I had a collection agent finally explain to me the purpose of having friends. She said, and I paraphrase, “If you can’t ask your friends for several thousand dollars to help you out with your debt, then what are they for?” Wow. I’d hate to be one of her friends. I bet she’s never picked up a tab in her life.

I feel like Moses trying to get water from a rock…. How many different ways can you tell a company, “I can’t afford to pay you right now”?

I know a lot of you out there reading this, also follow Donna’s blog. On Donna’s blog, you see a lot of “I’m doing fine”, “It’s all OK”, etc. So, let me just take a little time to translate from “Donna-ese” to English.

You know how the answer to “How are you doing” is “relative”… it just depends on what you are using as your base-line for comparison. Well, Donna always gives you how she’s doing as it relates to how she figures she should be expected to be feeling during this kind of treatment.

So, let’s see if I can give you some objective observations of Donna’s condition.

• This round of chemo ended around 3pm on Friday. As of Sunday evening, she couldn’t remember anything from when she got home until Sunday morning… and Sunday itself is sketchy.
• When you talk to her or ask her a question - even at times when she’s in the middle of a sentence - you sometimes get a blank stare… until her brain catches up with the conversation.
• She sometimes answers questions with something that’s completely unrelated.
• She acts like it’s hard to speak, her voice is weak
• Her walk would be best described as a slow shuffle
• She got nauseous just sitting down to get her head shaved
• She is very weak
• She loses her balance and gets dizzy easily
• She always needs an ice pack close by since her body overheats on a moments notice - no I don’t mean she gets a “hot flash”… she overheats… Sunday evening she had to literally hold onto an ice pack and lay flat on the bathroom tile floor to cool off.

She will begin to feel better starting Tuesday or Wednesday, and she’ll be able to start faking “I’m perfectly normal” until the next round… but each and every round of chemo hits harder and seems to stick around just a little longer… and leave more “residual” effects.

Now compare that with how she is “normally”… if that term can really be applied to her - and you now have translated “Donna-ese”. If you don’t know Donna personally, do the following… try to remember what your Grandmother was like when she was in her 50s, and then what she was like in her late 80s and 90s. That’s almost the difference between Donna before treatment started, and Donna after a round of chemo.

For you guys… look at your wife, and then try to imagine her aging to 95 in just a matter of days.

I have no problem dealing with her being like this… I was just expecting it to be 40-50 years from now and due to age, and I was expecting to be in the same state right there with her.

It used to be that when I saw one of my guy friends with their beautiful girlfriends or wives, I would think something along the lines of, “he’s blessed to have such a beautiful wife, I hope they stay as deeply in love as they are now”.

The last couple years the thought has changed to, “he’s blessed to have such a beautiful wife, I hope they never have to go through cancer”.

That’s just lame….

Some people seem surprised and confused, or just not believing, when hearing how having cancer in the family can completely screw up your finances. Calculate this….

Donna’s lung cancer treatment starts next week. The cost per session will be somewhere around $8,000 per session (if it’s anything like the chemo she had for breast cancer - and assuming that prices haven’t gone up). She will have 6 groups of 3 sessions over the term of the treatment. That’s $144,000.

Of course, nearly everyone has some kind of insurance. So let’s see, for a typical 80/20 insurance plan, that means that the person with cancer would be paying $28,800 out of their pocket… plus any deductible amount before the insurance kicks in.

But our insurance is not a typical “I’m employed at a big company that pays for a large part of my premiums” 80/20 plan, it’s a “typical” self employed insurance plan, with 70/30 coverage…. and a $7500 deductible. So, that means of this $144,000 cost of treatment, $48,450 will have to be covered out of our pocket.

Keeping in mind, that for the breast cancer several years ago, there also were 3 surgeries and several months of daily radiation treatments.

So, as you see, there is a reason that a large percentage of people who have cancer in the family either end up loosing everything or filing for bankruptcy.