Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Thoughts from Across The Pond

 A look back across  the River Cam, at I believe Trinity College (but don't quote me) in Cambridge, UK
ED NOTE: I wrote this back in February... but never published it. So four months later, here it is.


It's Saturday night. About 15 degrees outside. I've got a fire burning in the fireplace, a beer beside me, and I'm writing. Life is good.

Last Sunday we returned from a week in London, a trip we've been talking about for years. We had always wanted one trip where the kids were exposed to a different culture -- and even with a shared language (mostly), the UK definitely has a different culture.

The boys at our tour of Stamford Bridge, home to Chelsea FC
It was a great trip - full of all the expected sights that London has to offer, Westminster Abbey, Tower of London, Globe Theatre, and of course, a Chelsea game. Definitely a highlight for the boys. I think Cambridge was the highlight for me. That, and the fact that for a solid week, I didn't even think about my lymphoma.

It's not that cancer itself didn't come up. There were ads for it, and even a Cancer Research UK retail shop. But even as I thought of cancer, I didn't think of my cancer. And that seems somewhat remarkable to me.


Game Day Selfie 
But in some ways it's the natural evolution of my thought process. Six years in and lymphoma is so now fully part of who I am that it doesn't require me to think of it separately. I don't think that's a bad thing -- it's just a thing.  I always had a hard time with the concept of follicular lymphoma as a chronic disease. I kind of thought that it was called that because there was no cure, and the alternative label would be fatal disease. It's only recently that I've really come to believe that it's just something that hopefully I'll have to deal with for a while.

And a quick medical update... April visit was as uneventful as they come so we just move on to July and a PET/CT scan as planned.