Facing an uncertain future

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What  I have been diagnosed with is a rare and aggressive type of cancer.

Selfie outside the Precision Cancer building at the UCSF Mission Bay campus

It has scared the crap out of me, and I am just starting to call it out by name in order to face it directly. 

Cholangiocarcinoma. AKA Biliary Tract carcinoma. Or just bile duct cancer.  Its specific location earns another label, a Klatskin tumor.

It’s a nasty cancer. The general prognosis is dismal. 

But it looks like I could be among the few who are candidates for “curative” surgery, the only way to beat this thing. Tests done this past week at the University of California San Francisco Precision Cancer Building in San Francisco’s Mission Bay appear to have found no evidence the cancer has spread beyond the original location. That would seem to make a surgical approach in my case more viable.

i’m awaiting the “official” assessment of the surgical oncology option, which I expect to get soon.

Ths is, of course, only a very short version of what has been happening over the past seven weeks as the process of diagnosing and devising a treatment plan has been underway, initially in Hawaii and then in San Francisco.

The selfie was taken early Monday morning, April 13, as I waited for the building at UCSF to open so that I could check in for another CT Scan. I was probably looking more beaten up by the end of the week.

Please keep those positive vibes coming!

I didn’t see this coming

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My parents both lived well into their 90s. Both died closer to 100 than to 90.

My dad didn’t retire and transfer his small restaurat supply business to a longtime employee until the end of 1998, weeks after his 85th birthday. He took overnight fishing trips on his 28′ fiberglass fishing boat that had once belonged to Duke Kahanamoku for most of another decade, enabled by a younger crew that handled the boat while my dad went along for the ride.

I used assume that the combination of their excellent genes provided a layer of protection that mere mortals didn’t have, which meant that I would be likely to follow them into a similarly long life.

Silly me.

I should have known this was a far too simplistic view of how our bodies work!

I’m still 16-months short of my 80th birthday, and six years short of my dad’s retirement age.

And now I find myself skating on the thin edge of mortality with a potentially (but not necessarily) life-threatening malady that I’m trying to beat by seeking out top-notch cutting-edge medical treatment in San Francisco. I’ve become a medical commuter.

I’m rolling with it, and right now feel better than any time in the past 6-weeks.

Back on March 16, I announced that I would be taking a “leave of absence” for medical reasons. That has proven more difficult than I thought. Although I’ve tried to press concerns about current events into my mental background, I’ve still found plenty of things to share that might otherwise appear prosaic, but now feel very special–sunrise on a rainy day, the sparkle of sunlight in a cats eye, bits of Hawaii memorabilia found in my files, ginger blossoms along our driveway, stories worth sharing from times past. Small pieces of life as it moves along.

I do appreciate all your positive vibes, and am maintaining an optomistic attitude as we move forward a step at a time.

Saturday at dawn

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Today has offered a respite from the past several days of rain.

We walked down to the beach park to watch the sunrise. Didn’t see the sun. And we didn’t run into any of our regular dogs.

Here’s my favorite image of the morning.

Did I mention Kiko is a drooler?

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Let me tell you a bit about Kiko.

She’s the cat we rescued from alongside the Kahala Hotel in September 2024 when she was about 5 months old.

We learned right away that she is, as we were once warned about Kinikini, “a bit of a biter.” These are meant as “love bites,” I think, but human skin is thinner and more vulnerable to bites than that of the average cat.

One of her favorite things is to just somehow teleport herself into my lap while I’m sitting at our dining table with my 15″ MacBook Air open in front of me. Usually she begins by registering her appearance with a quick run across the keyboard, or sometimes a slow walk resulting in a window closed or a computer user logged out. But then she’ll run off and I assume she’s gone until I realize I’m unconsiously stroking Kiko as she sprawls out across my lap, her head always pointing to the right.

And here’s where I discovered Kiko’s other trait. She is a drooler. When she’s happy, she drools! Not a few little drops, mind you. She is a prodigious drooler as long as the lap is available and the petting continues.

I finally documented the scene earlier this week.

First photo: I realize that Kiko has quietly arrived and taken up her position on my lap. She’s wide awake in this photo.

Middle photo: Here’s Kiko in a more traditional view. I stopped the petting momentarily to get a few photos, but when the petting started again, Kiko relaxed and melted.

Bottom photo: I mentioned she is a drooler, and this picture shows the extent of her drooling during a typical session. Well, I admit this may be a bit more than average.

She doesn’t do this to Meda. It’s reserved for my lap and only when I’m sitting at the table concentrating on the computer, while stroking the cat is sort of on autopilot.