3 years later...

Well I no longer work at the SHIT JOB, so that's done with, at least. :P I still plan to make another post in which I finish writing down all the insanity that happens there. I haven't forgotten! ;)

For now I'm just thinking about the fact that it's February and my birthday is coming up in a few weeks. What's more important than my birthday itself is what it represents; I was diagnosed with leukemia around my birthday. Too sick to move the day of, slept for 24 hours straight 2 days later, and was hospitalized 3 days later. Oh, the horrid, horrid nightmare-tier memories. Now what's extra monumental this year is that I'm approaching the 3-year-mark. This is big news, to put it mildly, because with leukemia, your life expectancy exponentially increases if you can make it to 3 years without a relapse. I'm almost there. Well, to the 3-year-point of being *diagnosed*. I'm not sure if my life expectancy goes up after 3 years of no relapses from the point I was diagnosed (so, end of February), 3 years of no relapses from the point I went into remission (that'd be April 2nd), or 3 years of no relapses from the point I finished my treatments (so that'd be late in July). I have to find out. Still, I'm approaching the 1st step in this stretch. So that's something. But thinking about it is freaking me out still, because, well...why wouldn't it, I guess.

I have to say, so far I seem to be handling the freak out barrage of terror that February usually brings me, simply because I'm in a different location with different surroundings, here in Toronto. I don't have the snowy familiar street of Jeanne-Mance to look out at every day, which looked & felt the exact same way that time I was getting sick. I don't have the same balcony door whose window I desperately I tried to keep opening when I was getting night sweats from (what I thought was the flu), or the towers of La Cite staring back at me from the window, the same towers I would stare at from the hospital and think about how I could sort of see home just by seeing those towers, and how homesick I felt, so beyond homesick, as if a new word needed to be invented to describe that degree of homesickness.

Haha, it all sounds so dramatic, but it's true! Without all that here, and without the Royal Victoria looming out there in background as I walk down the street every day, it feels a little bit less like it's "THAT time of year again". It's only February 6th, so we'll see how it goes as time passes and I approach those horrid dates toward the end of the month. But I only wanted to say that lately, at least so far, the indescribable feeling of deja vu-ish foreshadow-tastic  impeding doom hasn't really been on my mind, at least not quite the same way it had been these past two years in Montreal when February rolled around.

We'll see, we'll see. I understand I can have good days and bad days. But so far? Much better than usual. Change of location has seemed to have helped so much. Fingers crossed!