Time to Start Rebuilding this Brokedown Palace

Picking up where the last entry ended, there is a song written by Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia that has haunted me many times during my stay in Cancer World.  It's called "Brokedown Palace" and like many Hunter/Garcia songs, it can have many interpretations.  My own is that it's a story being told by someone whose body has given out (thus the brokedown palace) and they are preparing for the inevitability of death:

Goin' to leave this brokedown palace
On my hands and my knees I will roll, roll, roll

Going home, going home
by the waterside I will rest my bones

After my surgeries last year and this year, I would quietly get very emotional when I heard this song, and often had to turn it off.  While I never thought that my death was close, the song did remind me that my body has been damaged in so many ways from seven years of cumulative side effects from chemo and radiation, and surgeries.  It is a truly brokedown palace in many ways:

--my left leg  is about 90% functional which causes me to wobble sometimes
--my left arm has a large scar from the 2015 surgery and is about 80% functional
--my left hand has restricted range of motion and reduced grip strength
--I can't raise my left arm laterally above that shoulder
--my left and right shoulders are not in balance
--my neck area has large areas of fibrosis and loss of sensation
--I have only five bottom teeth, all on the right side
--I have hair growing in my mouth, from the patch of arm skin grafted there this June
--I have a noticeable speech impediment, especially as the day goes on and I get fatigued
--I've had both cataracts replaced
--my lower face is disfigured

I'm sure there's more, but you get the picture.

But, the point here is not to feel sorry for myself, or to seek pity.  As my oldest brother Jim once told me "Any day you can get out of bed with both feet hitting the floor at about the same time, is a good day."  I can do that, and with the second dreaded PEG tube in the past, and regaining enough function to start exercising again, I can begin to rebuild this brokedown palace.  I know it will take a long time, and it will be a difficult road after seven years of physical setbacks and creeping age, but it's time to start.

But, there is another motive at work here.  One of the realities of life in Cancer World is that every major episode--be it damage from treatments, recovering from surgery, or (God forbid) a recurrence--takes an extreme toll on one's body and psyche.  Some people fight very hard mentally, but the accumulated effects on their body can sometimes not be reversed, and they just give out physically.  While I want to get stronger and healthier to feel better for its own benefits, I also want my body to be as ready as it can for the possibility that those persistent Prairie Dogs might show their ugly heads again.  If they were to surface again right now, I have serious doubts about my ability to fight them off.  I need to get rid of those doubts.

When all of this started--almost 7 years ago exactly now--I defiantly called my blog "Mike Metzler Beats Cancer" for good reason.  I was full of enough piss and vinegar to will my body through the coming ordeals, and I was determined to beat the Prairie Dogs into submission.  After these seven years, I know that I have not beaten cancer--it has changed my life and Terry's life in profound ways that will never end.  But, I have survived cancer for seven years and counting, and looking back--that was the more realistic goal to have

So, the best way to keep surviving and to be ready if the Prairie Dogs come at me again, is to rebuild this brokedown palace into a stronger, resilient structure.

mike