Meet Jeff...

Hey everyone, I'd like to introduce you to Jeff.



Jeff and I have been co-workers for 7 or 8 years now. He served in the Navy during the gulf war, he likes paintball and massive-multiplayer RPG games. Once in a while he jumps in a very cold lake for a very good cause. He's a pretty cheerful guy and always treats people well. I don't really know his wife, but his daughter Erin is adorable. We're not best buds or anything, but we get along well at work.

Jeff got a little thick around the middle in his 30s just like most of us. A couple years ago he saw the "big-four-oh" coming up and decided he didn't want to be forty and fat. He started watching what he was eating, and working out. He started a "Biggest Looser" type contest in our office that helped me loose 5 pounds this year. Jeff himself has been looking pretty trim and fit lately, he's about as healthy as you can be.

Except, of course, for the brain cancer.

About mid-June, Jeff got back to the office after a workout and had a grand mal seizure at his desk. I won't go into the details, but it was pretty dramatic, and a hard thing to witness. He left in an ambulance, but a few hours later he was feeling perfectly fine. He was told that seizures like the one he had are relatively common and are usually not serious, but they made an appointment for an MRI, just in case.

The MRI showed a small lesion in his left temporal lobe. It was about the size of a dime, close to his skull and just above his left ear. Jeff was told that it was probably not serious. After discussing options with his doctors, he chose to have it surgically removed and have a biopsy performed.

A few days before his surgery, he started having headaches. They thought it was a sinus infection; he got some of the strongest antibiotics out there. The headaches got better, then they got a lot LOT worse. They did another MRI and found that the mass had grown from the size of a dime to the size of a golf ball.

His surgery was scheduled for the next morning. They got it all. They did the biopsy and found out that it was stage three cancer, which means that it was growing rapidly and very close to spreading out to other parts of the body. He was very lucky that they found the tumor when they did.

Jeff was back in the office for a few hours today, and I had a chance to talk to him. His Oncologist told him that his chances for beating this thing literally could not be better. They found the tumor early. They got it all out. He's getting the most advanced treatments medical science has to offer, and cancer aside, he's very very healthy. That helps a lot.

Working out and eating right has paid off for Jeff. The seizure that started this whole thing was probably triggered by his workout. Without the seizure, they wouldn't have caught the tumor early. Jeff is going to be around for a while, and in more ways than one, it's because he decided to take care of his health.

I've been thinking for a long time that I need to take better care of myself. Despite the weight I lost this year, I'm still hauling around 10 or 15 pounds of unnecessary flesh. I don't exercise enough, I drink too much coffee, I eat too much junk food and not enough salad, and I haven't had a physical in a few years.

All of that is stuff I've been meaning to change, but I never get around to actually doing anything about it. I'm sure a lot of you are in the same boat. We all know that being healthy will prolong our life, but it's a pretty abstract concept. We hear all kinds of statistics about how people who eat blueberries live an average of 6 months longer or whatever, but we never really connect all of that with our lives. When we think about living a few extra years, we think about living to know our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and when you're still young, that doesn't make a big impression.

Talking to Jeff today changed the way I look at things. It wasn't anything that he said necessarily, it was just sitting there, talking to a guy about my age who might not be here, right now, today, if he hadn't decided to improve his health. It made the whole idea of prolonging my life a lot more real.

We don't all live to be old. There are car accidents. Heart attacks. Cancer. A million things that can go wrong and kill you, but if you're lucky enough, and healthy enough, maybe you get to live.

I love my family. I love my friends. I love being alive and I want to keep doing it as long as I can. If that thing that you never expect actually happens to me, I want to give myself every chance I can to live through it.

So I made a decision today. Or maybe it's realization. I didn't decide to take a walk every day or limit myself to 2 cups of coffee or to stop eating cookies. I might do those things, but rules, chores, prohibitions, don't really work for me. What I'm talking about is something deeper, more basic.

And I really mean it.

I decided that I want to take care of myself.

I want to be healthy.

I want to be here as long as I can.

I want to be like Jeff.

I want to live.

(for a more detailed and accurate version of Jeff's story, go to www.caringbridge.org/visit/Hammerhead)