Not a cowboy
This is my all-time favorite photo of Randy. You can’t tell if you didn’t know him, but he’s really hamming it up here. He may look like a tough, sexy cowboy, but he hadn’t owned a cowboy hat since he was 6 and he would never wear a shirt like that. But he was a graphic designer for a company called Ariat which makes - among other things - western footwear (cowboy boots) and apparel. So Randy was at a rodeo managing the signage he designed and found out that he would not be allowed down where the action was unless he had a cowboy hat and some kind of western-ish shirt. Or maybe it was just a long-sleeved shirt. Anyway, he had to run out and buy all the gear to be allowed anywhere near the signage. I don’t know who took the photo or how I got it, but when Randy was in the hospital waiting for a lung transplant I used it on his Caring Bridge page where I posted every day to keep all his friends and coworkers up to date on his progress. Everyone thought the photo was hysterical.
It’s amazing now to think that I was so grateful that he had a successful transplant and I felt almost like we had been promised at least 10 years before we had to worry about his body rejecting his lungs. He kept up with all his medications, blood draws, x-rays, and breathing tests - he was so careful to take care of himself and he was happy and active. We called those bonus years and it was hard to imagine that they were just about over when he got the cancer diagnosis.
Before the transplant the pulmonologist told us that a transplant is exchanging one set of problems for another. And I thought, Yeah, yeah, but one set of problems is going to kill him and the transplant will let him live. Randy had been paying more attention than I was and knew that he was at greater risk for, among other things, cancer. He went to a dermatologist every year to check for skin cancer, and a couple of years ago he had to have a lesion removed (you can see the scar in some of the photos). And still I worried only about his lungs. When he had the seizure I thought stroke - there’s medication for that. And then they said not a stroke and still I didn’t think about a tumor. And then we saw on the CT scan a shadow on his brain and a biopsy said cancer. And I thought, radiation, chemotherapy.
Denial is not a river in Egypt.