Hi Julieann and fishmanpa (Mark)

Thank you both for your warm and friendly welcoming words! It's a pleasure to be here (hell, it's a pleasure just to "be...") My (first) distant metastasis recurrence promoted me from Stage IV to Stage IV c. Five year survival rate, from dx, is Zero for those of us with the "c."

That said, I've been in much worse shape a couple of times in my life with the same odds, and yet here I am.

On Nov 5, '66, I was a Capt in the Army, stationed at Ft Sill, OK. At 0530, I was the sleeping passenger in my then new '66 Corvette (yep, I was single. How'd you guess?) when the driver, a young German Luftwaffe Feldwebel (Sgt) decided to run a red-light to save a couple of minutes on the way back to his temporary barracks. His entire unit was at Ft Sill, training on a US weapons system that the germans were purchasing from us, but they were headed back to Germany at noon that day and had been restricted to barracks as of midnight. So he was AWOL, technically, and didn't want to get caught.

A local cop saw him run the light and lit up the party lights in pursuit. The kid driving panicked and put his foot in it, and the car went airborne. The OK HP estimated his speed at over 145 mph when it did. It cleared an Armco guard rail with all but the left wheel, tearing that and the entire Left rear suspension from the car which continued airborne for 264' before landing on the nose and going end-over-end for more than 600' after that.

I was declared DoA at the scene, he was found over 80' from the car with a shattered left ankle, several cracked vertebrae and a 7" long fracture of the skull.

I had a right side flail chest; 7 ribs were broken off about 3" from the spine and overlapped about 3"; while 5 of them were broken off again on the side. My right lung was shredded by the jagged rib-ends and my chest cavity was filling with blood and bodily fluids which threatened to collapse the left lung.

I was admitted to the Post Hospital, officially DoA and left on a gurney in the ER OR while they worked on the kid for over 4 hours. I was actually taking one ragged-breath a minute, so they put a sand bag against my chest to give it shape, and a saline IV.

I'd thought that trying to walk on a tibia broken into 4 pieces was painful, but I was wrong. As soon as I was able to maintain consciousness long enough to stay sitting up, they sat me up and told me my lungs were now full of blood clots and I would have to cough them up. Now I don't know if you've ever broken or even cracked a rig, but that is painful. So much so, that trying for forcibly cough for any reason is way up there on any list of things to avoid if at all possible. I actually did this, and produced hunks of what looked for all the world like large pieces of raw liver the size of a man's hand with his fingers extended straight out.

Although they told me I'd be hospitalized six months and on convalescent leave for another six months, I walked out of the hospital 39 days after I was wheeled in on that gurney. In 67 days from the accident, I was declared fit to jump out of airplanes again, but the Army, in its infinite wisdom, decided that I was too big a health risk to go to Vietnam, and so I got out of the Army and went over with another government agency.

Three weeks after landing at Tan Son Nhut airbase, I was in Pleiku in the central highlands, getting assassinated. I took two .32 cal rounds to the gut and two through my right thigh, one of which went squarely through the Sciatic nerve and the other passed harmlessly through the muscle. That cost me the permanent loss of control of my right foot and the use of my calf.

The ones in the gut were not so benign, one went through the iliac artery, the second largest in the body. I actually bled-out in probably less than 3 minutes; the doctor at the 71st Evac Hospital, who operated on me when they brought me in, later told me that my survival of that was impossible, Rigor Mortis should,in his words, have been leaving my body by the time he saw me

I have that one in the back of L3 in my spine (it hit the spine - talk about a bone bruise...) and I have the other also, deep in the pelvic cavity. The two of them got my liver, spleen and nearly every fold of intestine in my body. Now that, mes amis, was not a fun recovery.

But I did recover and was back in Vietnam, at work, in less than 4 months later and stayed there for another 3 plus years doing my job.

So, why am I telling you this tale of woe? Because there's no woe it it at all.

When the shooter produced the gun and advised me that I was a dead man, I had every reason to believe him; and I have never been so terrified of anything in my life! All the clich�s are true; I thought that a freight-train would come roaring out of the hole in the end of that gun, and smash me flat! He was between me and the only escape route, and he started shooting when he was only 6' away!

I realized in a most visceral way that my string of luck had finally run out and I was definitely going to die in the next seconds with no hope whatever of rescue or escape; and at that moment, I had an overwhelming flash of Satori!

I realized that I was a dead man, but DEAD MEN HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR!

Really, I cannot possibly tell you how wonderful that feeling was! I'd been dominated by fear since I was a very young kid, and suddenly, it was all gone!

Not only that, but when I applied to Johns Hopkins for admission to their study to determine the impact of Psilocybin on death anxiety in patients with terminal cancer, they refused me because I don't have any. Dead (wo)men have nothing to fear, and freedom from fear is the best feeling in the world!

No one gets out of here alive so don't worry about it. No matter what the cancer takes from you - you always have something left, celebrate that and accept that life taking its pound of flesh is just the cost of living at all.

Well, we here are all paying our dues to life now, please make sure you get full benefit from the membership and LIVE.

My brothers and sisters of the big C.