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A Celebration of Life.

I attended a dinner last night featuring many of the army of angels I have written about before . The reason we all got together was to have a celebration of life , and the life that we were celebrating was mine. Wait... what? A celebration of life is most often thought of as a gathering of the people that matter to someone  after they pass away. It is often less formal than a funeral and is usually stripped of the religious aspects of a funeral. In our increasingly secular Western world (and I make no judgement whatsoever about this trend), this is often the only  ceremony that is held to commemorate the passing of someone. But if this is what a celebration of life is , why was I in attendance, walking around and laughing and doing all the various things that very few of the people for whom these celebrations are held are able to do? Simple - this celebration of life could just as easily have been the more commonly held post-mortem type held in my honour. I actually only attende
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Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's back to work I go

I returned to work yesterday, albeit only for a couple of hours. It was really nice to be back amongst my colleagues and coworkers, but more than that it was nice to start living a normal life again. A life without cancer. I was off work for almost a year. Three hundred and thirty-four days to be exact. That is a LOT longer than I originally thought I would be off for treatment; the original plan was surgery only and back to work in three months. Six months at the outside. And looking back, I likely would have been just fine to return to work about four months after my surgery (three months was a little overly optimistic), but then that pesky but ironically good-news positive lymph node  cropped up on pathology and that plan was shelved in favour of plan B. I was to receive 5 weeks of radiation and oral chemo, followed by the balance of six months of oral chemo alone. I would probably not have been able to work during my radiation, but aside from a bit of fatigue and some minor
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The return of Chemo Brain

I had my final appointment with my oncologist recently. He is great - very intelligent and caring, if a little bit socially awkward at times - but sometimes his biases are obvious. "So, how are you feeling?" he asked. It's a pretty standard question and to be fair everyone I have seen recently has asked me this same question in one form or another. I think it springs from an abundance of caring about me (or about others in general) coupled with recognition that I have come through some pretty harrowing stuff to get where I am today. I respect the people who ask me this question too much to not be honest. "Physically I'm doing pretty well," I told him. "I have a little bit of neuropathic tingling in my hands and feet and some loss of dexterity but my energy level is good and I'm back at the gym. My brain is not recovering as quickly though; I have frequent lapses in memory and cognition." "Well, you've been through a lot this ye
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The long and winding road (to recovery).

Yesterday marked five weeks since I got my last cycle of chemotherapy. If I am being 100% mathematically correct, I still received chemotherapy for 48 hours after that so it's almost  five weeks as I write this, but that sounds like a distinction without a difference to me. The fact is that it has been over a month since I last had to have carefully-adjusted doses of drugs that were actively trying to kill me infused into my body, and that means that I am officially in the recovery phase from my chemotherapy. I can't describe how chemotherapy affects every aspect of one's physical, spiritual, and mental health. I can try - like explaining how I could feel every centimetre of my entire GI tract, from mouth to anus, due to the damage to and irritation of my mucous membranes throughout my body - but in the end they would be like describing a fresh snowfall on Christmas morning as being white and cold. It just doesn't really do it justice. Suffice it to say that my life o
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Several "lasts", in pictures...

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On October 4, 2019 I parked at my local cancer treatment centre for my last cycle of chemotherapy. I was connected to the poisons that I had come to accept as part of my life for what seemed like forever. In reality, it had been about eighteen weeks from the start of my chemotherapy to my last cycle, but it was such a significant change to my life as I knew it that chemotherapy came to define my life more than I had wanted. But that all changed that Friday morning. I received the nerve-damaging drug oxaliplatin for the last time, then had the last baby-bottle of the mucous membrane destroying fluorouracil connected for the last time. I would still feel the adverse effects of these drugs for the next few weeks - cold dysesthesiae from oxaliplatin and GI side effects and mucositis from the fluorouracil -  but that would be the last time I would experience them. My life, my normal former life, will soon be given back to me. I took a few pictures to commemorate the various "las
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NO MORE CHEMO!

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I received my last cycle of chemo today. After all of the dramatics and problems I went through this week , this was by no means a certainty. Even when I presented at the cancer treatment centre I was not counting my proverbial chickens; there could still be complications that could result in my treatment being delayed or cancelled entirely.  And that is very nearly what happened. Remember the dance of a thousand steps that I had to do because my nurses couldn't get blood return from my PICC? Yeah... that happened again . But this time I was able to tilt and stretch my head in just the right way so that my delightful nurse - who is maybe  five minutes older than my son but is still a very capable nurse - was able to get blood return. Phew! Crisis avoided. You see, last time this happened I received my chemotherapy up to the point of my 'baby bottle' infusion through a newly-started peripheral IV. I am an easy IV start and I have good, robust veins, yet after two hours
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Don't count your chickens before they're hatched. Or your chemo before it's given.

"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched." Growing up, a lot of life's little lessons were distilled down into cute little catchphrases that maybe  still had some everyday meaning to people. But as America and Russia fought a Cold War for global supremacy and ran a Space Race for supremacy in the heavens, fewer and fewer people had any firsthand knowledge of poultry husbandry and so the saying rapidly lost its direct meaning and became more of a catchall to espouse a philosophy than a direct metaphor to an experience that most individuals had shared. But as a pre-teen, my family did keep a small flock of chickens so the saying actually does  have some direct meaning to me. Still, if you have never seen a chicken lay an egg or seen an egg hatch into a - let's face it - totally ugly and disgusting-looking chick (they don't get to be cute until their fluffy feathers dry several hours after hatching), you probably know what this saying means. Don&
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Penultimate

My grandfather was an amazing man. Well, both  of my grandfathers were amazing men, but in this context I am thinking specifically of my maternal grandfather. He was one of the smartest people I have ever known and my parents and sisters and I all lived together with him and my granndmother in this amazing 1020's mini-mansion so he was very involved in my upbringing. He called me young master  and I loved him more than words can describe. He was also a linguist and a librarian and as such he shared with me a love for languages and even individual words that has stayed with me forty years after he passed away. And one of the words that he shared with me was penultimate. Okay... great. Touching and heartwarming story but... penultimate? Really? This is just one example of many memories I have about my grandfather but as I sat in the comfortable reclining chair at the cancer agency yesterday I remembered him and I sitting at his workbench as he taught me how to solder components t
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Who you gonna call?

Ghostbusters was an absolute smash hit when it came out in 1984. I was just barely into my twenties and the over-the-top (for the time) special effects and campy comedy delivered by some of the brightest creative minds of the day were mesmerizing. It even had a very  catchy theme song  that reached #1 on the music charts in the US and Canada and stayed there for three weeks. And it is that song as well as a whole cascade of positive memories and emotions related to it that have been bouncing around my cranium the past few weeks. Let me start out by saying that I don't define myself by what I do at work. I much prefer to define myself by the relationships I have with others - my children, my wife, my family, my friends. That said, as a clinical pharmacist words and phrases like thrombolytic and fibrin sheath  are as much a part of my vocabulary as slime or ectoplasm  were to the writers of Ghostbusters. I use them all the time with other medical professionals because we share a
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Midway

The Battle of Midway was one of the most significant naval battles in history, taking place over four days in early June of 1942 just six months after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. Although outnumbered in terms of both ships and aircraft, the United States Navy prevailed, destroying all of the Japanese carriers and their accompanying aircraft (248 aircraft in total across 4 carriers) and one heavy cruiser involved in the battle. The US Navy lost one carrier, one destroyer, and approximately 150 of 233 aircraft in the battle. Sadly, 307 US servicemen were killed in the battle, with over 3,000 Japanese servicemen perishing on the opposite side. So... what does this have to do with me and cancer? On the face of it, a devastating naval battle that occurred 72 years ago has nothing in common with my cancer diagnosis and treatment. But if you dig a little deeper there are at least a few passing similarities. First off, I have often heard of people "battling cancer"
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