I hate cancer

My dad has been diagnosed Multiple Myeloma for 4 years and 5 months. Originally, they had no idea what kind of cancer it was, because he was carrying two types of cancer - Myeloma and Lymphoma. He had been complaining about a soar back for many months, he had tried Kaiser doctors, chiropractors and herbs. It was when he saw an acupuncturist, who told him that he had something very wrong with him, that the real studies began. Through rigorous bouts of chemo, the Lymphoma was killed, but the Myeloma held-on.

In the summer of 2002, my dad went through a stem cell transplant of his bone marrow. Out of 6 siblings, not one of them matched his bone marrow, so he couldn't have a transplant. Do you know what a stem cell transplant involves? Well, in order to get a good sample of bone marrow that isn't infected, the doctors practically kill you with chemotherapy, take the sample and send you home (in a clean, sterile, environment) for a month to come back to the hospital and start again. This happens three times. When it is time to spend a month at the hospital for the actual transplant, they actually bring your cancer count down so low, through chemo, that you can barely do anything. It's not a pretty picture.

So, my dad went through all of this with the hope that it would put him in remission (although there is no known cure for Myeloma) or it would give him a large extension on his life. It worked. At first, it worked. Aside from making my dad extremely tired and weak for a year, and probably forever, his counts did go down and were barely visible. He also went on an alternative medicine doctor's high frequency machine that has helped keep his counts down. It's funny to see the doctors become baffled by this, because for all intensive purposes, his counts should have been higher.

But, not long after we lost the breast cancer battle with Mitzi and with Justin's uncle, Ron, we are here, again. My dad's cancer is back. He has refused to do any further treatment, but he did buy a better high frequency machine. We're going to see where that takes him. We have the luxury of time on our side. Myeloma is not a fast cancer, as far as cancers go.

I don't want to be here, again. I don't want to lose my dad. There's too much that's going to happen that he needs to be there for. I have always been and will always be a true "daddy's girl." He is my buddy and we have a relationship like no other. The really strange thing is that no one in my family is talking about this. Maybe they're all feeling what I'm feeling - like if you say it out loud, then it exists, but if you say nothing, you don't have to deal with it. I know my mom isn't saying anything about it, because she told everyone that dad was in remission - which is impossible to declare so soon and really at all with Myeloma, in general. I don't know why my sisters aren't saying anything. Well, I guess I expected that from Jacqui, because she tends not to deal with stuff head-on. But I think that we're all just so scared, so tired, so very, very tired of cancer. It has claimed the lives of so many loved ones. To watch someone lose a battle with cancer is literally watching them wither away to just a shadowy figure of the person they used to be. This cannot be the way my dad goes. He's too good for that.