Last Sunday was my older daughters HS Graduation. She has been out of school since the fall semester, but they must attend the graduation in order to get the certificate (and because my wife insisted that she get to she it.)
As I sat in the crowded gymnasium with the kiln like temperatures and the various scents of overdressed, perfumed, Midwesterners on a church day beating down my senses, my thoughts drifted to a day almost 12 years ago.

I had just been diagnosed with lymphatic cancer and was looking at X-rays and CT scans showing a series of 2 cm tumors under my collar bone, and a large 18cm tumor in my chest wrapped around my heart and pushing out 75% of the volume of my right lung and 35% of the left. My Dr. Juan Carlos Garcia La-Fontainethe ugliest man in all of Paraguay, was explaining to Monica and I that he was having the first of 12 to 14 chemo treatments prepared for me. He said that he had never seen such a large tumor from Hodgkin's but that he was going to hit me with as much medication as my body could take to get it turned around before it metastasized. I was already so sick that it took me 12 min to walk into his clinic from the parking lot, but he said they would wheel me around on a cart before he would let up on the high doses of very destructive chemicals he was going to pour into my blood.
You see, chemo therapy is poison pure and simple. The idea is to poison the body in such a way that the cancer dies faster than you do. The particular poisons ,and there were 4 of them, were going to attack fast growing cells like the cancer. Other cells affected are finger and toenails, hair, mouth skin and flesh, bone marrow, and several organs that regenerate themselves. So in addition to the poison, you receive may other drugs to reduce swelling, water retention, and nausea, as well as heartburn from the acid reflux caused by your stomach lining being abused.

The words he said to my wife Monica are what came back to me as I sat through that long graduation ceremony.

"I will be very hard on your husband Mrs. Bouck I will nearly kill him in order to save his life. If we do this, and hurt him bad enough for long enough, he will be sitting next to you at your daughters graduation. I hope to give you 15 to 20 more years of yelling at this man to take out the garbage, and sitting next to him at weddings and graduations. This is why he is so sick and I am going to make him sicker."

Of course the reason I was thinking these thoughts was because of my wife. When we sat down I made my usual grumbles about pompous fools and silly dress clothes and wasting time. She had just leaned over and whispered into my ear

" You have one more to get out of high school and all those weddings and college graduations to attend. Dr Garcia said 15 to 20 years of weddings and graduations. That was 12 years ago so shut up and do your time. "


I shut up!