Cancer could be so much worse

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

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