Essay 2 - 2024. My Personal Fight with Stage 4 Cancer or CLL. What is It Like to Know You are Truly Dying? By: Mr. George D. Patnoe. January 12, 2024

Essay 2 - 2024. My Personal Fight with Stage 4 Cancer or CLL.

What is It Like to Know You are Truly Dying?

By: Mr. George D. Patnoe.

January 12, 2024

Soon, my real fight with stage 4 cancer was soon to begin.

But before that process was to begin, I realized even before I visited the oncologist’s office that I was dying. It seems pretty self-evident to me even though I am far from being an expert on any type of cancer whatsoever. Although, I have been told about own human mother’s fight with her own battle with CLL cancer during her lifetime, into an old age that did not have the cancer research, nor the cancer drug that has been such a huge help to me staying alive.

But truth be told, I had my first chemotherapy by needle around the year 2015. As the nurse put the needle with the four other needles into the main needle, I looked at my watch’s second hand. One, two, three, four, up to 20 seconds. I said out loud, “Oh shit.” The nurse said, “You are super sensitive.” Then, it was lights out for my mind, into the darkness I traveled. Four hours later, I woke up and as I walked through the hospital’s front doors, I very quickly realized that I was so fucked up that when I looked at my car, I thought to myself, ‘It is less than ten minutes to the house. I can do it. After all, I had driven fucked up before, decades ago.

My human mother knew that she was dying too, with six kids, and being a nurse full time since her youth. I wonder how she did it, and how she felt like while she was dying, but at the end, she wanted to go, in a manner of speaking. I accidently discovered my mother had died on the web. My dad, brothers and sisters never called me to let me know that my mother was dying. Can you imagine that? I looked at the words on the wed, ‘She is dead.’ I stated out loud, ‘Those motherfuckers, regarding my dad, brothers and sisters. Too bad for them.

I might have called her to ask how she felt about dying, but I was too young to think about it like I think about dying and death now, along with the fact that dying and knowing you are really dying is such a personal experience especially that when the person dying has more on their minds than talking about their human death. Maybe they cannot explain it anyway! But look at me.

My active CLL cancer had a huge, a gigantic start by the time the first Calquence pill entered my mouth and system. Who knows how long the inactive CLL Cancer had been active until it had infected my blood, bones, body, and brain too, to the moment I actually knew my biological body was being destroyed from the inside out, by a cancer that kills people every day is my guess.

I have no idea how long, but it did not matter anyway. But what I did know was that in the darkness of the night, when everything and especially my body of course, was still and silent, when I could feel my body talking to me and informing me, that beginning of the end had started. That the beginning of the inactive CLL which long had been a part of my body without any pain or worry, all of sudden it became alive like a deadly monster arising up from the deep sea, without a scream or a yell to warn me what was about to happen to my body. Actually. No, it did not.

In the darkness of the night, I could feel a part of my inner biological body, an organ of course, that I never knew anything about before I heard the word from my oncologist, the spleen. Of course, I knew I had a spleen, like I know I have a lot of other parts called organs in my body, but it is very different knowing that you have organs in your body compared to actually understanding and then knowing what they all actually do within the biological system called the biological body. Until you discover that you are dying because at least one organ is being eaten alive by stage 4 CLL cancer cells. Or in my case, as my doctor stated to me, “That cancer is all over your body.”

When I felt the slight pain on the left side of my inner guts becoming more and more painful, during the silent darkness of the night, I knew and realized that when my spleen started feeling a slight pain in the middle of the night, which then become a bit more painful little by little, until I truly knew I had a real issue on my hands, or in this case, in the side of the inside of my gut. But there were more signs than the slight pain in my gut to warn me that I was actually dying.

I don’t remember exactly what night it was, but I do remember I was sleeping in the darkness of the night, in the darkness of the dream world when I felt the sensation in both of my legs, the tingling and needle’s pin picks that were in my leg’s bloods and bones. I sat up and I stated to myself out loud, in the darkness of the night, “Oh fuck! I think I am dying.

Oh fuck, I think I am dying. Shit. Motherfucker. I think I am dying.” They were not words of joy, but more of surprise. But truth be told, I knew for years that this moment was coming to kill me. I had been mentally and spiritually preparing myself for this moment. I knew I had a problem for a few minutes until I returned to sleep. What else was I going to do at 3 am. Not be a crybaby.

Which of course that was an understatement. I wasn’t simply dying, I was dying really, really fast, just like those poor people who unexpectedly and suddenly knew that they were dying from the Covid virus. How did they feel when they knew they were saying goodbye to everything in the world they owned and loved, like the people in their live? Some people simply dropped dead, without preparing for their own quick deaths. It was not a mistake I made, mind you.

Just a warning to my dear readers. But a real warning to all of you, if in the darkness of the night you feel something wrong with your body, you should maybe think, thank ‘God.’ for the warning and get yourselves to a human doctor who just might save your biological body from becoming dead. I listened to my body because as the saying goes, “If in the middle of the night, the thief, CLL in my case, comes to take your human life, be prepared to kill it.”

It might help to read some parts of the Bible too, because miracles do happen by reading the Good Book, in its proper context of course. If you don’t like to read a book like the Bible when you are dying from CLL, or some other deadly condition, like life on planet earth, you might want it next to you on that pillow when you are dying just in case a supernatural being like an angel is watching over you to take you somewhere special, or maybe not so special, whatever the case may be in your own specific cases. Where the dead go, who knows. But they go somewhere!

In any case, it might also look good to those people who are discovering your dead body and picking it up from the place where it stopped breathing. Or in my case, where my body was being eaten alive by cancer cells killing and destroying my normal working blood cells and organs. I was very lucky that before my body was actually dead, I could start to do something about it like taking the Calquence chemotherapy pill.

Just in case you really die from stage 4 cancer, or some other deadly form of human existence, it might be good to have a Bible next to your dead body just so it looks good for the finders of your dead body, and any supernatural creature hovering over it. Most of the deadly forms of human and biological and even mental elements that are trying to kill each and every one of you are hiding in the shadows of darkness waiting to take your human life and laugh about it. Yes.

That guy Jesus who supposedly lived over two thousand years ago stated something like this, “Do not worry about your body going to hell, worry about your soul going to hell.” Paraphrased.

“I know how it feels like to live like you are going to die today and/or tomorrow. I have been there. I make each day feel like a wild ride through the heart of the rapids at midnight.” (Shameless S5:E10 2450.

I have wondered what Jesus must have felt like within his own mind when he knew that he was going to die a very horrible death when all he had to do is simply walk away, at least up to a certain point of his human experience.

I have also wondered what it must have felt like for those Covid virus victims who were one day living a normal life and then the next day they realized that they too, unexpectedly were going to die a rather quick death, maybe without enough time to say goodbye to their loved ones, even all the while they also knew that no human doctor was going to be able to help them live another day in the human existence. But saved they would not be!

People who have cancer and who are especially dying from cancer probably do not feel like having a wild ride through the heart of the rapids at midnight, but they do know what it feels like to live like they are going to die today, tomorrow, or the next day. But they know they are dying.

They also live with their suffering and sometimes wishing they could end their lives just to end the constant and endless suffering that they alone have to experience while other human beings go walking around doing their business and living life like it is just another day of life on planet earth. What else can they do anyway? When you are normal, not sick, undying, you walk around like everything is A Ok. Like it is heaven on earth, sometimes. Not so for the people dying from any type of cancer or anything at all. All they see, feel, realize, think about, it is dying and death. Maybe they hear the voices of those souls who have traveled on into the afterlife.

Not so with people who are actually suffering or not suffering with any type of cancer! People with cancer have a state of awareness that their biological human bodies are being attacked from the inside out by an invisible killer which cannot be seen with human eyes, unless you are a doctor or specialist or a cancer researcher who is dealing with cancer cells in one way or another every day and who own some very powerful microscopes.

When I was a little boy, I received a microscope for a birthday present for one day, my birthday. But the next day it was gone because my parents probably returned it to the store. I guessed that they needed the money because money was really tight back then, just as it is now for many people. But I did learn something about life on planet earth, that certain tools are needed to see, to hear, to understand how life operates, develops, evolves, for human beings and other living creatures. I wondered what I could have seen through that microscope if I owned for a week.

As I grew up and more intelligent, I learn that life on planet earth is very complex, very complicated, and also very special too. After all, it seems from all current knowledge that biological life is located only on planet earth and no other place in the vast and seemingly endless cosmic universe, at least from the current human standpoint. But for creatures as myself, I do know that there is life beyond planet earth. I am a creature on earth who has seen many things.

What is it like to know you are dying? The simple answer is that you know that you are dying. You know it!. You know you are dying because you feel it, sense it, taste the death that is in the air, around your human soul, waiting to take you beyond this earthly realm into the great beyond.

You are waiting for death to happen like normal people who are waiting for their morning coffee. Who live living their lives without a thought, a worry, a concern about death. Who are happy that they are alive, when the dying are no longer happy about living because they know that they have already crossed over from life to death, even before their last breath. They are actually aware, unlike people who are not aware, that your end is near, that your death is near, that you are going away, hopefully somewhere special, and better than here on planet earth.

Not me! Inwardly, I was laughing at death the way I would laugh at a good joke.

But still, I am very happy to still be alive on earth; watching the birds fly in the sky, feeding feral cats, seeing the blue sky with the white clouds floating around like, drinking good coffee, listening to classical and jazz music, reading books, eating good food, taking a warm shower, etc. But now, I live life with invisible tears in my eyes, running down my face: Thanking God, the angels, and the cancer doctors and researchers who helped me long enough to write this essay.

But before all that teary eye stuff, the real fight with cancer was soon to begin! For the fight for the life of my biological body which I do not call home, simply a place to stay in a bit longer, would be the biggest bitch I could ever experience. Let the joke of dying and death turn into a fight of life and death. Wow, what a fight it was for more reasons than one.