It's been a while...

Hello all.
Can you see me waving at you?
I am back; I did try and leave, did try and start up numerous blogs detailing some aspect or other of my life, but somehow I kept coming back here.  Somehow, this page is my page, my space, my scratched corner of the wide web sculpture.
It seems appropriate that just after two years after my last post, I have returned, shy, edging into the room like a gawky teenager, feeling the keys alien beneath my fingers.  Not quite hitting the keys in the same rhythm as when I left.

So much has changed in those two years.  My hair for a start has regrown.  I have had a scare since; last November another lump in exactly the same place which was nothing but scar tissue, but still another operation, general anesthetic and a return into hospital where memories beseiged me.  But the manacle of cancer has left my ankle now, and although you could, if you searched, find the scars of my treatment, it is nearly over.

Nearly, because it isn't quite five years yet, and as every survivor knows, it is the number five which is magic.  Due to the recurrence five months after the final treatment, my five years is beyond the normal five years so it will be six years after it all started in September 2005.  Next year I will finally be free.

But, to be honest, one is never really free. Recent hip pain sent me back to the doctor, and a bone scan.  Inevitably and yet again, the cancer monster raised its head, fixed its gaze on me, and I writhed in its glare.  False alarm: early arthritis brought on by chemotherapy. The dragon has curled up in the corner, nosed its tail and shrunk to a lizard.

Long may it stay there!

Minerva