It is just before 1:00 am, Sunday, Feb 26, 2006. I enjoy writing during the wee small hours of the morning. Those of you familiar with Dexamethasone know very well that a high dose of the steroid is quite the sleep terminator. But this has been part of my current therapy, and it has worked well over the past three years. 

Still, I am an early riser, anyway. My regular day as a TV meteorologist begins at 2:00 am when my alarm clock goes off, although, I am up usually a little before. I am in the studio by 3:00, and on the air at 5:00. This has been my routine for a very long time, long before the “Dex” – so I can’t exclusively blame my insomnia on that. Maybe, it has to do with some incredible energy which has also helped keep me alive during the past 10 years, since the fall of 1996 when I was first diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Like so many other cancer patients, I really do not know when it all began, but I am sure it goes to the very beginning.

My grandparents, on my father’s side, were first cousins – never the most healthy situation for offspring. My grandfather came from Russia, and my grandmother from England. So they didn’t exactly live around the block from each other, and like many other marriages of the day, it was arranged. Harry was a hard worker and bright. When he immigrated to the US with his new wife, he began what turned out to be a small, but very successful manufacturing and distributing firm for houseware and hardware. They made a lot of mops and brushes. My grandmother, Ann, and he, had eight children – they did that in the old days, but over the years, all my father’s siblings, including my father, contracted cancer. My father did not die from his lung cancer. He died from heart failure some 17 years later. Only one of his brothers is still alive today, but he is fighting a variety of illnesses, and his son, my cousin, has just contracted leukemia. The proclivity for cancer has definitely passed along to another generation, the generation of cousins, but happily without the frequency of the earlier generation.

 

Although my grandfather was very successful for his day, he didn’t exactly divide his attention and wealth evenly among his eight children. I grew up rather poorly in my very early years. Maybe, old Grandpa Harry didn’t approve of my father’s early divorce from his first wife. That happened before my father reached 21. He married my mother when he was 29, and they lived happily ever after, but there might have been a question of trust from old-schooled Grandpa. In any event, we barely shared in the largesse of the rest of the clan. For the first 7 years of my life, we lived in a tenement which the rest of the family would occasionally visit with wrinkled noses. But I had my friends, my mother always made sure I was dressed well, and we always found ways to have a good time – even chasing down storms, such as the Great Worcester tornado of June 9, 1953. I have plenty of storm stories to share with you, but that really does have to be for another “wee hour.” My sister was four years older than myself, so we really did live in different worlds, but as a family, we were very close.