Monday

While I do not think about DEATH, I am cognizant of the fact that my life will not last much longer in that I have less years to live than I have already lived.  My mother lived to almost 96 and my father lived to 89, so there is longevity on both sides and both had diseases that might have killed them if they had not of died from old age first.  My father's body just quit all of a sudden one morning after talking with him on the phone and my mother declined rapidly as well but took several days...  neither disease killed them although their diseases influenced the ability of their bodies to last longer.

With my cancers, I suppose that I will be in a similar situation and figure that at the most I have 20-25 years left to live...  which would take me to 92 or 97...

So, what do I do each day?

What I do not do is sit around and ponder how long I have to live...  I do that only as an exercise to calculate how much money we will need and then how much money my wife will need to live to 95 if I were to die today or at the end of the year, making it easier to calculate.

SO...  the start year would be January 2021... and she would be 68 years of age...  and, 25 years would take her to age 93 which might be a little low but 25 years is a good target from which to build.

According to what I read online at the SS website, because she is also drawing SS, when I die, she would stop drawing her SS and receive 100% of mine.  If she had not been eligible for SS, then she would have only been able to receive 71% of my SS...

With that number in mind and estimating her future expenses and future deficits, she will need right around $2,000 each month or $24,000 each year or $240,000 each decade.  Given the estimated time at 2.5 decades, she will need $600,000...

AND, the longer I live the more that number is reduced...

My Greatest Fear Not Thought About

I am being treated for and therefore I suppose I am also fighting two different kinds of cancers:  Non Hodgkin's B Cell Lymphoma and Metastatic Melanoma because it has moved from my foot to my groin to my neck for 12 and 6 years respectively.  My condition(s) are further complicated by a serious heart attack that I had about 12 years ago that because of my healthy physical condition, I barely felt.  Three heart arteries were blocked 100%, 90% and 90% and while a triple bypass was the norm, I had my arteries cleaned out and 5 stints inserted, experiencing no problems since then.

Not realizing my health situation was as serious as it was, I left a bug bite or a spider bite unattended after scratching it and ended up in the hospital for 6 days with a staph infection in my blood and throughout my entire body and an antibiotic infusion protocol 3 times a day for 28 days after I was discharged.

I won't make that mistake again.  Hindsight is always the best.

BUT, I completely disregard and completely ignore the single most important aspect of my cancer odyssey and that is the fact that either or both cancers could suddenly not respond to treatment or become relentlessly aggressive...  in which case my life would be put in some serious jeopardy.

ALL CANCER PATIENTS live with this fear daily whether they think about it or not.

Another Day... Another Dollar

Any day above ground is a good day, I have often told people who have asked me how's it going...  and, while that might be a clever response, it is pretty much the truth given my health situation.  With Lymphoma and Melanoma, I live under a constant threat that my Oncologist will one day tell me that there is nothing that medicine can do for me...

With that mentality, I have maintain a constant vigilance over my finances and have gotten to the point today where if I were to die tomorrow that there is enough money saved (along with selling the house and moving into a rental apartment) to pay the monthly expenses until my wife reaches the age of 97...

"Get your house in order," is what physicians tell terminal patients and knowing that I have preempted that from being told to me...  not sure why that might be important to me but it is. 

While I recognize that I am getting closer and closer to the end of my life at age 72 with two cancers, I have NEVER seen myself as dying...  and, I am not sure why other than I believe that GOD, our creator, has something planned for me of which I have yet to be informed. 

Does that mean that there is something yet for me to do?

Perhaps, I just don't know.

What I do know is that GOD is in charge of my life...  and, when it is time for me to go, I will go...  just like when it was time for me to be born, I was born...

This is my faith.

I trust my faith.

I live today and plan for tomorrow...