Dennis Hollingsworth

Out of the Blue

We recieved a phone call at five o'clock on the morning last Tuesday. Calls like that are rarely good. My father in law was in the hospital.

We flew to LA the next day after a day of telephone calls. We visited Stephanie's Dad in the hospital and digested a raft of new medical information. I flew back to Dallas Friday, and I will rejoin Stephanie in LA this Thursday for the weekend. Surgery will happen this coming Friday. This is a time to keep tight about the unfolding events, they are so personal, so intense. It's enough and I hope not too much to say that the diagnosis is a level 4 cancer and there is a chance that we can beat it back to buy some time.

He's had two previous bouts with cancer surgery, but this one has metastisized and the doctors say we have passed the possibility of a "cure"... But I now think that with cancer, the idea of a cure is questionable. Level 1 is the first and only cancer detected... but there is a threshold where the doctors cannot see the cancer cells. So when do they know they exist, other than when it is too late? How is it possible that they can declare a cure at all?

It is possible that we all are born with nacent mutinous cancer cells that go into large scale operation like Bin Laden's terrorist's. The idea of a cure now seems ridiculous to me, just as the idea of returning to the world before 9-11.