It’s been over a year since that fun brain surgery and life keep passing me by.

It’s been over a year since that fun brain surgery and life keep passing me by.

One year eight months ago I was a cancer survivor. 22 Feb 2010, I became a brain surgery survivor.

Which one was the worst to survive?

Brain surgery.

I would rather go though another series of radiation treatments than another 10 hour surgery!

My life as I knew it changed for the worst. Cancer holds nothing to what I’ve gone through since I woke up from the anesthesia.

When I rang out after my last dose of radiation and the 2 last chemos I was able to go back to work and start to gain my weight back and look at life as a new beginning. I could honestly say that life was great!

Now I am looking at some more things that cancer gave me to fight as I have said many times that cancer is the gift that keeps on giving even if you don’t want those gifts! Brain surgery was just one of them!

But in the morning I get to go back into surgery for a few minor things caused by that radiation that saved my life but keeps giving me more not so fun things to put up with. This time more Human Papillomavirus to be burned out of my nose, some repairs to my throat so food can go down easier and some wild and weird thing that radiation did to my tongue.

But there is nothing that can be done to put my brain back to working the way it used to before that day in February.

I sit here and pray every day asking God to give me my life back. Not this one I have now where I can’t walk very far before having to stop to get it to stop bouncing and to take in information and process it correctly. Or the way I seem to be mean to my wife and sons and stop being a bad dad as my youngest told me not to long ago. Or as I’m told, scream at my wife as I know I don’t do but I guess I do. I can’t process that data at all.

I want to be able to buy things like I did before all this started. Not live on this sad fixed income where my wife stresses out trying to make ends meet knowing that I’m the one who should be working but can’t do much of anything and now with the world the way it is now knowing that being hired for a job would be on a level with winning the lottery that I can’t even afford to buy a ticket to even try.

I can’t count the times I start thinking of how life was so great and how I was able to support my family with no worries and nothing to fear but now I worry about what will happen tomorrow to me and them.

I can feel my brain slowing down. I can feel it at times swell and hurt but I can’t let them see this as they have watched a man turn into something that is becoming a waste of air the rest of the world needs. I cry too much now. I stare into the past and then to the future of this pathetic life I have left and I ask again why God? What did I do that was so bad that I get to live this life I have now? The headaches, the pressure, the food I can’t eat, the things I used to do that I can’t and the way this affects my son, my wife and those around me.

I was able to help people over come the pain of cancer. I showed them how to laugh and to see that there was a future ahead of them that once that monster was beaten life would go on, but no one could or did warn me about this life after brain surgery. Mine was just a small problem compared to Senator Giffords and to those on the fields of battle who have such traumatic brain damage.

And here I am crying about my pathetic little brain problem but I’ve lost the will to want to keep going on with this life. Waking each morning and having to sit up slowly so I don’t fall over, washing my face and looking at that stranger in the mirror that looks so wrinkled from the weight loss and radiation. Having no appetite for anything solid but cooking a bowl of oatmeal or eggs with cheese just for the calories as nothing has much taste any more even my other meals of soft and mushy foods as I need them to stay alive so my wife and son have my pathetic fixed income so they have a roof over their heads and food and clothing but watching my son not have the things I was able to get him back before all this happened or a present for my wife on our anniversary to show her how much I love her and to thank her for putting up with me all these years as I’m not the pick of any litter!

I want my mind back so I can finish a few stories I started so I could make some extra money, I want my old creative brain that would look at a problem and figure it out and my old life back, not this thing calling itself a life.

In a little while I’ll finish my last cup of coffee until I wake up after surgery.

I wish that God in his infinite wisdom would do as I have asked lately and I will ask of him one more time before I nod off on that table for a simple little 3 in 1 surgery to look at me and say that’s enough and let me wake up to a better life or to just let me go so that my wife and son can benefit from the insurance and not have to endure life with me any more. No human should have to endure this. It’s not a life but a fight. A fight to stay sane. A fight to support my wife and son. A fight not to look at me and cry and wish for a miracle to put this shell of a man back together the way he was before that first round with cancer.

I just want my life back. Not just a life but the life I had. Is it too much to ask for? God, I can’t keep doing this anymore. I’m tired of the doctors, the pain the way I can’t see my world anymore.

Give my life meaning. I never ask you for anything, just my life I had that was capable of caring for my family. Just release my brain from this torture so it will start marching to the band. Let me go so the doctors can use my body to learn how cancer and surgeries will affect the body so that they can better heal others.

That will give my life meaning.
That’s all I ask.