The tiger in the room

I was going to use the obvious phrase “the elephant in the room” for this title but then everyone would assume I was making a bad mastodon pun. This is not about mastodon. This is about cancer. The tiger is a better metaphor for the thing I’ve been pretending isn’t happening.

Hello, I have cancer. Throat cancer, specifically. It is not that bad as far as cancer goes and my doctors tell me that once I get through the chemo and radiation there is a very high chance I will be 100% cured. Not like “in remission” cured but actually cured cured. It’s good news! But the chemo and radiation for the next seven weeks are probably going to be tough. I start today.

I did not restart this blog to turn it into a cancer diary, because unless you actually have cancer, cancer diaries can be super boring. But I am going to talk about it, because I think stuff through and settle my mind by writing about it.

I was going to seperate the cancer posts from my normal blog posts but it looks like that will be complicated and I don’t have the spoons for that. The cancer posts after this one will have content warnings in the titles, you may skip if you wish. I do hope to continue writing about other more normal things, such as cats. Because you cannot not have cats, even in times of darkness.

Yeah, the timing of the pandemic AND the holidays AND twitter collapse AND restarting a blog AND getting cancer is a bit much. I wish things were all different and that it hadn’t happened right now. But as a wise man said in a book once, that’s not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

So far I’m trying my best.