It's been a year

By -


I've let the actual date I'm calling my "fingerversary" fly by a couple weeks ago but it has now been over a year since I became 1 guy with 7 fingers and 2 thumbs. So far the cancer last described as "Sarcoma: Favor low-grade" has remained absent and I am very grateful.

Brea & I were actually at White Sands National Monument on the actual fingerversary and it was amazing. I overdosed on photography but what can you really expect at such a stunning venue?

The other fingers are doing just fine, thanks for asking! They still talk about the missing Mr Middle but have become rather adept at getting on with daily life since his untimely demise. Halloween had them on edge a little bit as a prime haunting time but the only ghost sighting was the white plaster cast of my hand from before the surgery. Plans to carve a carrot and dress it to where it looked like a dangling, mostly severed Mr Middle never panned out which is probably just as well as there were a number of small children that may have been permanently scarred as they trick-or-treated at our house. 


But today I'm blogging about something a little different. The month of my fingerversary also happens to be Movember and I've been participating. We (a team started by fellow cancer survivor Roger M.) shaved our faces clean on November 1st and have been growing a mustache to help raise money and awareness for men's health (With a concentration on cancer prevention and treatment). Several guys in our neighborhood are involved and besides Roger, Paul E. has been a boss in raising over $700 so far. Today Movember is officially over but you can still donate by visiting the website!

If nothing else, please visit this page and read up about men's health: http://us.movember.com/mens-health/
There are some crazy statistics in there to read about but it all boils down to owning your health as much as you can. Get a check-up, get to know your family history, and work towards living a healthy lifestyle in diet and activity.

I've been doing a push-up and pull-up routine lately that's helped me feel a lot better and has had some surprising results in slimming me down too. The best part is that (at least with push-ups) it doesn't require anything but yourself and a floor but it still works your core (if you do them correctly). So please, get to it brothers!

November 1st
November 23rd

So now it's December and I'm very tempted to make it Decembeard. We'll see if Brea's had enough of facial hair for a little while though. I suppose she should get a vote...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Testing... testing... 1 2 3... Am I still cancer free?

By -
Image
Welcome yet again to another episode of Do I Have Cancer! Today we'll be testing to find out whether "Eric with a C " is actually still Eric without the C." On the docket are the standard hand and chest x-rays, blood work, and an ultrasound of my lymph nodes, exciting stuff! If guessed correctly, contestants win.... absolutely nothing but the satisfaction of having guessed correctly. What a crappy game show. Still, it's fun to be regularly scanned and studied although not as much as folks on dialysis or business travelers that fly wearing turbans. I do not envy them. On a much happier note, some relatives of mine who were also affected with cancer got featured in an interview with the Anchorage Daily News up in Alaska. I didn't even know they were up there but Alaska is a pretty cool place from what I hear, no pun intended. "From Virginia Garner's pay-it-forward perspective, clinical research saved her life, which made it her duty -- her ...
Read more

And so it begins...

By -
Some titles we considered for this blog were: Giving Cancer the Finger C is for Cookie, I don't care what they say 172 + C So here is the back story. We noticed a weird bump on Eric's left middle finger many months ago. It took some prodding but he finally went to the doctor and was told it was just a ganglion cyst and that it should go away on it's own. Over the past 6 months or so we noticed that it was growing in size and eventually began to have minor discomfort which is not consistent with a cyst. After lots of harassment he finally listened to his wife and went to a hand specialist, that was on Tuesday Sept 7th. He was told that it was not a cyst but actually a tumor and that he should have it removed. So on Friday Sept 10th he went in to have "a professional stab him" as he likes to say. The tumor was sent in for testing, which I believe is pretty much always the case when some kind of growth is removed from your body. We weren't worried at all. ...
Read more

Just noticed... I'm out of Cadbury TimeOuts...

By -
Image
Day two felt productive so I can't complain. Thankfully thanks to Brea's side of the family we have some fantastic contacts and crashpads. Since we had an early appointment today, cousins Chris & Courtney let us stay with them at a place that you can literally see the hospital complex from in the distance. Cancer I can take, just don't throw me to Houston traffic too! Ok, that is a bit of an exaggeration but it was awesome to have that advantage in getting in on time without waking up at 5am again. Whereas yesterday was a bunch of small stuff (blood pressure, temperature, height, weight, and blood work) and waiting, today I got into some of the cool tests. I got my first ever CT scan and then a chest x-ray! It was actually really quick as best I could tell. I didn't even have to get into a gown and risk accidentally seducing any nurses with my chiseled abs and stunning features (Zoolander reference). The attendants were really nice and friendly and I wound up chatti...
Read more