Yes that’s correct, I spoke with my Doctor late this afternoon and he searched and searched through my bone marrow and was unable to find any Cancer!! This is our first victory! And I’m sure all you sports fans know how important the first game is! Exactly how wide the margin of Victory is, will be determined by the length of time my counts take to recover. But as you know the score doesn’t matter, as long as we get one in the WIN column.
My blood levels are almost normal, Neutrophils are 1.6, which is close to the target of 2.0, and hemoglobin stands at 116 while my platelets are normal. I feel almost like my old self again!!
This I would like to explain. I have had a different sort of past few weeks, more different than any period of time I can remember in my life, and I have to say that I did feel like myself throughout. There were many up and downs and there will be many more as one game never wins a Stanley Cup, but in general I have felt like regular old Geoff, Geoffrey, Skeats. That is certainly how I pictured myself and thus how I thought I was portraying me to you and everyone, from my “hotel” room at the Eaton Complex.
Now that I have been out in the real world again and in the last few days even been able to do normal things like XMAS shop and go out to dinner and today I drove for the first time in SEVEN WEEKS!! As I was given clearance to resume a somewhat “normal” existence, not that my existence has ever been normal. After the past few days of doing some of the things I used to do in my pre-Cancer life, I have realized that my hospital stay affected my level of operation, for lack of a better term, more than I thought it had. I may have talked to you all about appreciating the little things, and I’m sure most of you have written or told me about how you view things a little differently after learning about my challenge. Well I can say that if my emails have made you think a little differently our face to face meetings are going to blow you away. If you could see or some how experience the deep rooted joy and pleasure I have gotten from such simple things like driving my car, having a beer at my favourite watering hole (yes I am allowed to have the occasional beer), eating at one of my favourite restaurants, etc…… your world would be changed forever! I realize now more than ever one way to appreciate things on a new level is not necessarily to deprive yourself of them, but to have them taken away or stolen from you for a period of time. I guess this the where the line is drawn between my view, the fighters view and your view, the fans, as you have not really had these things stolen from you. It is impossible for you to COMPLETELY understand my situation, but I feel that you can still understand to varying levels and that hopefully you can benefit from our collective experience. I think this is what I have meant, when I refer to our opportunity and how we can all learn so much about so many things, such as, ourselves, our thoughts and thought processes, life, etc.. I know I’m going pretty deep here but I think on this level regularly everyday, and honestly I kind of like it.
If none of this makes sense just take away the fact that I am appreciating what I have more than ever before and I hope that I can make one, one hundred, one million people feel the same way. That is one of the major elements of my TD’s (To Do list) and I figured that I may be able to get started while I’m fighting my battle instead of waiting until after the victory party. And we will have a victory party, I have it well planned out, and I will share the details some time later.
For now I just wanted to tell everyone that I am feeling as close to myself as I have felt in the past 7 weeks since my fight began. I will touch base tomorrow, hopefully, with the date of the second game and when the puck will drop. Thank-you to everyone who writes, who has sent me XMAS wishes and who thinks about me at any time in your routine. I think of you all often, not on an individual level as much as a group of people who I look forward to touching now as I fight but even more, after the fight at the victory party. One down, a few more to go, take comfort, I’m well rested and ready to kick some more ass!
Have a great XMAS, this one will be special for me for a number of reasons, I hope it is for you as well.
Health and Happiness,
Geoff, Geoffrey, Skeats
#4
