On March 24, 2023 I was laying in a hospital bed for the first time in my life. I’d just been told that a team was being assembled for my upcoming brain surgery. I don’t remember being asked if I wanted one. Rather, I was told that I would have one and that it would happen soon. The previous day I’d been shown an MRI of my brain. It revealed a tumor in my right parietal lobe.
Fear of falling (FOF) is a major concern among the elderly. Depending on the source, between 21% and 85% of those living in care communities experience FOF. The condition is insidious due to its reinforcing mental and physical aspects. Fear of falling leads to reduced physical activity, which leads to weaker muscles and joints, and degraded coordination. These follow-on effects increase fall risk, setting up a feedback loop.
In March 2023 I was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a terminal form of brain cancer. There are treatments, but they fail in all but the most exceptional cases. By early June of 2023 I had completed the standard of care, which included surgery followed by chemoradiotherapy.
In March 2023 I was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer. According to the National Brain Tumor Society, about 15,000 Americans get the same diagnosis every year. Despite decades of research, untold millions spent, and hundreds of thousands of dead patients, the prognosis, measured in months to live, has barely budged.
About one year ago (March 23, 2023) life as I knew it was upended by a terminal brain cancer diagnosis. What started as trouble with balance and walking escalated into a visit to my local hospital’s emergency room.
We tend to think of death as a point in time. Before, we’re alive. After, we’re dead. In reality death is a process. Except in extreme cases, death takes time. Sometimes it takes a lot of time. During that time varying degrees of suffering occur. Multiply the duration of a death by the suffering involved, and you get a metric for the “goodness” or “badness” of a death. At one extreme are short deaths with little suffering.
The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events may or may not be coincidental. What he’d witnessed had shaken him. The burden he now carried weighed on his shoulders and tinged the undersides of his expressionless eyes. “Halford, right?” The man looked up at me and blinked. “Yes, he said.” He was seated on the chair in front of my desk, right foot resting on his left knee.
In March 2023 I was diagnosed with a form of terminal brain cancer called “glioblastoma.” The surgery to extract the tumor from my brain was considered unusually successful. Unfortunately, surgical success won’t change the fact that I’ll die from glioblastoma sooner rather than later. And it’s like this for thousands of patients in the US every year. It doesn’t matter how famous or powerful you are.
On March 23, 2023 my life was turned upside-down and inside-out by a brain cancer diagnosis. The kind of cancer I have, glioblastoma, is terminal. You don’t “beat” this cancer, it kills you. But before it does that, it turns you into something you, your friends, and your family will not recognize and may only barely believe. This isn’t a lump like a lot of cancers.
My grandfather, Kenneth Orville Holloway (“Kenny”), studied physics at Willamette University from 1946 to 1949. He’d later work as an engineering assistant at Hanford Engineer Works near Richland, Washington. This factory produced the plutonium explosive used in the “Fat Man” atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. After World War II, it produced most of the plutonium residing in the current US nuclear arsenal.
My grandfather, Kenneth O. Holloway (“Kenny”), worked as an engineering assistant at the Hanford Engineer Works (“Hanford”) near Richland, Washington. He never talked about what he did there, and died at the age of 35 — long before I was born. Given just a few morsels of family history and some internet tools, I wanted to piece together the story of what what brought Kenny to Hanford and what he may have done there.
