HAPPY 1st 2nd BIRTHDAY!

This one will really be quick.  Yesterday was the really, actual, bonfide 1yr anniversary of my stem cell transplant at UCSF, which gave me my life back after cancer.  My 2nd birthday.  It was also the day that I had my monthly visit to my local (SLO) oncologist for my Zometa infusion and check of labs.  Thanks to Rod Blackner and his Paso Robles Culinary Academy cohorts for baking me a cake to take with me.  Chocolate cake with vanilla filing.  It was great, and everyone at the oncology center appreciated the moral victory that the day represented.  All of the many nurses that have treated and "infused" me over the past year and a half were there, especially the 2 who were in Paso when Michael Blackwell, then Dr. Bonis saved my life.  Valerie and Kristen, a special thank you.  Kristen is leaving the cancer bus. to work for an OBGYN in Templeton.  Friday is her last day, so it was doubly nice to be able to see her, thank her, and say my good byes.  For all of the miracles in my treatments, I'm guess the need for an OBGYN in the future for me is still pretty slim.  It was wonderful to go back home and climb into bed all nauseated from the infusion and nightly chemo.  I laid there just thanking the Lord for my nausea and body pains.  It reminds me every night that I am alive, and beating the cancer that tried to take me.  If you're interested, go back a year and review the miracles that surrounded my surviving the bone marrow and stem cell transplant, or the chemo that preceded them anyway.  Yesterday, one of the other patients receiving an infusion said that I was just "beaming and glowing".  I told her, and the 5 other patients receiving infusions in our treatment room, that thanks to God, my brother Jesus Christ, fantastic doctors, nurses, medicine and science, I was alive to beam.  I gave her my telephone number and told her to call me if she wanted to hear about how she could be beaming by her next treatment.  Terri, my nurse, encouraged her to call.  She said, "He always leaves here having made somebody feel better about their chances and recovery."  I can't help it.  It's a message that needs to be shared.  Have I told you about my friend, Dennis Lozano and my niece, Becky and great-nephew Spencer?  Now those are stories...