor invasion of the portal liver vein, the prognosis for me remaining cancer-free post-transplant is very slim. It raises the likelihood that even if I could get a donor liver surgically implanted, I will spend the next 6-months to a year dealing with recovery and complications from the surgery, and then will probably require another liver transplant as the donor organ becomes seeded with new cancer cells again.

My personal choice, which I am making now with the new knowledge about the portal vein invasion, and input from the leading national doctors in this field, is that I will not pursue transplant surgery and I will only pursue additional chemoembolization treatment if the next CT results show significant shrinkage in tumor growth. If results are not seen, my goal will be quality of life over quantity.

These past few months I have been feeling in excellent health and state of mind, except when undergoing treatment for the liver cancer. As a result, it seems like a very natural choice to allow life to run its course. I plan on staying active, living strong and maintaining realistic optimism. I have a lot of life left to live and I choose to stay busy living, rather than stay busy dying through experimental treatments, which, at most, will give my life a few extra months of breaths.

I read a quote a few years ago before these health issues were part of my life, but it struck a chord with me and I remember it today. "Life is not measured by the amount of breaths that we take, but by the number of times we are left breathless!" I choose the joy of being breathlessly excited by life than the battle for extra breaths at any cost. These photos along the right are moments from my life that made me breathless. How many more breathless moments await me that I might miss if I am at home or in the hospital dealing with the side effects from surgery, chemo and treatments to attain those few extra breaths.

Will I still feel the same months from now if I am feeling sicker? Will I change my mind and seek out those extra breaths that western medicine may provide? I doubt it. But the human mind is constantly taking on new information, recalculating new possibilities, resassessing new outcomes, and reprioritizing the existing issues in life. That could mean that I may change...but I doubt it. This feels like me. As authentic and deep-rooted as I have ever known.

Do I feel differently about death from most people? I do not know. I only know how I feel. I want to live, but I accept that death is a natural part of life. Why should my fate, my death, be any different from any other death that has ever occured on our planet? I am just an animal with the unique gift of being able to ponder my own existence. Living on a piece of rocky debris orbiting a small star in an average galaxy, one among billions, in a universe that has existed for eons and will continue to exist for eons more when I am gone.

Why should my death be any different from the death of anything composed of random combinations of atoms and molecules that was born, thrived and then faded away only to become part of another wondrous feauture of the universe? We live in the wilderness of space. No different than the wilderness of earth. Planets, stars and galaxies will continue to be born and die. Our Mother Earth eventually be consumed by Our Sun or by some other natural cosmic event. Our Sun will also eventually die and blend into the Milky Way Galaxy. Our entire universe itself has a beginning an end and rebirth. The elements that comprise my body are part of this universe and thus part of the eternal birth, death and rebirth of the universe. Lucky me to have been part of the dance of existence for a short time and to have had the consciousness to appreciate its glory.

When did existence first exist? When will it ever end? These answers will never be known, but comtemplating them provides the mystery of life. For now, I am happy to know that I am star dust returning back to the stars. Eons from now, some being will look up and wonder about the bright lights he sees in the skies and I will be part of what he sees. What a gift life is. But we can not to hold on to it forever and there comes the time to give it back from whence it came and let it continuously evolve and create.