East of Moline...

If you were to look up Shorewood, IL, on Google Earth or Google Maps or Google Mildly Useful Product #341, you would see that west of Shorewood, all the way to Moline, IL, on the Illinois-Iowa border and on the banks of the Mississippi, there is, essentially, nothing. Oh sure, there are maybe a couple of hundred houses stretched across a couple of hundred miles, but really, there's just nothing.

Driving along Route 52, or Route 80, it's a rather featureless landscape -- lots of flat fields, green in summer, brown any other time, growing corn, wheat, and soybeans, and providing forage and space for hogs and cattle. All of those are important -- but it makes for a boring, even dreary landscape.

Adding to the dreariness, we are here in Shorewood to celebrate and mourn. We are here to celebrate Cherie's dad's birthday, but here to mourn that this is likely the last birthday he will live to celebrate.

He suffers from terminal, metastatic prostate cancer. Seven years ago, while prepping for surgery to repair fractured, weakened bone in his upper right arm (the consequence of another cancer, liposarcoma, that he beat, and the severe doses of radiation he endured to beat it), doctors found the prostate cancer. He suffered every treatment the fine doctors at the University of Chicago could come up with -- chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, more chemotherapy, androgen deprivation (aka chemical castration), various drugs in various phases of clinical trial, and soon more radiation-- but no treatment has been able to fully arrest the growth and spread of the cancer. He has suffered loss of appetite -- for food and sex -- had to shit through a pillow, lost his hair, puked his guts out, pissed blood, filled with fluid, nearly gone comatose, had his testosterone level driven to zero, suffered radiation burns to his skin -- has survived every side effect that has been thrown at him -- but it hasn't stopped the cancer.

Instead, slowly, inexorably, it has spread to distant regions of his body. He has lesions in his shoulders, back, and ribs -- and more growing in other places, not large enough yet to show up on the various scans he endures on frequent visits to the hospital. Doctors long ago stopped talking about remission, first retreating to talking about slowing the disease, and now talking about "palliative" care -- reducing pain in the face of fairly imminent death. The lesions are growing, more are appearing, the cancer markers in his blood are more numerous, and the pain he suffers is greater by the day.

No amount or variety of painkillers eases the pain completely. Sometimes he swallows oxycodone until he passes out. He sleeps off and on all day. But the pain is always there. The lesions eat through bone, causing tremendous pain, and weakening his bones to the point of fracture. The lesion on his spine may eat right to his spinal cord, which he won't know until one day he wakes up paralyzed, or just doesn't wake up at all.

He's not yet 60, but he shuffles like an 80 year-old man. The radiation treatment he will soon begin will target the individual, visible lesions, seeking to shrink them and reduce their impact. Ultimately, the treatment will fail, and it will be time once more for a decision he has faced several times already -- fight on, or give in -- and die?

Fight on, he says. More medicine that makes me puke, he says. More radiation that burns my skin, he says. More chemotherapy that makes everything taste like metal and gives me hemorrhoids and makes my hair fall out, he says. I've fought for seven years, he says. I've seen four grandchildren born, seen the first reach first grade just today, he says. I've seen a son and a daughter become parents, and I've seen another daughter grow into one of Boston's finest surgeons, he says. Fuck you, cancer, he says. I'm not done with you yet. You may have taken my brother, mother, every uncle and aunt I've ever known, others I never got to know, and you may get me, he says, but NOT WITHOUT A FIGHT. Seven years and counting, and I'M NOT FINISHED.

And that's why I love him. For all the agony -- the pain, the suffering, side effects, the bad news, the march of treatment, failure, treatment, failure, treatment, failure -- he blazes on. For his children, grandchildren, wife, brother, friends, and for all those who fought and lost and all of those who fight on still, he blazes on.