It's been a blogging year

I started this blog one year ago. I crashed my initial effort and lost the first two weeks of blog entries but I remember what they were about and where I was at. I was trying to push my physical activity level as hard as possible and was attempting to walk/jog again. I realized that running was probably not in the cards but I hoped that I could build up to a steady routine of walk/jogging. When I started this blog it was almost 18 months after my melanoma diagnosis and a little over a year after my chronic maladies began a few months after the groin LND. I was hoping that my emphasis would move away from the aftermath of melanoma and more towards gardening, pleasant walks and perhaps jogging, and that I'd start playing with photography again.
It certainly hasn't been a straight path but I have a lot to be grateful for. The friends I've made through the MPIP (it's been two years since I started participating on that site) and the support from them has meant so much. I appreciate people who've taken the time to visit this rambling photowordlog. Sometimes I lose site of the good and when I stop and realize how lucky I've been, I feel like an ungrateful jerk. I'm not ungrateful. I don't take what I have for granted and it's helpful for me to think through it all here.
When I sat down to write this look back over my blogging year, my initial thought was how things haven't changed that much. I started here trying to re-energize and move forward. I felt like after my first year of living with a stage III melanoma diagnosis, making it past the initial onset of chronic pain, making it past the first post LND scan where I had a mass which was consistent with a tumor recurrence and then thankfully it was a false alarm, that I was ready to begin putting it behind me. As it turned out the chronic mess got worse and my fitness efforts were stops and starts, I had a scan that couldn't rule out a recurrence (thankfully PET scans after that were good), I went through a bunch of physical therapy, I had a lump removed from my back (thankfully a benign lipoma), and here I am a year later once again ready to try and move forward and put the crap behind me.What I have to remember and be grateful for is in the final analysis, the news has been GREAT. I have not had a recurrence. I may have to settle for walks and stop trying to jog, but I can walk. I may have to settle for pain management but it can be managed. In so many ways, I am incredibly blessed. Most importantly, my daughter is healthy and in the scheme of things, I'm doing pretty damn well as I close out my 49th year. I turn 50 on November 11, 2007 and rather than get hung up on all those goals I had for turning 50 (before my post LND crap), what I should be grateful for is that it's looking like I will turn 50. When I find myself feeling like I'm back where I started a year ago, and perhaps that I've gone backwards a ways, I have to think about how many good things have happened. My daughter graduated from college and got a full scholarship for law school. Although that wasn't something I did, it makes me happy because she was able to make plans, follow through, move to a new town, and things are going well for her.I've been able to continue to work from home, take breaks to drown in the scent and texture of the flowers, walk on a wooded path on a regular basis. I am surrounded by the bird songs and shade trees and oh brother, am I starting to sound like a hallmark card or what? I think what I'm working around to accepting is there are much worse places to be than seemingly caught in circular motion. Circles have their own charm. Circles that keep ending with me continuing to try and find my own way of dealing with limitations I'm still adjusting to, beat the hell out of some far worse alternatives. It's been a blogging year . . .