Deb’s Still OK

We got the results of Deb's latest CAT scan today. She looks great; no evidence of cancer anywhere.

It must seem to the rest of you like we do these CAT scans every two weeks, but in fact the gaps are up to six months now. The next one happens in late November. (I know, that's seven months. It's a scheduling problem.)

August 1, believe it or not, is the 10-year anniversary of Deb's first cancer diagnosis. That was the breast cancer, and there's been no sign of it since. The GIST tumor showed up in January of 2003 and got removed in February, so that's more than three years ago. I remember being in the Beth Israel emergency room checking out a false alarm in March when Bush was giving Saddam his last warning, two days before the invasion.

Little by little, normal life has reasserted itself. Back in 2003 I threw away our budget, with the idea that if Deb lived long enough to get us into financial trouble, that would be good. Last month I finally got around to doing the numbers and put us back on a budget, though not a very rigorous one. Surprisingly, it turns out that doing whatever we want is not all that different from what we'd been doing anyway. Maybe we lack imagination.

I'm also having trouble imagining how to mark August 1. It seems significant, but neither of us has come up with any good ideas. I think we've gotten superstitious about planning things like that.