[CaptainCrunch]

So a little over a year ago I lost my aunt who was my god mother to throat cancer. I watched as this former energetic, funny, smart woman who had never smoked, drank very little and lived a generally healthy life style literally eaten to death by a disease that was misdiagnosed as a throat infection. The woman that I remembered laughing when I came home from the bar at 3 in the morning and clumsily messed up her kitchen when I made the worst ham sandwich ever. I watched in the end in the hospice as this woman was knocked out by powerful pain killers who was never lucid in her last day withered and died.

I had another aunt who had cancer 35 years ago, she put up the brave fight, basically had her insides burned away by radiation, who had to have a hysterectomy because it was rotted away by that cancer and the radiation. Another very kind, very bright woman who always took in her nephew (me) for long periods of time over the summers and treated me like her own kid. Who let me drive a tractor and a ATV, and trucks even though it wasn't wise to do it.

today I got the phone call, that after 35 years the cancer came back. she had felt a little tired and a little sick, nothing unusual for someone that was moving towards her 70th year, who had worked on a farm all her life.

Suddenly her lifespan is measured in weeks instead of years, suddenly her time with her family and her grandkids is going to be cut short before her grandkids graduate from elementary school.

Today she got the grim news that treatment isn't going to work, that its now about making sure that she doesn't suffer in the end, and we all know that this means the powerful narcotics that robbed my previous aunt of her dignity and her ability to carry on a conversation or read a book, or laugh at a conversation.

This is a disease that shows no mercy, that eats not only your body, but your dignity and your very being.

So if someone that you love feels a little sore, or tired, or sick to her or his stomach. If they start losing a little bit of weight without changing their eating habits or exercising, please for god sakes throw them into a car and get them to a doctor, and don't believe your doctor if what he or she says doesn't feel right then ask for a referral for a second opinion. This disease moves quickly one day your ok and you have your feature to look forward to, and the next is not something that you want to contemplate.

Cancer can be beaten if you get at it early, the difference between what my aunt went through 35 years ago and what they do now is vastly different and far more effective, but only if you give it a chance to work.