one year ago today


today, i celebrate a different kind of anniversary.

where were you on july 23, 2009?

me? at this time one year ago, i was probably in a room after having my right kidney removed from my body by dr. brian k. wade. turns out that kidney had been housing a malignant mass for who knows how long. also turns out that i ended up being one of the "lucky ones". i was lucky, in that, for whatever reason, those perverted cells that made up that mass had not yet decided to go exploring in the rest of my body. the friday after the surgery, dr. wade came into my room and told me it was "completely contained" and also told me to "celebrate".

a year later, i don't know if i've let myself celebrate. for the first six weeks, post-surgery, it was all about the physical recovery. getting back into shape after having been cut into was a new, long and painful process i had never done before. after three weeks, i went back to work. after six, i started lifting and exercising again. looking back, the surgery and the physical recovery was the easy part.

then came the demons. after i started getting back into my normal life-ly routines, i started worrying. i've always been good at worrying, but now i felt like i really had something to worry about. after all, i just had freaking cancer removed from me. surely the doctors had missed some of those perverted cells moving somewhere, right? in my mind, i was convinced that the answer to that question was "yes".

i was dizzy all the time. i started seeing floaters. so, in the first six months leading up to my first follow up ct, i went to the eye doctor and had my eyes checked for tumors there. no tumors. just floaters. i also went into my primary care doctor's office, cried like a baby and allowed them to schedule a "peace of mind" scan on my head so that we could rule out a brain tumor. no tumors. just anxiety. i went to therapy three times for the anxiety. learned the "is it possible? yes. probable? no." mantra.

six months passed. i went back to see dr. wade, again knowing full well that my first follow-up scan was going to show something bad. it didn't. neither did the chest x-ray. by this time, i had been prescribed and started taking lexapro to help fight off the demons. it helped. time helped. all the clean scans helped. the no tumors in my eyes report helped. and i started acting like the crappy human being that i am again.

i plugged back into church. we got limbo off the ground. my store became a point of pride again. things started feeling..."normal". two weeks ago today, i went back for my year-out visit. the scan looked good again. they saw something in one of my lungs. but then, they didn't. i had a chest scan. clean there too.

is it time to celebrate?

maybe it is. i still worry. this week, i started the process of weaning myself off the lexapro. can't take that shit forever. we'll see how good i've got at coping with the demons on my own.

today, a full year removed from my surgery, sarah and i are heading to gatlinburg. it'll be my first trip there since late 1999 when i took a few youth there to see gay-ass josh mcdowell and the columbine crosses (that part was actually kind of moving) at some youth praise-all-things-that-came-from-jesus-which-is-everything gathering.

today, we are going to travel somewhere without children for more than one night for the first time since 2002. it is going to be weird. we hope it's relaxing. and fun.

it's been a helluva year. here's to many, many, many more (without cancer).