A Long Road Back---and It Continues

It has been a long time since I have been able to write a blog. I woke up on Friday, April 2 and asked my wife to drive me to the emergency room of UMass\Memorial Hospital on Belmont Street because I was coughing up blood. I had previously had an x-ray of my chest in January which showed clear lungs. I had asked my doctor for this because of a persistent cough. The shortness of breath and the fact that I could not do ten laps around the Atrium at St. Vincent"s Hospital without great difficulty convinced me that I had more wrong with me than my doctor's diagnosis
of post nasal drip. This time a chest x-ray showed a cancerous tumor in my right lung which was the size of my fist and was pressing on my esophagus causing me breathing difficulties. I was admitted to the hospital and have been fighting cancer ever since. My oncologist told me that a tumor that grows that fast (the x-ray showed nothing in January)many times can be cured just as successfully with proper treatment. I was blessed with excellent treatment at UMass/Memorial and my wife at home for the past three months. The tumor has now disappeared. All of my chemotherapy sessions are over. Those are what killed the tumor. Now I will have a break of about a month to recover some strength and then I will have to visit UMass's new facility on Plantation Street for a series of 14 radiation treatments on my brain. The brain blocks chemotherapy for some reason, and if cancer is going to spread anywhere, the brain is where it will go. I asked the radiologist if radiation of the brain would affect cognitive thinking and he said no. I hope he is right. So far, all of the catscans have shown that the cancer has spread nowhere.
When all this hit me in April I was meeting infrequently with a second year Fellow nephrologist from Iran at UMass to help her a little in advanced English. I believe she will be all finished next month and I wish her the best. I also presided over my last meeting of the Military Intelligence Association of New England's monthly meeting in Woburn that first Wednesday of April. (Our speaker that month was Al LeFebvre, one of our own members, whose topic was "The CIA versus the KGB---Who Won?" A few days ago I received the national Military Intelligence Association magazine through the mail. This magazine is entitled THE GOLDEN SPHINX. Under New England News they mentioned my illness, but also surprisingly gave a positive prognosis. Now that my name has made it into the national magazine, I am hopeful that some of the agents that I knew years ago who I knew in Baltimore, Washington, and New Hampshire, might make an effort to contact me.