We love you, Carole!

You have a gift of making people feel like they are your best friend and that they are special. No one feels so alone in your love. You genuinely care for others. Thank you for your support, your friendship, and your love.

We are with you on your final journey.

All our love, thoughts and prayers,
Steve, Carla and Family

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!

Dreaming of Spring

This is my friend Tony dreaming of spring.

Winter and chemotherapy

are keeping him and his bike

inside right now.

Sweet dreams, my friend. Sweet dreams!

Incisional Hernia

It turns out that about 15% of abdominal surgery patients develop incisional hernias.

So NOW they tell me!

My rectal surgeon referred me to a hernia surgeon to get mine fixed. This will be surgery number three for me. Cancer certainly leaves its mark!

I saw my rectal surgeon yesterday for my three monthly check up. He put his nifty little camera up my bum again to see how things are healing inside. Carla was with me and got to watch the whole thing on the monitor. She said my insides looked pink and healthy. I thought she was pretty lucky to be there. Not everybody gets to see this side of me. My surgeon told me that my anastomosis was almost invisible in places and that I was a great healer.

From all reports I'd have to say I'm doing a good job keeping it together. :-)) Too bad I'm not doing so well keeping it all in...

Extra! Extra!

Read All About It!

If you thought the movie was great, now you can read the book!

That's all 12 months of my cancer blog

squished into 112 pages...

...including many of your comments,

plus never before seen photographs

from our Alaska Cruise at the end of treatment!

Thanks for the inspiration, Lisa (Shents). Carla and I presented each of our children with their own copy. That was the best part of the project. We realized that my blog was the only record of my journey through cancer.

I was able to make the book completely accessible on the publisher's web site if anyone is interested in viewing it online. Just click on this image.

Like Lisa, I have made it available for sale at cost. The idea was to preserve a tough year of my life for my posterity, not to make money on a book. When we purchased the books for our children, I went to Google and searched for "blurb coupon code". That got me 20% off our order!

We hope you enjoy the book. It was a lot of fun putting it together.

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time there lived a young man who loved his Father very much.

When the young man was diagnosed with cancer he did not ask his Father, "Why me?"

Instead, he asked his Father to "Pretty please (with sugar on top)" accompany him on the dark and scary journey that lay ahead.

And it came to pass that a very loving Heavenly Father heard the pleas of his son and granted his request.

From that very moment the tender mercies of the Lord began to pour forth upon the young cancer patient to the comfort of his soul and the blessing of he and his family.

In due course, four angelic emissaries from Cancerland emerged in his path. Their names were Carole of London, Fiona of Bollington, Angela of Kent, and Tony of Matlock.

The strength and support, the example and encouragement, the love and laughter of these four friends proved most effective in vanquishing the vicissitudes of cancer.

This is but one example of the team effort needed to fight cancer. Truly the young man was blessed in his journey.

Ever after he remembered with fondness these four fighting cancer warriors and the unbounded love of a Heavenly Father for each of His children.

May we all live happily ever after to the end of our days in the arms of our Father's love.

The End

“The Lord's tender mercies are the very personal and individualized blessings, strength, protection, assurances, guidance, loving-kindnesses, consolation, support, and spiritual gifts which we receive from and because of and through the Lord Jesus Christ.” ~David A. Bednar