Milestone

Thank you all for your kind comments on my post yesterday. I appreciate all of your well wishes and support more than you know. I wish I had known you all back when my husband got sick. I was blogging then, but had very few followers and had yet to meet most (all?) of you in late 2011/early 2012. It would have been a wonderful source of support during the darkest time of my life. At times I felt very, very alone in those days.

I didn't want to mention this yesterday until Gregg got the "all clear"....but it was exactly 5 years ago that he got his cancer diagnosis. That means he's passed what I consider a very important milestone, and one I secretly feared he would never see. The 5-year survival rate for stage 3B lung cancer is a dismal 5%. I found that statistic early on and nearly despaired. My husband is a lucky, lucky man. Lucky to have as a long-time personal friend the head pulmonary specialist at McLeod hospital here in Florence, who pulled out all the stops to get the cancer treated quickly and aggressively by the best doctors, surgeons, and oncologists in the area. Lucky that he was relatively young and in good health (except for the giant tumor in his left lung, of course) and could stand an aggressive course of treatment. Lucky to have good health care insurance that paved the way for any and all tests and treatments to be done immediately. He may have lost an entire lung, and chemotherapy was hell, but he's here today and healthy. Nothing could be luckier than that!

I expected yesterday to feel momentous, but it was strangely anticlimactic. The oncologist didn't even mention the 5 year thing. Gregg will still be on a 6 month follow up schedule, at least for now, because they made an appointment for next June. After seeing the doctor yesterday, he went back to work and it was just a regular day. When I mentioned the milestone to him last night, he kind of shrugged it off and changed the subject. It didn't feel all that momentous to him.

But to me, it feels like a miracle.