Fighting for My Life: Guest Post by Shan O'Meara


           When I was in the initial stages of my fight against epilepsy, I was having seizures all the time. By all the time, I mean once maybe twice a month. I thought this was too many, but now knowing that people have multiple seizures in a day, some rolling right into the next, some having dozens a day, or even nonstop seizures, I feel very fortunate and very naive to say that my seizures were bad. Compared to some other people, mine were fantastic, as far as seizures go. As the Creedence Clearwater Revival song goes, I am the Fortunate Son.

            The stage four esophageal cancer I have now is going to be harder for me to overcome than the seizures. Although there is no cure for it, just like there is no cure for epilepsy, the cancer can be brought down to its knees to remission with the appropriate number of chemos, surgery, radiations, or combination of the three. I guess then, since I am just starting out, this is just like the initial stages of epilepsy, where it will take a certain amount of time, let’s hope not too long, to figure out what the correct method to get the cancer under control will be and send the cancer into remission.

Each doctor I saw for epilepsy was optimistic that my seizures were capable of being controlled. My doctor now for the cancer rolling rampant in my body also thinks my cancer will be sent into remission, as well. Otherwise, he told me that if I have nothing done in regard to esophageal cancer, I would have only a year or two to live. If I did what he told me, optimistically maybe four to five years. We are hoping for remission, and we are hoping for it soon.

I feel like Rocky Marciano going up against Sonny Liston AND George Foreman, at the same time. Marciano never lost a fight in his career and I will not blemish his winning ways with my fights against both epilepsy and cancer. I don’t know if he ever got knocked down, but he always came back to win the fight. He kept fighting and never lost. Rocky always went forward   and was victorious in every fight he fought.

            My seizures are finally under control to the point where I don’t have to worry about them much anymore and have learned that my seizures won’t come close to killing me. The cancer that I have could eventually end up killing me. As morbid as it sounds, it could be the end of me, but I’ll fight to stop it!



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