The tides of winter

I don’t know what it is about late January and early February and the deaths of people I care about. In 2010, I lost my mother. In 2011 I was just beginning to emerge from the numbness that enabled me to endure Jane’s death–and lost a former student I’d coached to a heart attack. In 2012, I lost a former student who was like a daughter to me. In 2013, I lost one of my closest high school friends. Three days ago, I learned another high school classmate had died.

This isn’t over until we all say it is.

Death has swirled around my mind endlessly the last five years. I’ve lost my wife, my mother, my father, my father-in-law, and more people than I can count. I’ve attended more wakes and funerals in the last five years than in all the years before combined. I have young friends who talk about how all the people they know are getting married and having babies. Too many of the people I know have died. And I hate funerals.

Mind breaking point

None of that includes the many people I have met working on NET cancer who have died in those years. Their names stick in my mind–but I have no idea how many it is. I don’t like to think in those terms. I worry when I don’t see a post from someone for more than a couple of weeks. Sometimes it just means they’ve gotten busy with something else. Sometimes they’ve gone into the hospital for an embolization or other procedure that leaves them too tired to do more than recover. Sometimes the next thing I hear is from a closer friend that they have died.

Death has swirled around me endlessly…

In mid-January this year, my mind cracked. It didn’t matter that there were things I needed to write, events I needed to plan for, forms I needed to fill out. It didn’t matter that work on the 3-in-3 campaign was hanging in mid-air or that our Marathon Walk team needed me to be focussed on it–or that this website needed some daily attention. I curled up in a ball on the couch and read about World War II, did crossword puzzles, and tried not to think about death or politics or the Zika Virus or my training schedule or, most especially, NET cancer.

Recovery

I’m still a little shaky. The crossword and the comics in my daily newspaper call to my mind like Sirens.  The seemingly daily anniversaries of the deaths of people I cared about threaten to entrap me in a shroud the way a spider wraps up a captured moth. But I’ve begun to move again–and I know things will get better.

…my mind cracked.

In fact, I can see them getting better every day–especially on the NET cancer front. The new issue of Hematology/Oncology Clinics is devoted entirely to NET cancer–and was edited by Matt Kulke and Jennifer Chan. The AdVince Virus developed at Uppsala University has–at last–been approved for a Phase I/IIa  trial in Sweden. A similar level trial of immunotherapy sponsored by the NET Research Foundation gets underway later this year as well. And those two trials are of agents that might finally offer something better than managing the symptoms and slowing tumor growth.

Getting there

I’m in the process of drafting fundraising letters, struggling with a series of slides for potential donors, and sitting on some other news I want to shout from the rooftop–but can’t even whisper about until the official word comes down. Soon, I’ll start reading through the papers in Hematology/Oncology Clinics and trying to put what’s there into a form a general audience will understand and piecing together some events to help fund the future of NET cancer research.

I’m still a little shaky.

I feel badly about vanishing the second half of last month. But I also know there are times my mind will insist I take a break whether I want to or not. It is the nature of both grief and this work–at least where I am concerned.

But I’m still here. This isn’t over until we all say it is.