Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone. I was really ready to get past 2008 and move on. After Christmas the family ventured to Portland. The truth is that I think everyone needed a break from me, including myself. The trip was much harder than I expected. The air travel wore me out and I was cold the entire time and really could not get warm. The plus side was that Cynthia and the boys had a great trip and it was really good for me to get away.

The neuropathy has seemed to get much worse after the last chemo treatment. I have now learned, after going to a support group, that this is very common. I thought it would be a cake walk once after the last treatment, but life has many surprises.

This week I had a CT scan and a visit with my surgeon. The good news was that the scan was clear, no cancer to be seen. The bad news was that I am still not completely healed from the surgery and damage from the Chemo and Radiation and there is a lot of inflammation. The surgeon was pleased with my progress and still thinks I will completely heal with out additional surgeries. I have to wait a month and get an x ray. If I have healed up and the inflammation is gone he will do the final surgery and I can put this episode of my life in the history file.

I mentioned the support group. St. Josephs has a specific Colo-Rectal cancer support group. They meet once a month but due to my chemo schedule, I could not make any of the previous meetings. I went on Tuesday night. I learned a lot. The more I know the more I realize how lucky I am and how critical the early detection was to my positive outcome. I am planning on making this one of my ongoing campaigns to get guys under 50 to get tested. There were too many examples of people ignoring early warning signs and having disastrous results. I also learned how being in good health prior to this really saved me a lot of problems and basically, although brutal, I did not have near the problems as many who wne through the same treatment course. Many still have the neuropathy significantly worse than I am experiencing and they are 1-3 years post chemo. Many had significant problems because they were not completely healed when the did the reversal and ended up with really bad problems.

I was really not pleased with not being able to finalize this this week. Today I decided to move on, so I am back on the bow flex and I walked a couple of miles through the hills, hoping to start running again next week.

I meet with my oncologist on Thursday, hopefully he gives me the all clear and all my blood work matched the CT scan. For now I am thankful for the news I have and I am moving on. The other thing the support group showed me is how important outside support is to the recovery. So again I want to thank everyone for their prayers, good wishes, help and concern over the last 8 long months.


Bruce