I THOUGHT IT WAS OVER

I finished the last radiation treatment on March 9th and thought I would start getting better right away, I couldn’t have been more wrong. On the 10th I went to the ribbon cutting for the Two River Theater a women there told me that once they recognized me she cried over the way I looked. The look fit and I wound up in the hospital that night and stayed there for two weeks. My throat was and had been so painful I could not eat or drink anything and had not for days. My weight had been 180 when I started and by the third night in the hospital I was down to 140.

I spent two weeks in Riverview recovering. They put a feeding tube into my stomach so I could be feed and I went home with it at the end of the two weeks. I continued to use the tube and slowly start eating again. The tube was actually cool…you could dump two cans of Ensure in less then five minutes and the flavor and the taste didn’t matter. It even worked with wine a couple of nights when I was having trouble sleeping. It is over seven weeks now since the last treatment, the throat is still sore, the tube is gone and I am back at the gym trying to get back in shape. The recovery is slow and the ordeal is something I hope to never have to repeat.

Due to the articles in the TRT hundreds of people came up to me to thank me for the stories and tell me about their bouts with cancer. If it was not theirs it was a husband, a wife’s, their children or Mom or Dad. It got to a point that I realized I have not talked to anyone that does not have someone that has gone or is going through this disease. In the past many people did not talk about what was going on but now it is becoming apparent that it seems to be epidemic in nature. For me it could have been the second hand smoke for 35 years in the restaurant, but what causes that pocket of cancer in the Toms River area?

It was common knowledge that in the late 50’s and early 60’s that tanker trucks were paid by the gas companies in Newark to haul away toxic waste products. They were not asked where they were dumping these products and the story goes that they would drive south along the GSP at 3 and 4 in the morning and pull the plug and dump these waste products along the side of the Parkway. This is only the tip of the iceberg as to what heavy industry has been dumping over the last 60 to 70 years and it leads me to fear that our ground water could be contaminated to a point where it is effecting everyone. Maybe it is time to call our Senators and Assemblymen and ask them to look into it. After all I’ll bet the percentage of cancer cases is just as high with their families and friends and they just don’t realize it.