Focus on the Positive

Ok, I'm a bad, bad person. I haven't updated this blog in almost a month after I made a vow to myself that I was going to do it regularly. Well, you know how things happen. Some thoughtless individual made a rather snide comment about the contents of this blog and it kinda sucked out all my motivation to update it anymore. Oh well, screw them, it's a new year and I'm back with new vigor.

Over on my myspace blog, I was summarizing 2008 and basically came to one conclusion: it sucked major ass. The first half of the year was just fine, but the second half was consumed by my cancer and its subsequent treatments. Definitely not good times. But I've been thinking more about the issue, and in light of one of my goals for 2009, to be more positive, I concluded that 2008 was also a year of tremendous blessings.

The first blessing was the very fact that 2008 was 2008 and not 1968. If it were 1968, I would have been a dead man. Testicular cancer was a lethal killer back then. In 2008, however, it is probably the most easily treated of all cancers. How is that for blessing?

The second blessing, one related to the first, is that my treatments, although unpleasant, weren't as horrible as I had imagined and I had almost no complications (side-effects, yes, but that's not the same as complications). The fact that my treatments went so smoothly when, for many people, they don't, I consider a huge blessing. Two cases that illustrate this come quickly to mind: there's the case of the older woman I did the chemo teaching session with, they ended her treatment after about a month because it was so ineffective. I'm not sure where she's at now, but it's probably not as good a place as I'm in. There was also the man who I frequently saw in chemo room who ended up dead, at a young age too. Those things considered, I came out well.

The third blessing is also cancer related. Getting sick caused me to postpone a planned move in August, this gave me more time here at home and caused me to stick around at my job longer than I otherwise would have. This extra time allowed me to solidify some of my friendships that probably wouldn't have survived if I had moved in August like I was planning. Granted, it still looks like one of them isn't going to work out in the long-run, but I'm leaving town in much better shape socially than I was in when I first came here about a year ago.