Sweet Sixteen

Each Sunday morning since Christmas I have weighed myself on our bathroom scale.

In six weeks I have lost 16 pounds.

For Christmas I gave my wife 50 pounds of sugar and a 10 gallon fish tank for storing the sugar. She looked at me quizzically until I explained.

My present to her was a promise to loose 50 pounds by my 50th birthday five months away. The sugar represents the weight I have to loose and the junk food I am giving up to loose the weight.

For each pound I loose, I remove one pound of sugar from the fish tank. We can all see the sugar level going down.

So far I have given my wife 31% of her Christmas present. She is very happy about that.

I made my sweet sixteen!

Done and Dusted

I have been following four cancer blogs since just after my own diagnosis.

Fiona's blog, Onwards and Upwards, is the only one of those that was not about colorectal cancer. She was diagnosed with liver cancer.

She was also diagnosed with hepatitis and cirrhosis. Her poor liver took a triple hit.

The real conundrum is how did she get hepatitis and how did it go undiscovered and untreated for some 25 years, especially considering her consistently heathy and active lifestyle.

It took cancer to expose the hepatitis and the years of liver damage left in its wake.

Like me, Fiona is on the other side of her cancer treatment. We both go in for quarterly checkups.

Fiona also monitors her hepatitis on a regular basis. She just posted her January clinic results.

Now I am not a nurse like she is, and I don't even try to write the type of technical posts she churns out. But it doesn't take a heppy doc (her affectionate term for hepatitis doctor) to realize that she just got some pretty descent news.

So this post is for you, Fiona.

Well done, my done and dusted friend!