Nothing Is Written In Stone

Well, as we are now well into another year, and I have just passed a very strange anniversary ~ Its a year this week since I had a life extending surgery. I hardly know what to say to sum up my feelings about being here. 

A Cancer Diagnosis Leaves You A Long Way From The Light

On the 9th of December 2016, after several months of increasing ill health, I was diagnosed with a very bad form of cancer which was quickly classed as inoperable. I was told that if treatment failed to get an exceptional response then I likely wouldn't see August 2017, and certainly not another Christmas. 

So my 2016 Christmas holiday break collapsed, and the New Year simply disappeared as I was engulfed into a Stygian Gloom, from which I felt I was likely to never emerge. Oh I kept going, governed largely by autonomic responses, and indeed I carried on working, but some spark had died inside me. Perhaps it was simply hope, but whatever it was, I was no longer quite me any more.

18 weeks of heavy chemotherapy did little to alleviate the feeling of the darkness closing in on me, but just as it finished, a little ray of light finally pierced that all enveloping gloom. I was told that the chemotherapy had worked well enough to make me a candidate for an operation again. So although I quickly slipped back out of the light again (and frankly I was rather frightened of the operation, which was going to be a minimum of 7.5 hours), I now had a glimmer of hope to guide me, and on the 17th of July 2017, I went on to the operating table, resigned to whatever happened next.

Hurrah, it worked, and they got all the obvious bad bits out of me, and this was later followed by excellent pathology reports showing all my lymph nodes were clear .... apparently the chemotherapy had worked far better than anyone had expected, exceptionally in fact. Not a cure, but a hopeful position for at least a few more years.

The Dangerous Part Of The Woods Is Where The Bears Carry Toilet Paper!

So now its just over 12 months later, and my new birthday has passed so to speak, and if not exactly on top of the world, nor completely out of the woods, I am certainly out of the part of the woods where bears carry toilet rolls.

I have finally broken free of that all enveloping gloom, and am now recrossing the river Styx, and rowing desperately towards the sunlight, in the vague hope of making the safety of the shores of the living. But more importantly, come what may, I am me again ....

Leaving The Stygian Gloom Behind Is A Difficult Journey ......

Its a long road that I am now on, but at least I travel it into the rest of 2018 with cautious optimism, and in a far better frame of mind than that with which I entered 2017.

I guess the moral of this is that Nothing is Written in Stone, and we don't always know how things are going to turn out. So if you are facing some difficulty that seems insurmountable, never abandon hope all ye who enter this post!

 

Update 17/07/2022: I had my last cancer phone call and following an endoscopy inspection and 3 biopsy samples being declared as still cancer free, I am now 5 years cancer free and in the UK that's classed as cured. 

 

So my chances of a reoccurrence of that particular type of cancer are nearly normal, and as I had volunteered for a number of other NHS tests (for national medical data gathering), I also know that I don't have bowel cancer, an enlarged Aorta, Heart Rhythm problems, or Lung Cancer .... so I am almost in the pink so to speak.

 

Thanks to those who commented and those who messaged me, I appreciated it