Once again, it's the week before surgery. This Friday morning, once again, I'll be wheeled down the surprisingly chilly hallways of the surgical wing of University Hospital and through the metal doors of one of the Operating Rooms, and once again will be the only one in the room not working that day, the only one not standing up, the only one not wearing a mask and then the only one being put to sleep.

That charming stereotype we call "the Optimist" has sometimes been differentiated from his gloomy counterpart "the Pessimist" by his (or her) description of a glass of water that is, in fact, both half-full and half-empty. At last week's meeting with my oncologist, the good doctor told me that whereas, back in May, my chances of surviving this cancer were in his opinion very bleak, he now upgrades my odds of survival to a solid 20%. Committed as I am to the Optimist's cheerful outlook, I can now say that my particular glass of water is apparently one-fifth full.

Two weeks from today, I will once again be the Special Guest at a meeting to be held in my honour in one of University Hospital's Operating Rooms. This will be my third surgery (Lifetime), with the great likelihood of two more surgeries to follow in the months to come. This one being fourteen days from today, the words of Samuel Johnson come to mind. "Depend upon it, Sir," he once said, "when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

This past Monday, having met for a second time with the surgeon who in June had turned me over for the summer to the care of two oncologists, Deb and I heard some not very good news about how much, that is to say, how little my six weeks of chemotherapy and radiation had actually accomplished. Contrary to what the early-August CT-scan seemed to indicate, the rectal tumour isn't really much smaller than it was in June and is almost certainly still inoperable. (Yikes.)

One of my favourite scenes from The Chronicles of Narnia features Shasta (the boy in "The Horse and his Boy"), riding an awkwardly uncooperative horse (NOT the horse referred to in the title of the book, but another horse, which "had a very low opinion of Shasta"). That boy and that horse were riding through the mountain pass between Archenland and Narnia. The point in the scene is Shasta's alarming discovery "that someone or somebody was walking beside him."

I wasn't listening to commercial radio in 1991 when Tom Cochrane's "Life Is a Highway" became his greatest hit single, and I didn't have any very young children asking me to take them to a movie in 2006 when the Pixar movie "Cars" featured the same song (covered by Rascal Flatts), but I have recently read Psalm 84 again, and so recently read again these great words of the Sons of Korah.

Psalm 84:5-7 ESV
Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion... They go from strength to strength; each one appears before God in Zion.

What I am seeing these days is that, for me, and the likes of me, death is a NOT a Fee-fie-fo-fum giant. At the same time, it is not a beautiful or a lovely thing. To say it is would be saying too much, and just making things up in an effort to make ourselves feel better. So how IS a man to think about his own death?

Deb and I went for a lovely drive to Muskoka for a week at a very nice cottage. The radiation and chemo had been over for five days and I felt surprisingly altogether well.  That was Monday and we were in the Muskokas for a week. So far, so very very good.

I once stood beside the hospital bed of a young man who had very recently been suddenly and mysteriously struck down with a very serious medical problem. I couldn't help noticing that his mother was standing on the other side of the bed. I began to assure him that the "good and acceptable and perfect" purposes of God were embedded in, and woven all through, his experience, but I was passionately interrupted by his mother.

The good, the bad and the ugly about there being nothing to do but wait.