Moving on

Is Thanksgiving really next week? 

I can't believe it, even though I've spent most of the year in bed, on the sofa, in the hospital, in a chemo chair, or just plain bitchin' and whining. Still, I have a lot to be thankful for, so bring it on!

Still on medical leave from work dealing with the mastectomy. Oh yea. Having a few little issues, but overall nothing too terrible, and I'm even hoping to return to work next week. Talk about moving on...going back to work will be a serious dose of reality.

But the real work of moving on from a cancer diagnosis is about to begin. I've read a lot about "survivorship", but I couldn't even fathom what that meant until last week when I got some perfectly awesome news from my perfectly awesome oncologist. 

She reviewed the pathology report from the mastectomy with me. She said - get ready for this - she said that it was the BEST NEWS POSSIBLE. She was blown away. An oncologist...blown away by a pathology report! You'd think she would have seen it all by now, but apparently I'm special. (We already knew that, right?)

Weigh the path report and lots of other hocus pocus medical stuff, put it in a pot and give a big stir, load into a calculator on the MD Anderson Cancer Center physician portal...and you are rewarded with a pretty little graph showing my opportunities for recurrence between 0 and 5%. That's lower than the general population.

Thank you, chemo hell. Thank you, mastectomy. Thank you, the hundreds of various pills I've taken this year. Thank you, God. You made it possible for me to get an unbelievably low recurrence score. Amazing.

Makes me feel pretty cocky. Cocky enough to want to rid my life of all the cancer crap in it. Including the hats and caps I bought to cover my bald head, the wig I bought and never wore, and all the pink shit decorating my house for the past several months from loving and well-meaning friends. I'm donating it all. Cause I don't need it any more. 

How's THAT for something to be thankful for?