Cancer Blog
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #1:
July 31, 2021:
“send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.”
For whom the bell tolls, by John Donne
Hi, I’m Brian Zimmerman, and this is my first entry in my blog about my experience of dying. My intention in this series of entries is to document my thoughts and encounter with the event of dying. This is not a discussion of political news or cultural problems, though I may occasionally allude to such things if they’re appropriate, but I’m mainly concerned to try to help anyone who’s been diagnosed with a terminal illness, or is concerned about death and dying, or may have a parent or child or friend or neighbor who’s going through this process.
That Donne Quote
I may sometimes provide a quote at the beginning of an entry because it’s related to what I’m going to write about, or maybe just because it’s a quote concerning dying that I have found helpful. The Donne quote at the beginning of this entry is an example of one related to this entry. It may seem from the quote I gave that he’s simply saying that we all have to face death at some point. But, if you google the poem and read it in its entirety (it’s not very long), you’ll see that his real point is that we all as humans are affected by each other’s death. This is the poem that begins with the familiar line: “No man is an island…”. We’re not islands, but a part of the continent of humanity, so are affected by others, especially in death. So, though I write as a Christian, I also write as a part of humanity in our common experience of death.
My friends requested I do this “journaling” to help them in understanding my and perhaps their preparation for death. But, I also have a medical background: a bachelor’s degree in medical technology (nowadays clinical laboratory science) (and even taught clinical chemistry in a school where seniors in affiliated colleges would come for a 12-month program to learn how to perform hospital laboratory tests), as well as a doctorate in physical therapy (I graduated in 2010). In between those two careers, I worked for Hewlett-Packard for almost 21 years on the service side in the field, and took early retirement at age 55 in 2007 to move to another city with my wife to enter the doctor of physical therapy program. I practiced as a PT in a number of settings: acute care (hospital), spinal cord injury (rehab and a special pressure ulcer wound care program), outpatient briefly, then finally in home health physical therapy for the past 6 years. And, my wife is an RN who worked for many years in surgery. So, I’ve had a fair amount of medical experience, and educated a lot of patients on PT principles, but also on more general medical ideas that I thought would help them understand what they were going through. So, I’ll try to explain PT ideas, but also more general medical issues (such as lab tests) and terms in terms that I think most people can understand.
Cancer in My Lungs
So, now I’m 69 years old, and have been diagnosed with esophageal cancer (cancer of the tube running from your mouth to your stomach. Mine is just before the esophagus enters the stomach). That tiny spot of cancer metastasized (meaning some cells from this original spot of cancer, called the primary tumor) travelled somewhere else. In my case, they went to my lungs and grew like gangbusters. So, now my lungs are full of cancer. Not lung cancer, but cancer in my lungs. There’s a difference. What’s in my lungs is actually a GI (gastrointestinal, meaning from your gut) cancer, not lung cancer. It’s stage IV (we’ll talk more about staging and prognosis later), treatable, but not curable. So, I’m on two kinds of chemo therapy (one oral, one IV), and another IV treatment in a clinical trial called immunotherapy, which is designed to attack specially my type of cancer (in my gut and in my lungs).
That’s what I’ll be talking about during the rest of my entries. My faith and medical experience of what it’s like to be diagnosed with a disease that’s going to kill you and the medical work to try to extend your life as long as possible.