New Year Clean Colon

The first of September in our house is a lot like the first of January in others.  I work at a University so things get kind of kooky once the students start returning to town.  To me, the fresh re-start begins during frosh week and not at the beginning of the calendar year.

Now, the academic year doesn't have a direct effect on what I do every day normally but, unusually, the arrival of frosh week coincided with work getting super busy again.  For a number of reasons, last year, a lot of my colleagues either took no vacation or a very abbreviated version of their normal holiday.  This year, more folks took their hard earned vacations and I think that the convergence of everyone coming back to work at the end of August caused stuff to get nutty.

I am talking about this because normally, the only time I can usually carve out to do a little bit of writing here is over my lunch hours.  That bit of precious time has ebbed away recently. 

Just before Labour Day weekend, Mark celebrated one year of post cancer surgery goodness with a colonoscopy.  Lucky boy huh?? This time, he didn’t find that the preparation was as horrible as it was last year.  I think that the anticipation was a little worse though.  Last year, we hadn’t even thought about cancer.  This year, we were both thinking “what if it’s back?” 

Instead of a scope technician, his surgeon performed the colonoscopy this year.  He found 3 polyps (which have probably been biopsied by now) and Dr. M indicated that they didn't look like anything we should be worried about.  It was a huge relief.  I find that you don't realize exactly how worried you are about something until you stop worrying about it.  Limp dish rag sort of describes it I suppose.  We found out this week that Mark has his next follow up appointment with the surgeon in late November.  Given that they aren't rushing him back in to see the doctor, I'm taking that as a good sign as well.

I still have a couple of posts in the works about his cancer story to finish up and post.  That story is more about the journey through surgery and recovery.  As you can tell, so far anyway, we're enjoying a happy ending of sorts.  Once you have that cancer diagnosis, you never fully relax but we're not on high alert right now like we were this time last month.  That's a nice feeling.