Life challenges you everyday. The hardest thing to do is to face it and stare right back because it can all change within a blink of an eye. This post is here simply as a pause for thought. I'm so grateful for your good thoughts and for a positive outcome. I'll be back to my normal rants and stories tomorrow. But today, I am of very few words.

In this short Life by Emily Dickinson

In this short Life
That only lasts an hour
How much — how little — is
Within our power

My dad may have prostate cancer. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer. That's all I can hear right now. Please say a good wish for my family.....and to those men out there, get checked out. Early detection is a life saver.

Dear Ether, 

I’m really scared.  My dad just had a test for prostate cancer and they found that it was hard (a healthy prostate should be soft and spongy).  They are doing a biopsy tomorrow and won’t have the results until Friday.  All is gloomy around the household.  

My uncle, his brother, was diagnosed with prostate cancer just last year.  They say if you have sibling who has had the disease, your chances go up.  

My father, whom I just recently posted about (Read: The First Man I Ever Loved Was My Father) and wrote that he never had an injury in his life, could be thrown a very heavy blow.  I know prostate cancer, if caught early, is very curable.  But cancer is cancer and that’s an ugly word.  They say that it’s most virulent in men in their 50’s.  My father is in his early 60’s.  But, again, whose to know.  All is speculation.  

My mom, always positive, thinks he will be fine and will be healthy as he always has.  I can tell by the sallow look on his face and his body language that he does not feel the same way.  

This is the man who I thought was infallible.  A man who I thought was perfect, may have something that will mar him internally and change him psychologically.  I do not fear anything as serious as death, but I do fear suffering for him and the severe shake to his belief in his youthfulness and health.  My father.  Mr. Perfect.  The man I love most.  I can’t bear that he is potentially living with something destroying him. 

Everyone always told me that I took after my father.  I always felt so proud of that because he had a constitution like a rock and had aged handsomely.  If HE is bound for any sort of demise, than I, too, am not going to be always strong and healthy either.  

I’ve never really been unwell.  My brother takes after my mother.  He has a zillion allergies, and always complains of aches and pains (whether this is psychosomatic, I don’t know).  He is always taking off work because he is sick.  I can’t remember the last time I visited a GP. 

But back to my Dad.  He is aging.  He has graying temples, sagging skin, a few scattered sunspots and thinner hair (though a full head—he is not even close to bald).  Aging is a reality, but to see your perfect father lose to the inevitable hands of time.  That even HE can’t beat the clock………it makes you realize that you too, are bound for the same fate. 

My dad wont be alive when I reach his age.  He won’t see me with paper thin skin on the tops of my hands, fat blue veins popping out of them.  He won’t see me chop of my lovely hair and wear it as a woman of my age should.  He’ll never see my lens prescription grow thicker or my eyes grow less clear.  I’m grateful for that.  Because watching him vanish is terrifying and painful.  

Please send out a good word for him.  I hope he is going to be okay.  You’ll remember from my earlier post that I have so much I still must work out with him.  I can’t lose him.  I can’t allow anything to harm him. 

Nobody’s perfect.  I know that.  But to give him cancer?  No.  Please.  No. 

Dedicatedly yours, 

—One of 365