While many of us are waking up to ordinary Saturday mornings filled with jogging, tweeting and hangovers, longtime Mother Jones blogger and writer Kevin Drum is waking to this: cancer. On Friday, he came right out with it in a post just before dinnertime. While his doctor says his prognosis is good, he knows he’ll have to be watchful for the rest of his life.
“A few of you have probably cottoned onto the fact that people don’t usually spend a week in the hospital for a broken bone, even a backbone,” he wrote. “So in the long tradition of releasing bad news on Friday afternoon, here’s my first-ever Friday news dump.”
His story has echoes of two other journalists who seemingly out of nowhere got diagnosed with cancer and died within months. One is Newsbusters Associate Editor Noel Shepard, who died in March of last year after a January diagnosis of lung cancer. In extremely raw tweets, he let readers and friends in on every agonizing step of the process. To the point where even family members told him to stop. The other is Chief Operating Officer of Alejo Media and The Hill‘s former media relations manager Jim Allen, who died of lung cancer in late December of 2013. He, too, laid out his gripping ordeal in unforgettable Facebook posts.
On a brighter note for Drum, he thinks he’ll survive it, but the road ahead will be a rough. He’s already on a “fairly moderate” chemo regimen. In an impressively emotionless story, Drum laid out the details of what is happening.
A cough took him to the ER Saturday. He had several tests, including a “painful” bone marrow biopsy.
That won’t be the last of serious medical procedures: “Treatment involves two to three months of fairly mild chemotherapy, which has already started, followed by a bone marrow transplant,” he wrote.” My oncologist thinks I have a very good chance of complete remission.”
Like Noel, Drum joked about his political foes. In Drum’s case, those on the right. He wrote, “Later tests showed that I also had lesions in my upper arm, my rib cage, and my skull—which means that my conservative friends are now correct when they call me soft-headed.”
Read his full story here and here. See his candid selfie above.
