Forks.

My brother and I were driving down to Seattle from Vancouver this morning and he made an interesting comment. He said he didn't know if he could do what I've done over the last two+ years.

Fact is, I know he could and would, and he'd probably be more gracious about it than I've been, but his comment caused me to think.

Each of us faces forks in our road on a daily basis. Sometimes the forks present viable options, sometimes the forks only provide an inconvenient detour.

One can never know what might have happened by taking the other fork. One can only know what's on the fork chosen.

When Ed and I were presented with my MM diagnosis, we saw it as a major detour in our lives. We saw no logical choice but the path we selected. Yes, we could have elected to do nothing, but we chose an aggressive course against the disease and that's the course we're still on.

However, this course has presented us with other significant forks in our road. That's the odd thing about the whole process. Once you get on this highway, you still need to make decisions and deal with the results. Having cancer does not absolve responsibility or remove future plans.

As an example, Ed could have refused his current position because of my condition, but we chose not to let the opportunity pass. In some ways it made our life more difficult in the short-term, but it will probably make our future (and certainly Ed's) better because we've taken this fork in the road. One can only postulate.

The thing that is most odd and unappreciated about the entire process is the incremental nature of it all. We started with a couple of cracked ribs and a feeling of malaise. Now we're beyond surgery and a pair of bone marrow transplants, into GVHD and asking ourselves 'quality of life' questions. We make social decisions based upon criteria only we understand. We've transitioned from me being a person with cancer to me being a cancer patient. Yes, I know it's semantics, but the difference is significant.

It's as if the diagnosis was a 5 pound weight we'd been given to carry around. At some random interval, somebody gives us another pound or two to add to our burden, and before long, you realize you're carrying half a ton of stuff and there's no place to put it down! Sometimes someone comes along and takes 5 pounds off the load by saying "you've engrafted", or ten pounds by saying "we see no tumor cells", but then they give you seven pounds back by saying "the graft isn't working".

From our perspective in the beginning, it would have been difficult to guess the size of the current load. From our current perspective it's difficult to estimate the size of our future load. We HOPE the load will be less than it is now, but we don't know. If I could foretell futures, I'd play the lotto.