The beginning of the end!!

D2PC (or, Day 2, post-chemo)

Well, chemo is over. While I still have the hole in my chest, it is no longer attached by a thin tube to a bag of poisonous crap on my hip!! 17 weeks and 6 days with my little "friend", and I'm over it.

I had a CT scan on Monday as part of the restaging of the cancer, and I am happy to report that according to the doctor, I'm cancer free. Of course I will still have a PET scan in Sydney over the next two or three weeks, but the oncologist is confident that we've knocked it on the head. You bloody little beauty! (please note unrestrained joy not possible to convey in writing - just not good enough at it).

When I asked him whether this meant that I was cured, his response was along the lines of: "with cancer, you're never cured until you die of old age". I can live with that.

Another appointment in a month to (a) have my portacath flushed out, and (b) to ask him the hard questions about how we are going to monitor things to ensure that - should the cancer recur - it doesn't become as advanced as this time before we discover it. Or maybe my new reality is that I will live on tenterhooks around this for the rest of what will be hopefully (and I hate using that word) be along and fruitful life.

In the meantime, life continues on. I am feeling better by the day, although this morning while out on my walk with Oskar the Dog I tried to jog a couple of times and knocked up very quickly - and I'm paying for it now. Paul Craft says I should be back to a very unfit "normal" in one to two weeks. Can't wait. Although I went for a long bike ride with my sensei yesterday and held up okay - a 1200cc engine will do that, tho.

There are some learnings from all this which I intend to out down at some time in the not too distant future. The most obvious is that Cancer is not necessarily a death sentence, although everything we "know" as a society tells us it is, and we certainly respond in that way when told we have it. Another is that there is very big industry out there flogging quack cures and approaches. The give-away to these is, appropriately, that they don't give them away - you have to buy them. Warning: NEVER buy a book which details the unique approach to survival of a wholesome young cancer sufferer. Wait till you can pick it up from the estate of some other idiot who bought it, tried (or didn't) the "cure" and died. And don't get sucked in. Also, do your research: type cancer quackery into Google, and read the discrediting of most of the popular approaches, from the Gersson diet approach to the power of positive thinking as espoused by the very expensive Ian Gawler.

That's enough for now. More later.


Yeayyy!!