I went to the doctor for a little ol' head cold, you know, stuffy nose, sinus pressure, that kind of stuff. The doctor gives me some stuff, which I go home and take. A few days later, while home alone in my shop something started going all wrong. First my arm started jerking around, then my leg. I got myself set down, and was trying to get my cell phone out of my pocket so I could get myself some help. I had never had a seizure before, but I sure was having one now. All the sudden, it stopped, and outside of being very scared, I was OK. Just to celebrate being OK, I lit me up a cigarette. I had quit smoking, and hadn't smoked in several months, but this deserved a good dose of nicotine.

At the time I was putting a new concrete porch on front of my house to replace the wood deck that was there when I bought this place. My step-son Bryan and his friend were on the way over to help me. Bryan didn't have boots or gloves, so we headed towards the farm store to get him some. Concrete is not a nice product to work with, and will burn you and poison you if you don't know what you are doing. I was driving to the store, and felt another seizure coming on. It started in my shoulder, and went down my right side. I got my mini-van off the road and parked before it hit me. This one wasn't so bad, but I knew it wouldn't be safe to drive, so turned that over to Bryan, and we headed for home. That was the last time I drove a motor vehicle for the next 18 or so months. The concrete was already on it's way, and the two guys, minus me, went ahead and placed it, doing a great job. I went to bed, feeling like I was exhausted. By the way, you do not "pour" concrete, you "place" it.

Monday morning I was at my Dr.'s Office, wanting to know what was going on. He sent me across the street to the hospital for an emergency CAT Scan, and X-Ray.

The tests showed a baseball size tumor in my chest, wrapped around my aorta. I had been having real trouble eating, talking, and in general breathing, so additional test were done. The pictures showed a vocal cord completely relaxed, paralyzed, giving me the trouble talking. The chest tumor was pressing on the nerves for my voice box. Vocal cords, typically, do not recover from this. They said I was destined to be nearly silent the rest of my days. 

Like most humans I wanted to blame it on something. I had been helping a guy with his alcohol-burning Honda powered mini-sprinter and thought I had burned my throat and lungs with the alcohol exhaust fumes. I just refused to concede that my 27+ years of smoking cigarettes, A life time of sucking in diesel soot in farming and trucking, asbestos  dust from auto and truck brakes while I worked a an auto mechanic had anything to do with providing the cancer fertile grounds in which to set root.

I was immediately hospitalized for further testing. On doctor suggested I might have a brain tumor leading to the seizures, so an MRI was done. Sure enough, I had a unshelled peanut size tumor in my brain, behind my left ear, in the short-term memory area.

I had small-cell lung cancer metasisied to my brain. I was "Stage IV -Terminal"