Wednesday, October 15, 2008

October 16, 2008 - Got Dem Watchful Waitin' Blues

Today I run across a couple new 3-minute web videos on the Lymphoma Research Foundation website. Several of them seem more or less made-to-order for my situation.

One focuses on twenty- and thirty-somethings with indolent lymphoma. I don’t fit that age category, of course, but I’m still younger than the average lymphoma patient. It’s a pretty good discussion on indolent disease, and how different it is, conceptually, from other cancers:

Click HERE.

Another describes the Watchful Waiting approach to treatment:

Click HERE.

“That’s one of the differences about indolent lymphoma that’s difficult for people to get past,” says one indolent lymphoma survivor on the Watchful Waiting video. “It’s always a present tense.”

Indeed it is. Other cancer survivors are either in treatment, or in remission, or they’re cured. They get some sort of resolution eventually. We indolent lymphoma survivors live in an eternal present.

The trick, I suppose, is to find some way to get our future back again, to escape that eternal present.