It’s been about eighteen months now since the Doc told me I had cancer and about a year since my dog moved on. 2011 pretty much sucked.

Blood tests about a month ago were clean and I’ll get another PET Scan tomorrow. If that’s clean I do nothing for the next year, I’ll still be in remission.

For how long though? That’s a question whose presence I entertain with a certain foreboding fascination. They say I’m not cured, that there is none for this particular brand of cancer. Whether it’s tomorrow or two years from now or never, there’s no way to tell.

“For now,” whispers that little voice that used to chant ‘grow you little mother :cens0r::cens0r::cens0r::cens0r:ers, grow,” so often once the transplant was completed and my stem cells were beginning anew the job of keeping me alive. It’s the same voice that reminds me who I am, what I am. The Guy.

The Guy can deal with never knowing if yesterday was his last cancer free day.

The Guy can keep on keeping on, endeavoring to persevere, as it were, and not really fret the stuff he cannot change.

The Guy feels guilty about the pride he feels for being able to do the not fretting so well. Convoluted, The Guy is.

The Guy, he cried once. Just once, early on shortly after he got the news. Not knowing if he would ever meet the children of his children, with whom he is very close, saddened him greatly.

My hair is coming in curly. A bit thinner and a little more scalp showing, but in a year or so it should be long enough to pretend to be a ponytail. My finger tips are still very slightly numb. It’s hard to pick up a single sheet of paper off a smooth surface. The neuropathy in my toes has improved. I no longer tip when I lean forward. My balance is not as good as it used to be and my knees don’t bend as smoothly as they used to. It’s all chemo related in theory but I’m also getting older. I am able to work out regularly and take a deep breath any time I want. That wasn’t possible just a year ago.

My ‘office’ is the parking lot next to the man made lake in the man made park in the middle of the city I live in. I’m there several times a week watching the birds, the waves, the leaves and the clouds. Every weekend a group of geezers, really old guys, gather and sail their radio controlled water craft. Some are scale models of the ships they served on in the Second World War, a few from the Korean era and sometimes a non-com or two with their speed boats. There’s one geezer who made a scale replica of a tug boat by hand. It’s pretty neat to see them all on the water.

There’s a walkway that circles the lake. Quite a few people utilize it for exercise. They come alone, to walk or run around the lake. They come in pairs to walk and talk about all sorts of things, relationships, kids, work, the weather, whether or not the swans are geese and what kind of dead fish they saw floating by the outlet. I catch snatches of many conversations in a myriad of languages from my automobile-office. The most common user though, is the young parent. Sometimes it’s just mom and her offspring, sometimes she’s accompanied by another young mother or two or maybe her own mother. In the evenings and on weekends young fathers often accompany their burgeoning families. They’re happy, proud, lucky.

I see them and one voice says, “don’t sweat it, you’ll see em man.” Then the other voice says, and can’t you just see these two guys sitting on my shoulders, one horned and brandishing a pitchfork and the other all wing-ed and angelic, “Well no, you might not.”

Grow you little mother :cens0r::cens0r::cens0r::cens0r:ers, grow and away we go, not dwelling on what dwelling on can’t change.

It’s not weird, but it’s, no, it’s weird. It’s not common, usual does not belong in the same sentence. But, it’s not new and a lot of people have trod this path ahead of me. Looking behind I can see them queued up until the horizon swallows the line, a never ending parade of people who have been handed an end date and lived past it. Had I done nothing back almost two years ago, I’d be a few months from dead right now.

I heard somewhere that most folks who are in circumstances similar to mine tend to focus on, to dwell on, their recent survival quite a bit for the first four to six months after they’ve survived treatment. The whole miracle of life, wow I didn’t die, you all who haven’t been there don’t know how lucky you are type of thing. I reckon that’s about right. I never did dwell on it, but I do notice that I’ve pondered it less in the last six months than I did in the six prior. I wonder sometimes if it’s just life creeping back from the edge, ready for whatever effort I’m willing to give or some sort of survival mechanism that lets us put things like cancer and chemo behind us instead of living them full time, constantly waiting for the other metaphorical shoe to drop and the bad news to be new news again.

Heh. Mostly though, life just goes on. In the big picture I’m so insignificant, and I’m talking on the World scale here not the friends and family one, that my little story hardly seems important. Sometimes I forget that if it’s important to me, and I think a lot of us forget this, then it IS important. Not everything has to be global in nature to carry significant weight.

I debate with myself whether or not this little blog is important. I don’t write in it often because I am, have become even more so in the last year or so, kinda a private sort of person who has been simply amazed at some of the things he’s posted up. And yet, a part of me, one that yearns to write important and/or entertaining things, things that may help someone else going through what I have and am or perhaps someone who has a friend or family member travelling down this road with which I am now familiar where they are not, says it is and I should write more. Then the guy in the little red suit with the horns and pitchfork pipes up and round and round we go, ending here, with the occasional sincere, but to me anyway, somewhat disjointed, ramblings of my thoughts.