Cancer diagnosis

To start on the way back, I planned to talk about the cancer treatment that I will be undergoing starting in a couple of days.  The focus will be on my thoughts, feelings, and just general experiences along the way.  I don't envision this as some guide for future cancer sufferers or advice or anything like that.  Perhaps it will be interesting to family and friends to learn a bit more about me, but the reality is that this is as much just for me as for anyone.

It would have been best to start this when I first found out I had cancer as those early days were really crazy.  For the most part, I was very confident of beating this thing and that I would still live for another 20+ years, but when you don't know anything more than that you have it that confidence can be shaken.  I can be a funny person in a way, as I find myself grieving for things that have not even happened yet and that was part of what I went through;  the idea of missing my kids college years or getting married, helping them grow and seeing what they become was truly what scared me the most and really got the eyes watering.  As they say, its the chance of losing something which really makes you realize how important it is to you and there was no doubt that they were top of the list!

I really appreciate the ENT doctor who first provided me with some details that gave me a better understanding.  She was actually helping out for my primary doctor because he was on vacation that week.  She noted that there was a P16 test which showed a positive result and said that this was great news as it meant that the chance of success in treatment is much higher.  It led me to doing some research which showed that the success rate in treating neck cancers which had this positive test was 85%!

The next great news was the PET scan which showed that the cancer had not spread to other parts of my body.  There were a couple of hot spots seen, but they were clearly not related to this or indicative of other cancer locations.  So now we were moving forward in a positive way.

The nice thing about having a blog page is that you can just ignore it for a long time and it will leave you alone, especially when you don't have a big following (or any following for that matter).  Its also nice because its there when you want it, so that you can just write whatever you feel when you want.

So now is time for the third iteration and restart of this blog.  I orginally started it just to try to whole system out and see what its like.  Then I used it as a way to communicate real estate info without loading down other sites which I thought were less appropriate.  Now I plan to use this to capture thoughts on my upcoming cancer treatment and other things that are important to me.  It will hopefully be an way to explore those things and that this will lead to my next big project/job/activity/passion/life goal.  Or perhaps I'll just go back to my leisure pursuits and we will see you on iteration number 4?