Looking inward, it seems I'm at peace with my situation. Bad news seems to take about 18 hours to digest (assuming 8 of them are spent sleeping).
And really, it is not that bad. It just isn't as good.
I was really looking forward to radiation therapy; snuggling my neck right up against a gamma ray source and feeling the warm glow rip apart fast-dividing cells at a molecular level. This was a satisfying image for me. As satisfying as spritzing a yellow jacket with hornet spray.
Actually, it was going to be as satisfying as finding the hornets' nest and standing 20 feet away while streaming the spray right in that bottom hole. As the hornets dropped out, still glistening with spray, smelling of poison, and twitching just a little, I'd have said "take that, cancer."
Autologous Stem Cell Transfer seems more like running a hornets nest over with a lawn mower. Perhaps 100% effective, yet more like an accident, with more collateral damage, and more like I'm going to run away screaming like a girl and flailing my arms wildly--uh, not that that's ever happened to me.
The nice thing about Mantle Cell Lymphoma is that treatment is no mystery and mostly works.
God willing, I'm pretty well set to outlive my Term Life Insurance, which is "up" in 2029 (They tell you the best deal is to sign up for a policy that gets your youngest child through college.)
Of course, had I known that outliving my term policy was going to be a central life goal, I really would have signed up for a policy extending to 2039, or heck, 2099.
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