I thought I was over the last bout of melancholy shortly before Christmas but it has returned to haunt me like the spectre of Christmas Yet to Come.  I’m not in particularly bad shape but there is noticeable  agitation, particularly in the morning, an increase in negative thoughts (this could be my last decade …) and my appetite has not been doing well.  Most people gain weight over Christmas:  I’ve lost 5 pounds.

P’s brother & family came to stay for a few days starting Christmas Eve.  They are a lovely family and A had a couple of people her own age (more or less) to hang out with.  There was a lot more Christmas spirit in the air than usual and everyone seemed to have a good time, including me.  They left on the 30th.

The next evening we went to a wonderful New Year party thrown by a couple of close friends and fellow meditators.  There were only about a dozen people in total all of whom were interesting and friendly people.  Around midnight some of them paraded into the living room equipped with a concertina and a couple of guitars and, after the obligatory Auld Lang Syne, they regaled us with a variety of folky, bluegrassy songs.  We bailed out about 1am feeling very good about life.

Notwithstanding all this good stuff I started to feel agitated on about the 29th.  It is quite a mild case, really, but unpleasant to deal with as always.  Today P helped me devise a coping strategy.   I need to eat more.  The problem of finding something I want to eat is complicated by the various food allergies and intolerances I have acquired over the years:

• lactose intolerance (milk, cheese etc.)
• garlic (present in a huge variety of prepared foods)
• mustard (probably)
• corn products (also present in many prepared foods)
• chitinase (found in avacado, mango, banana, kiwi fruit, some nuts etc.)
• various nuts
• various legumes in any sizable quantity

Fortunately none of these is life-threatening but it has taken literally years (like about 20) to figure this out.  I’ve always had a rather delicate stomach and back in the ’90s I had all kinds of alarming sounding tests and examinations which revealed nothing unexpected.  This little list also caused huge problems when I was in hospital last summer.  They really had no idea what to feed me.  Ironically, of course, ginger ale (often suggested for an upset stomach) and protein drinks (like Boost) contain corn syrup and thus make matters worse. Anything containing “spices” has to be approached with great caution.  So many of the things I would snack on in my younger days are now more or less off-limits.  Eating out is complicated; fast food is pretty much a guarantee of later gastric distress.

Add to all of that the desire to eat healthy (avoiding red meat, hormone and antibiotic-fed chickens, high cholesterol foods such as eggs, pesticide-treated plants etc.) and you can see that maintaining adequate nutrition can get interesting, especially when I don’t feel like eating in the first place.

The short list of high-protein foods that we figure I can eat is:

• Salmon (18g protein / can)
• Sardines (20g protein / can)
• Chicken or turkey breast
• Pork
• Cheese (ideally goat or lactose-reduced)
• Solomon Gundy (a local specialty:  pickled herring, more or less)
• Vega protein drink (no milk, no corn, 26g protein in a full serving)

My new dietary plan now looks something like this:

• Breakfast: half Vega serving; cereal with fruit; bread & jam
• Lunch: half Vega serving; fish, cheese or meat as available; bread or crackers
• Dinner: Chicken, turkey, salmon or other fish; veggies; potatoes or rice

If it is time to eat and I don’t feel up to it due to agitation I will take enough Clonazepam to convince my gut to co-operate.  At any other time of day, if I feel like dealing with my mental state by other means I can do so but meals are hereby declared to be important.

I invite your comments and suggestions as to what else I might try.  P has been a very imaginative cook given all the restrictions but we would both welcome new ideas.

Speaking of someone other than myself (although I realise that I am endlessly fascinating) a large number of cards, letters and emails have flowed in from friends and relatives across the country and around the world.  It is great to hear from all of you!  If any of you would like to talk to me e.g. via telephone or some kind of Skype-like thing I would be only too delighted.  Drop me a line and let’s try to get some connectivity happening.  I’m not always morose so you never know:  talking to me might cheer you up as well.

Right now it’s ‘way past my drinking time so here’s wishing you all a very happy 2010:  may you live in truly boring times.

It always turns up again eventually.  P says she started noticing  my mood slipping about 10 days ago when I was having trouble levering myself out of bed, moving rather slowly around the house and not showing much interest in anything.  A few days ago it got bad enough that I started popping some extra clonazepam.  Yesterday it was 1.75 pills (@ 0.5mg each pill) which is, according to Dr. C, “fairy dust”.  I’m much more relaxed about taking this stuff after many reassurances from Dr. C and various friends that I’m in no danger of becoming a junkie any time soon.  So rather than trying to tough it out I might just as well feel better and be more functional.  It’s easier on everyone, including those around me.

There seems to have been no obvious trigger for this episode.  For all I know it could be the weather, something I ate, an event in my life too trivial to recall, the anticipation of some future event… I just don’t know.  Three months ago I started keeping a mood calendar but it only records (in very coarse terms) how I’ve been feeling, not the circumstances du jour.  So much data would have to be recorded in order to start looking for 2-3 month trends that I don’t know if I’m up to the task.  One cause I can more or less rule out in this case is anything to do with the melanoma.  My much abused leg (anyone want to see another picture?) continues to recover very well with no signs of recurrence at present.  While I am experiencing negative thoughts they seem to be very random:  global warming, a little swelling in my mouth that is slightly sore, the worry that my friends might get bored with my complaints… stuff like that.

One other event of minor significance occurred recently.  We got a call from Dr. R (the radiation oncologist).   At our meeting a couple of months back she said she thought some radiation treatment might be helpful.  Now, having taken a more detailed look at the scan results and having talked to Dr. G about where the active margins were that could not be dealt with surgically, she is thinking that the radiation is likely to do more harm than good.  If and when the melanoma shows up again it will be worth taking another look but for now we’re not going to nuke my leg.  I can be happy with that.

And finally, in the general news roundup:

• Mr. RJ of Calgary sent me two URLs (one from the BBC and one from the CBC) reporting a breakthrough in cancer DNA analysis that promises great things for the future,
• Science Daily reports that high-frequency ultrasound can help differentiate between benign and melignant forms of skin cancer,
• The Register reminds us that Christmas stress can be fatal (and a Merry Christmas to them too),
• and the Toronto Globe & Mail report on research that may improve the effectiveness of anti-depressive drugs.

All good stuff.

We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a prosperous 2010 and look forward to hearing from each and every one of you over the coming months.

I thought I’d better get around to posting something here before rumours of my demise reached pandemic proportions.  The big news, such as it is, is that I am still alive and currently quite healthy.  There has been no new news from any doctors:   my visit to Dr. D, as expected, yielded no nasty surprises but no miracle cures either.  I have yet to hear from Dr. R about getting my leg nuked; it would be nice to get that over with but there is not much I can do to speed things along.  Nothing significant to report from my most recent CT scan and no new bumps or lumps to be found either.   You can skip the rest of this if you’re just checking up on me.  ‘Bye

Those of you who want to know about the weather or who are in need of sleep, read on.

November has been beautiful here.  It is as though summer was simply delayed by a few months.  True, we have had some cooler weather (frost on the windshield in the morning) and some rain but today it is once again partly sunny and 15˚C.  I did walking meditation for half an hour on the back deck yesterday just before sunset and felt wonderful afterwards.

My state of mind has also been pleasantly upbeat and pretty stable. I have even been enjoying some computer programming lately which I think is a really good sign.  Not merely do I feel like doing it and that it is a worthwhile activity but I can actually summon up the necessary energy and concentration to make it happen.  Such episodes have been rare indeed over the past couple of years.  I attribute a great deal of this improvement to the mindfulness and meditation  that I have been doing.  I don’t want to come across as some kind of rabid, evangelical Buddhist or some new-age nutcase  but it has been so good for me that I am going to spend a few paragraphs trying to convince all of you to try it too.  P thinks I should write a book about my experience which I may try if I live long enough.

It was back in the late ’70s that a good friend talked me into trying Transcendental Meditation.  For the (then) huge sum of $60 I took a course and was prescribed a mantra, a sort of nonsense word on which to focus my attention for 20 minutes twice daily.  I managed to keep it up sporadically for a few years.  After that I only got around to it if I was feeling really agitated:  it was wonderfully calming.  In the early ’90s P and I took a course in Tai Chi for a few weeks.  This turns out to be (among other things) a form of moving meditation.  Your mind is totally focussed on what you are doing, precisely how you are moving and so forth.  Once again, it is a very calming exercise and it helped me crawl my way through some very dark times (for me) in the mid-90’s.  However, Tai Chi required me to remember a lot of detail (the moves, the sequences thereof) and after lapsing for a few months I never managed to pull it together again.  All of this is by way of saying that I didn’t come completely cold to mindfulness meditation.  It was, in many ways, a natural extension of a path I have followed several times in my life.

When the floor dropped out of my life 18 months ago I quickly realised that my state of mind (SoM) was going to be at least as important as a cure for cancer to my future quality of life.  In the early days I spent a lot of time doing TM which was, as always, calming but seemed to do little to dispel the pervasive anxiety.  Fortunately I was referred to a very good psychiatrist, Dr. C.  Unlike my previous brain care specialists she does a lot more than merely “talking me through” stuff or prescribing pills.  My first exposure to mindfulness meditation was at her suggestion.

Full Catastrophe Living is the book upon which the course was based and I highly recommend it.  A group led by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn developed the course which uses meditation as a tool to change the way your mind works by allowing you to observe the background chatter and exercise some control over it.  In my case there are two forms of chatter that pose a problem:  the kind that feels as though there is more going on than I can cope with and the kind that drags me into morbid speculation about unpleasant future events.  The latter is especially nasty because it can so easily bring on an anxiety attack.  During basic mindfulness meditation you concentrate on breathing, just feeling the air moving in and out of you lungs and nose, your belly and chest rising and falling.  Without gritting your teeth you try to keep your attention on this simple action.  Every time you notice that you are thinking of something else you mentally label this (e.g. by sub-vocalizing the word “thinking”) and move your attention back to breathing.  Doing this for 20 minutes a couple of times a day over a few months will probably make a big difference to the background chatter level in you head because it helps to form a sub-conscious habit of paying attention to what is happening right now, rather than to all the other random thoughts that flit through your mind.  In other words, the benefit of mindfulness meditation (over and above TM, for example) is the long-term changes it helps to bring about.

Quite a bit of scientific and psychological research has been done on this stuff over the last few decades and mindfulness is now a quite well-respected form of therapy for many  neurotics like myself.  You don’t have to be neurotic in order to benefit, of course, which is the whole point of this posting.  I suppose if you’re already an incredibly focussed person it won’t make much difference but for the rest of you (and I know you’re out there!) it is a simple way to gain control over many aspects of your life and avoid (or at least mitigate) a certain amount of unpleasantness.  I pretty much guarantee that it will result in more calm in your life and a much greater sense of contentment.

So there.  Feel free to ask questions etc..

Finally, pickings from the media over the last few weeks:

• Another promising approach to treating melanoma – in mice
• U of Alberta scientists synthesize Palmerolide A, which appears to be an effective melanoma treatment
• Genetic mutations identified in melanoma may allow existing drugs to be used in treatment
• there is a new device to help identify skin cancer.
• On the other hand, laser treatments may aggravate skin cancer
• and folic acid (vitamin B) may increase cancer risk
• Breast cancer is more likely to recur in ‘dense’ breasts
• and did you know it is possible for males to get breast cancer?  I didn’t.

Hang in there and enjoy the Christmas scramble.

 

It has been a glorious autumn season here, after a rather miserable summer.  This applies both to the weather and to my state of being.  My summer was spent worrying, having surgery, being unable to walk and recovering (mostly indoors).  However, the mindfulness and meditation I have been doing along with a new approach to some of the mind-numbing drugs has all proved very effective at improving my view of life.  I think I am much closer to a complete acceptance that my life has entered its autumnal phase.  Spring is but a distant memory and the glorious carefree times of summer are largely past (sorry:  that’s not in iambic pentameter; get over it) but I am not yet ready to concede that winter is on my doorstep.  Like the weather I am experiencing a very pleasant Indian summer which could go on for quite a while.

A visit to Dr. G yesterday (see Doctors) brought only good news.  A recent CT scan was all clear, the wounds in my leg are healing well and there are no signs of any new lumps or bumps.  I am expecting to hear from Dr. R in the near future with a view to getting a few bits and pieces nuked which should be entertaining (A can’t wait to see if my leg will glow in the dark) and will probably entail a 5-day stay in the city for half-hour treatments each day.  Next week I’ll be talking to Dr. D and asking if there are any new chemo treatments that might be applied prophylactically but I’m expecting the answer to be ‘no’.

The worst news I could get from one of my many doctors would probably give me 9-12 months to live.  How would I spend the time?  Really there is not a whole lot of big stuff I want out of life any more.  I think I’d eat more shellfish, drink more beer, watch more TV and movies, listen to more music, read more books, sit and meditate in the sun (ideally on a rock near the ocean), ride my bike, tidy up my stuff (and give quite  a lot of it away) and take whatever drugs I need to calm myself without worrying about addiction.  If I think of anything more significant to occupy my time I’ll let you know.  Meanwhile there appears to be no cause for alarums and excursions.

A couple of odds and ends of news from the media:

• people who are given hope for a complete cure for a chronic condition may end up less happy than those who are given none,
• and there may be a link between processed food and depression.

I’d heard that vitamin D is supposed to be a cancer preventative but I had no idea just how effective it might prove to be.  Mr. DH of BC emailed me recently extolling the virtues thereof.  Being the skeptic that I am  I went searching for some more information.  A recent study from UCSD suggest that a relatively minor vitamin D deficiency can allow cancer to metastasize much more readily than it might otherwise.  There are a lot of weasel words in that statement but the research is still quite preliminary and I don’t want to give the impression that this is some kind of cure all.  Vitamin D is produced naturally by exposing the skin to sunlight but even if one ignores the purported skin cancer risks it is hard to produce enough for those of us living in higher latitudes and spending most of our time indoors.  I’ve been taking 1000IU tablets daily for some time which may be helping me.  The study recommends double that and the material sent by Mr. DH (for which I have no formal reference but which is Copyright © 2005, Advanced Orthomolecular Research) suggests rather more:

The analysis of these 14 studies revealed that individuals whose oral vitamin D intake matched or exceeded 1,000 IU daily had a 50% lower incidence of colorectal cancer than those whose oral vitamin D intake was lower. Even this amount is considered conservative by an increasing number of scientists, many of whom suggest that daily doses as high as 10,000 IU can be justified.

The Canadian Cancer Society is more cautious due to the possibly toxic effects of too much vitamin D but they still think it is a good plan.

In addition to the curative properties of vitamin D the research reveals that it suppresses a probable mechanism for cancer metastasis which ought to work at any stage of the cancer’s progression.  This is not just another anti-oxidant.  It all sounds very interesting and plausible.  A television interview with Cedric Garland, Dr. (Public Health) covers the high points.

Let me know what you think.  Is this snake oil or are we onto something here?

In more prosaic news I met Dr. M, the plastic surgeon, yesterday who examined the damaged goods and indicated that the healing was proceeding nicely.  He could find no new evidence of melanoma which suits me just fine.  My mood has been a little depressed lately but P and I took a lovely mini-vacation this last weekend.  Tonight we’re off to meditate.  It all helps.

Update:

This just in:  the Globe & Mail reports that doctors are starting to include Vitamin D in cancer treatment regimes.  It sounds as though mainstream medicine is buying into this story.  Probably a good sign.

Recently several people have been kind enough to ask me if everything is OK in the absence of any blog entries to the contrary.  I am happy to be able to reassure all my supporters that things are going fine.  My state of mind has been very good for the past few weeks, I have had energy to spare and I have been Getting Things Done while the mood is upon me.  In fact one thing that I did manage to get done to this blog (which some of you may have noticed) was to collect all the various links together into a page which can be found under the References tab.  There are quite a lot of potentially useful bits of information there by now and I will try to keep the page up to date.

All the surgery incisions, skin grafts and so on are healing very well.  There are a few scabs left to fall off and two relatively small dressings which are mostly there to protect the still delicate new skin.  I still feel some discomfort in my groin and certain postures (kneeling, for example) are hard (or painful) to achieve but that’s about it.  I am back to wearing my compression stocking.  It’s funny:  I never thought I’d be happy to wear it but these days it represents a return to “normal”, which is good.  We saw Dr. H a couple of days ago and she thought everything looked good and could find no new bumps or lumps and I am going for a CT scan tomorrow morning although I doubt if it will reveal any new horrors.  The most I have to complain about is some kind of cold or bronchitis which seems reluctant to clear up but since P had an 8-week bout of something similar a few months back it is probably nothing to worry about.  Just to be on the safe side I am going to see my family doctor on Tuesday.

In other news:

• A BC team has been studying the DNA of breast cancer tumours, noted here , here and here.
• A Cambridge U. team has also found out more about how breast cancer spreads.
• From New York there are more hopeful signs that the PLX4032 drug is effective against advanced melanoma.
• Several articles comment on various aspects of life that can promote or detract from one’s mental health:  green spaces, too much retirement and social isolation.
• And finally, the debate on assisted suicide is becoming more widespread which I feel has got to be a good thing.

Thank you all for continuing to care and for checking up on me!  Right now life is good.  Long may it continue – for all of us.

I have to tell you this even though the story comes to me via at least three intermediaries.

Apparently a friend of a friend of ours was “feeling a bit off” a few weeks ago so she made an appointment with her doctor.  After some poking around he found a suspicious looking mole (I know not where) and sent her off post haste to a specialist.  Presumably the thing was excised, biopsied and various other tests and scans done.  The upshot of all this was that her specialist reckoned she had a bad case of melanoma and about three weeks to live.  She didn’t quite make it.  Apparently she was not in any pain at any time during this process which might have been a little comfort under the circumstances.

Three weeks! It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

The good news (if anything good can be gleaned from this) is that she was highly functional and in no pain until the axe fell.  From what I can tell melanoma, in general, is a relatively pain-free cancer for which I am profoundly grateful, wuss that I am.

On the home front I have been in a much better mood for the last few days, resorting to only token doses of clonazepam to keep me on an even keel.  Today was lovely:  the weather here has been fairly warm, dry and sunny with just a hint of autumn in the air.  I spent the afternoon sitting on our back deck reading a book on Buddhism, listening to the breeze in the trees and watching the occasional deer picking its way through the woods.  Life doesn’t get much better.

Just to confuse matters today’s doctor, a radiotherapy oncologist, is another Dr. C.  So I am going to refer to her as Dr. R to avoid ambiguity.

The pathology report that came out of the most recent surgery to my leg noted  a few sites where there is still cancerous activity in the margins.  In classical surgical terms this means that they should have cut more stuff out but in these few cases I would have lost tendons, major blood vessels and as a result probably the whole leg.  Given that the doctors are trying to keep me bi-pedal the next best option is to nuke the sites that looked suspicious.  Dr. R reckons this is a reasonable thing to do and shouldn’t be any great trouble.  It will have to wait until all the wounds are fully healed (which will probably be another month or so) and will probably involve half-hour outpatient sessions on five successive days.  P and I agreed that I should probably  just stay somewhere near the hospital for that week because a daily commute would be quite wearing on both of us.  Anyway, it will give me an opportunity to get to know a bit more about the city.

So for now we are back to waiting for the next appointment to be scheduled.

Meanwhile all the incisions, grafts and what-not are coming together very nicely.  Walking without artificial aids gets easier every day and I can even make it up and down stairs without too much trouble.  This is all very liberating and I am feeling greatly encouraged.  In fact during a chat earlier today one of my friends remarked:

Rationally, you’ve got it made. Physical health fast returning, loving family, lots of friends, beautiful house, no pressing needs…

This is all perfectly true and there have been many occasions lately when I have been very frustrated with myself for being unable to align my mood with this point of view.  Why am I so jittery and anxious so much of the time?  Beats me but as I’ve said in previous postings this has been going on for many years and I have yet to discover a really satisfactory solution.  Apparently several of my friends have been (or are still) struggling with similar mood disorders.  While I certainly don’t wish to spread the misery around it is comforting to know that some of you know precisely the sort of  difficulties with which I am coping.

What is less comforting is that depression reduces your chances of surviving cancer.  That’s a piece of news I really didn’t need to know.  However, on the brighter side, there seems to be a master gene that helps mobilize the immune system and a virus connected with prostate cancer, both signs that the march of science continues and will probably produce a cure for what ails me, sometime after I’m dead.

So there I was, feeling really great one day and not at all that great the next.  Maybe it’s not the extra prozac.  More likely it’s the periodic anxiety.  Here is how it seems to work for me:

High anxiety:

Unable to eat, nauseous, light headed, hot & cold (mostly clammy), jittery (rapid heartbeat, shakiness), prone to crying, trouble concentrating, worried (often about nothing in particular).

Moderate anxiety:

Jittery, maybe a little light headed or burpy.  No particular feelings of worry.

Neutral:

Nothing seems worth doing but otherwise feeling OK.  Dozy, unmotivated but fairly content to be a lump.

Low anxiety:

Moderately energetic, not too sleepy.  Feels like there are lots of possibilities for things that I want to do and enough energy to do at least some of them.

Very Low anxiety:

Positively upbeat.  Lots of energy, no desire to sleep.  Almost manic.

Today I started off in a moderate anxiety state and, over a couple of hours, took two half-clonazepam pills (each full pill == .5mg) which seems to have lowered the level to “low”, more or less.  I have to say that I can’t even imagine how much effort that would have taken to accomplish using willpower, mindfulness, meditation, cognitive therapy or whatever without the drugs.  P was commenting on how it seems as though my days tend to be about 20% good / 80% not-so-good and that this has been true for years.  Much though I hate popping pills to regulate my mood (especially potentially addictive ones) I think this is the practical solution, at least at present.

On the grand scale of mental illness I barely make it onto the bottom end.  Any mental problem that can be taken care of with such low doses of so few, relatively well-understood drugs really ought not to cause too much alarm.

I am certainly planning to keep up the meditation and mindfulness practice but I also anticipate being more relaxed about popping pills if my anxiety level seems to be creeping up above the “low” level.

Let me open by saying how good I have been feeling for the past few days!  Around the 3rd of this month I was noticing negative thoughts creeping back into my consciousness.  My “little voice” was haunting me once more.  It had been a while since I’d heard much out of it so I wondered to myself what’s changed? The first and most obvious thing that might have an obvious bearing was that about mid-August I tried dropping my Prozac intake back to 40mg/day.  Obviously, therefore, the first thing to try was to increase it to 60mg/day again.  I cannot be sure that the Prozac dosage is the direct or only cause of my lowered mental state but it is certainly an interesting coincidence.  On Thursday I’ll be seeing Dr. C, the psychiatrist, and will ask for an opinion.  My intent is to keep track of my state of mind, moods etc. for another week or two and then try dropping the Prozac intake back to 40mg/day again; if I get the same sort of results I’ll be sticking with 60mg thereafter.

Anyway, the weather has been good, we’ve had friends visiting, my leg seems to be healing well, my energy level has been good, I’ve gained about 8lbs on a high-protein diet and I have been feeling calm and generally well-adjusted.  Is it reasonable to assume that this is how “normal” is supposed to feel?  I’m trying to imprint the whole sensation on my subconscious so that I have a target to aim for in case of future crises.  Meanwhile I think I am getting the hang of this “one day at a time” business.  The days since my recent hospital stay have been slipping by, one by one, quite painlessly and mostly quite enjoyably.  All good.

Today we went to see Dr. G, the general surgeon who did the isolated limb perfusion on my leg.  He is a very pleasant and gentle human being and he laughs at my jokes.  I asked him about my knee (where a previously sutured wound split open a couple of weeks ago), my groin (which still causes me considerable pain when I move the wrong way) and a small piece of metal embedded in one of my skin grafts (which the VON discovered a few days ago and was unable to remove).

He tut-tutted over the knee wound but agreed that it seems to be healing quite well, made a recommendation for future care and dressed it up again.  The groin pain should clear up with time (doesn’t everything?) and he suggested I try a warm compress on the area and some stretches in the morning before I get up; I’ll give it a shot tomorrow.  After injecting some local anaesthetic and poking around for a while he announced that it was not, as we had thought, a lost staple but was in fact a vascular clamp used to close off a blood vessel.  P asked “Isn’t it needed anymore?” to which he replied, “Apparently not.”  Well, that’s good to know.

We haven’t got a copy of the pathology report resulting from all the surgery Dr. G did but he tells us that there was activity in some of the margins.  However:

1. this was more or less inevitable due to the presence of things like blood vessels and tendons which cannot be removed without rendering my leg useless
2. the perfusion chemotherapy is supposed to take care of exactly that sort of thing anyway
3. he will refer me to yet another doctor, this time a radiologist, to see if radiotherapy on those areas is  indicated.

In addition I will get another CT scan in a few weeks but there is no point in doing a PET scan yet because my leg will light up like a Christmas tree due to all the stuff that is healing right now.

By sheer coincidence we met our next-door neighbour’s significant other over the weekend and she was telling us of a friend who had had melanoma in the leg which had actually got into the bone.  In spite of this they were able to cut out the relevant bits and apply some radiation and he is now back to playing soccer.  A further coincidence was that she knows Dr. G because her kids go to the same school as his kids.  Today, coincidence number three occurred when she jogged up as I was getting out of the car to walk to Dr. G’s appointment.  There are some people you just have to meet.

Hang in there, folks!  The story will continue after this break: