After four months of crappy news and endless worry, today was great. Chuck got the official ALL CLEAR. He is cancer-free. We have it in writing. There’s a lot of follow-up: he comes in for a PET scan in a month, and for the next year every three months Dr. Nade wants him to come in for a preventative dose of rituxan. After that year, it will be check-ups every six months for five years. So there will be a lot of reminders of these past scary months and the uncertainty is something we’ll learn to live with.

The gift of time, of health, of life, is beyond calculation – beyond words. We have been blessed during this terrible time with family and friends who have been unwavering in their support. If we haven’t always expressed that gratitude, it wasn’t because we didn’t feel it.

This battle has been as much an emotional and spiritual one as physical. And some days, just getting up and going through the motions was the best we could manage. So it wasn’t that we didn’t appreciate all of the love and support – it was just putting one foot in front of the other was about all we could accomplish some days. Consider yourselves heartily thanked.

I’m looking forward to the coming weeks, as Chuck’s energy returns, as his taste buds return, as his hair returns, as our lives return to normal. But they’ll never be altogether normal again. We’ve been profoundly changed by this experience, in ways that I think are mostly positive but the full effects will no doubt take time to be fully processed. Certainly we turned out to be far stronger as people and as a couple than I’d ever imagined we could be.

Finally, we received a huge wake-up call to never, ever take each and every day for granted. Stop and smell the roses, take that trip, read that book, run that marathon. Seize the hell out of each and every day. They are ALL gifts.