A body is in freefall. Assuming normal gravity, how much distance will the body drop after, say, twenty seconds? Thirty seconds? I know the basic formula is 32 feet per second/per second, but math was never my strong suit, plus there’s probably other aspects of physics I’m overlooking.
Or, put another way, a body dropped from about a thousand feet high: How long until it hits the ground?
PAD
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Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, Tim.
Look, there’s no denying that it’s a bad kind of cancer. I’ve experienced it in my own family. My former father in law lived with us for a time while undergoing treatement for it.
So much depends on factors you probably don’t know and can’t control. That’s for the doctors to deal with. What you can and I have no doubt will do is to do anything you can to keep her spirits up and treat the symptoms of th edisease that can cause someone to give up (I don’t think that people should have to be dying to get the kind of attention they do in hospices and there is evidence that this kind of palliative care yields big benefits).
But please, please hear me on this–do not let yourself and your own health go to hëll while you are helping your mom. I’ve seen too many people end up in bad shape doing this and nobody is helped by it. It is never selfish to make sure you have the strength to help others but in this situation you see folks feeling guilty for taking care of themselves. Stay strong.
I wish there was something concrete I could do to help. You’re a good guy and an intelligent writer and I have no doubt that you are a terrific teacher. I doubt there’s a person on this board who isn’t hoping this will turn out all right.
Tim, I’m terribly sorry to hear about your Mum. Sending positive thoughts your way.
Megan
Hey, what’s wrong with naming your daughter Megalon? Or Megatron, for that matter? Just call her Meg!
I got a story for you, Tim. WAAAAY back when, first time my sister was pregnant, I drove my mom over to my sister’s doctor so we could see the sonogram. The doctor’s moving the sensor over Sheil’s belly, then says, “You know, I think I see two heads here.” Sheil looked absolutely horrified until my mom leaned over and said, “Twins. Not one baby with two heads.”
I’m thinking about you and your family, Tim. I know what it’s like. Bill’s right, though, take care of yourself, too.
Thanks to all for the well-wishes. We don’t really know the status yet (staging and all that is yet to be finished), but the CAT scan showed no evidence of metastasis, which is high on the list of Good Things.
With luck, we’ll find out it’s at an early stage and it’ll respond well to treatment. If so, that’s a whole different type of concern than if it’s at a more advanced stage. (She’s otherwise extremely healthy, which we hope can only be a benefit.) If she’s going in for surgery, odds are she’ll come to New York to do it, which means she’ll be close enough that both my brother and I can drive in to help whenever she needs us. (The few people I’ve told at school have assured me that the school will do everything it can in terms of logistics to make this easy, too.)
I’m determined not to panic about this until we get the biopsy results back next week. At that point, we’ll see.
Again, thanks very much. Now I need to plan for tonight — it’s Back To School Night and I should probably be at least semi-focused…
TWL
Tim, I’m sorry to hear that your mother is ill. I devoutly hope the cancer is indeed at an early stage and is treatable.
For what it’s worth, she obviously has an intelligent and good-hearted son in you. Your love and support will undoubtedly make a real difference.
As Bill Mulligan said, please also be sure to also draw on the love and support of those around you to help you through this trying time.
Tess posted: “Terminal velocity for a human body is right around 120 mph.”
So how do those NASCAR drivers survive when going over 200 mph?
Um… was that a joke?
(She’s otherwise extremely healthy, which we hope can only be a benefit.)
Oh absolutely. It can make all the difference.
One of the problems when people are getting chemo is keeping their weight up. This could be a good time to take up French cooking. Or Soul Food. (My former father-in-law taught me the absolutely best way to cook spinach: fry up a buttload of bacon and then throw the washed spinach leaves onto the bacon grease. Cover the pot before the steam escapes and let the grease and steam cook the spinach. Awesome. yes, it’s turning a healthy vegetable into a highly fattening side dish but that was the idea.).
Tim, fingers crossed here. Good luck.
One of the problems when people are getting chemo is keeping their weight up.
Assuming the biopsy results are promising, the treatment actually wouldn’t be chemo, at least initially — it’d be surgery. I’ll keep it in mind in case it’s necessary, though — the spinach plan sounds great anyway. 🙂
Jerry, thanks much.
TWL
Tim – True story. My late father was misdiagnosed with some sort of tonsolitis and operated on on that basis. A while later, the problem was shown to have been lymphatic cancer and, by then, it was deemed inoperable and terminal. He had a few weeks at best.
He refused to accept the diagnosis and signed up for – then radical – experimental treatment. Eventually he was able to get surgery done after all. It was very hard on him, but he beat it and went on to live another fifteen years.
You just never know. Good luck!
Sorry to hear about your mom, Tim. This sounds beatable, so let’s hope that’s the case.
It’s been a bit of a bummer week for me as well.
My late grandmother’s cousin’s wife (yeah, that’s a mouthful), Carol, just passed away over the weekend from lung cancer. While Bob is a distant relation, he’s the closest living relation of my grandmother that my dad has left.
So losing Carol is difficult for us, and I’m still frustrated that I couldn’t find a way to make it to the funeral yesterday.
Then, while discussing this with my mom, I found out her grandfather has Alzheimer’s. So, yeah, bummer week.
Craig, I am sorry to hear about the death in your family, and equally sorry to hear that your great-grandfather is suffering from Alzheimer’s. A “bummer week” sounds like a mild way of putting it.
When my grandfather died this summer, each of his seven children wrote one page recounting their favorite memories of him. They did the same thing when my grandmother died last year. It was very comforting. When I find myself feeling sad about losing them, I am able to draw on the decades of wonderful memories they left for me.
I hope your family will find an equal amount of solace in their memories of Carol.
My grandfather had begun suffering from senility (I’m not sure if it was, strictly speaking, Alzheimer’s or not) in the months leading up to his death. I think the toughest part was watching this proud rock of a man crumbling, losing his independence, his courage giving way to fear. But I choose to remember him as the proud, strong man he was.
My thoughts are with you and your family, Craig.
A “bummer week” sounds like a mild way of putting it.
Yeah, I suppose it is, but it could be worse: I was scanning the obituaries of the newspaper for the area where I went to high school. In the last week, two of the guys I graduated with lost their fathers after long bouts with illness.
I only graduated in 1999 in a class of 96 students, so to see this happen to guys that I knew but wasn’t good friends with does tend to put things in perspective against your own situation.
In the end, it’s hard to say exactly how these events in my family have really affected me. It certainly isn’t to the degree that I’m sure Tim has been affected (and, in a worse case scenario, will be affected) by his news, or these guys I went to school with, but family is family… unless you really hate your family, which I don’t. 🙂
And since the subject of treatments was brought up: Carol had something in the range of 30 chemo treatments for her lung cancer, one a day, five days a week. She was 74, and already of declining health in recent years, so I cannot imagine what she went through.
Hopefully it doesn’t come to that for your mom, Tim.
Sorry to hear about that, Craig.
Chemo is especially tough on older people. It HAS gotten somewhat better than it once was. A fellow teacher of mine has been fighting advanced breast cancer for some time and the main problem seems to have been fatigue, not pain or nausea.
That said, it’s obscene that there is still any question over the use of medical marijuana (or medical freaking heroin as far as I’m concerened). And word of advice to anyone who has a relative in the hospital–fight like crazy to make sure they get all the pain medication they need. It’s unbelievably stupid that people in this country have to endure one iota of pain more than necessary. My father in law was given way too little and only the fact that my ex-wife was an actual doctor at the same hospital got them to give him more. I can only imagine how far a regular person would have gotten. Raise a stink, pretend to have relatives at 60 Minutes, do whatever it takes.
Chemo is especially tough on older people.
I’m always amazed at how different people react to different treatments, because it just goes to show how hard it is to treat the human body.
We have an elderly woman who lives in our apartment building who, in the last year, found out she had cancer (I forget the type). She has gone through chemo, and now the cancer is in remission. She’s a little worse for wear, but seems to be doing well; she’s always in good spirits, regardless.
Yet, when I was still in high school, a best friend’s mother had recurring cancer. It would come back, she would go through chemo, it would go into remission; it was like this for several years. She finally succumbed to it about a year after we graduated, but I was remember that, after she had a chemo treatment, she always seemed to have *more* energy for a day or so. She was an incredible person as well.
My condolences on all of your bad news, Craig. Must be the season for it or something. (And I certainly know how you feel about your great-grandfather’s news — my grandmother passed away from Alzheimer’s about ten years ago. Nobody had much of a sense of how bad it was for the first few years, but once my grandfather passed away it became very obvious very fast.)
Mom was here visiting for the weekend, which was nice for everyone, I think. She and I talked for a long time — if nothing else, she knows now that she’s got a place to stay if she does come to NY for treatment. (I hope she already knew that, of course.) We’re still waiting for news about what stage it is — we’ll probably find that out later this week. We’ve all got fingers crossed — Stage I is VeryVeryGood when it comes to survival rates, and Stage III or IV is VeryVeryVeryBad. II’s somewhere in the middle. There are a great many crossed fingers these days.
School has been great about this — all the higher-ups are saying “once you know what you need logistically, let us know and we’ll make sure it happens.” If I’m going to be gone for long stretches, I’ll have to tell the students at some point … but not yet.
Meanwhile, I can handle the mundane stuff — off to finish making dinner for when the rest of the household comes home. 🙂
TWL
Tim, I will also keep my fingers crossed for you and your mother.