Good Morning.

It's been almost a year.

You all know the tale - over the weekend of June 23 last year, my appendix decided that redundancy was enough and it had to leave. Of course, they found some bad Juju in there.

So, emergency surgery, chemotherapy, and pretty much a year of convalescence.

This past Wednesday, I had a six-month follow up with my oncologist. Hard to believe, but it's already been 6 months since my last treatment.

All is now well. About a month ago, I had a colonoscopy, and they did indeed find a benign, pre-cancerous polyp somewhere in there. But it's out and won't turn into cancer. All of my blood work was either negative (tumor marker) or utterly routine (RBC, WBC, Platelets, CBC, etc.) My PCP pulled up my chart online, and the blood specs were arranged in table form - I was in pretty sorry shape during my last couple of weeks of chemo, but that's all past now.

Nevertheless...there's some stuff still hanging on. I thought I'd feel better now, but the fact remains that after a long day, or if I'm doing something particularly strenuous, I still get pretty wiped by the end of the day. Even on an "ordinary" office day, sometimes it feels like I only have 6 or 7 hours of gas in the tank. I've started taking the stairs at work in the hopes of building up some stamina...I can make it to the 5th floor before I start sucking wind; hopefully this will improve over time.

The neuropathy is slowly but surely retreating. My hands are almost back to normal, I've just got a little pressure sensitivity on the fingertips, and things like typing or buttoning shirts no longer cause me ajita. My feet are another story, but Doc still tells me that it takes longer for them to heal because they're further away from the central nervous system. Simplistic maybe, but apparently true. Nerve recovery is an iffy thing, but because of my progress, Doc thinks I might make a full recovery, even if it takes a year to do so.

So....it's ever onward. I'm in the clear for another 6 months now. In January, I'll have a CAT scan, something that will have to happen annually now. And because I did have a polyp, it's back for another colonoscopy in a years' time...this will probably be an annual event for a while now too.

But the big picture is becoming clear....I'm starting to think that maybe I beat this thing, which is in marked contrast to the dark days after my surgery and before I started chemo.

Cancer still sucks, though.