Summer                                                             Healing Moon

Wow. Path report came in early. Clear margins all around. Gleason score 4+3 with extracapsular involvement. This last means I had to have surgery. The first means the surgery was successful. No seminal vesicle involvement. In effect this means I no longer have prostate cancer!

I’ll have PSA tests on a regular basis but the presumption is that I’m now cancer free. This will take a bit to integrate. Just as it was difficult to absorb being a cancer patient, it will also be hard for me to recognize myself as a cancer survivor. The whole episode lasted almost exactly 3 months, April 14th to July 11th. Which is odd. To have something that momentous arise as a possibility, become a certainty, then disappear as a problem.

Lisa Gidday, Ted Eigner and their supporting staff…thank you all. Without you I would have fewer days in which to write, to laugh, to love. How can that be repaid?

Summer                                                  Healing Moon

After three months of seriousness, distraction, medical visits and surgery I’ve told Kate many times I just want my old life back. And I meant it. Or, at least what I meant was, I want out of this pit of uncertainty and back to a world where tomorrow is not a question mark.

Now, three days after the surgery, sort of the top of a bell curve of anxiety, I see I was wrong about wanting my old life back. The me who lived that old life-writing, Latin, family, hikes, friends-is gone. My pre-April 14th self has vanished, the one who had those priorities. That’s not say there aren’t continuities, yes, there are, but it is to say that my post-cancer diagnosis and treatment self is different, substantially different, I think.

This awareness is only coming to me now so I can’t see with any clarity those differences. They will emerge as I live into the fall and winter. But they exist and want to claim their own ascendancy as time moves forward.

I did not expect this, but in retrospect it makes sense.