BAD NEWS----REALLY, REALLY BAD NEWS

I got notice last week that one of my friends had a growth in his esophagus that was making it hard for him to swallow. They scoped it and it looked pretty bad so they sent him for further testing. The tests were to be taken Thursday and he told me he'd get back to me as soon as he knew anything. I called him Friday and left a message and called him again tonite. I talked to his wife and asked her how things went - she said she couldn't talk about it and gave the phone to my friend. He told me he had me down to return a call but he just hadn't been able to get himself up enough to call me.

He told me they had diagnosed the growths as cancer and that they had mastatized into his lungs, liver, kidneys and stomach. He said the doctors gave him 12 to 18 months to live. He said he is going to live long enough to see his son graduate from medical school four years from now. My money is on him making it the four years - my hopes and prayers are that he makes it through this nightmare with the radiation and chemo therapy. He said that even with the therapy and radiation treatments they didn't give him much chance of lengthening his life.

He told me that with this diagnosis he is planning to just keep working until he dies. He also told me he always thought he would go out with a heart attack. We worked together on the same district in Montana early in our careers. He also grew up in Omaha, Nebraska where Inklings mostly grew up. So we have a lot of things we can just visit about. This is a great guy and he's been a pretty important part of my life for the past 12 years since we lived close and I took the job he left when he went to be assistant director for the Olympics in 1997. I worked for him as part of the incident management team for the Downhill races at the Olympics. He worked for me on many, many fires after that when he finally started doing fires again.

THIS SUCKS! IT. REALLY. REALLY. REALLY. SUCKS!!!! :=(