Thank you, goodbye. 

    I don’t have to say that now. I don’t have to wonder if I’m going to have to say that with any finality anytime soon. At least not because of cancer. 

    I beat cancer. I made it through the treatments and the surgeries and the fear. I’m a little more than a year removed from my last radiation treatment (seven weeks, five times a week) and chemo infusion (three cisplatin therapies with numerous hydration infusions). A few more weeks and I will be a year removed from the surgery to biopsy what remained of the structures that those two treatments didn’t totally obliterate. That surgery left me temporarily looking like Frankenstein but it was also the surgery that allowed me to hear my docs say to me that I had won and the cancer had been beaten. And I could start to breathe again and begin to gather strength again and begin to think again of the next week, the next month, the next year.

   So, where did it go to, my health? What happened? Yes, my cells mutated and then formed an unholy alliance against me, their host. But the cancer was beaten, and now I am continuing my life in a seemingly normal way although the experience is still fresh in my head and still carries latent scariness. Why should anyone care? No reason really except we all have a degree of empathy for those visited by tragedy, whether it be natural or man made. We all live with a little fear of the unknown and we all watch as others are visited with some type of travesty or evil or bad roll of the dice, depending on the circumstances we sympathize with their plight. But it’s different when it happens on a personal level. It somehow begs for an explanation. It needs a reason, if not just to explain to yourself, why.

   In order that I may be able to refer to this at some point and ask that it offer some personal insight, and perhaps remind me how I am still here, I am providing a meandering chronicle of my cancer as I lived it. And let me start this by saying, hello, welcome. If someone else is reading this I am grateful and extremely humbled to have you share this portion of my life.