“No winter lasts forever, no spring skips it’s turn.”
Hal Borland (1900-1978)

It was a harsh winter and Julia nobly dealt with cocktails of drugs. They made her hair fall out and drove her to bone crushing depths of fatigue but I’m so immensely proud of her courage, dignity and tenacity in coping with it all. The kids also make me so proud, they’ve shown resilience, understanding and acceptance throughout and have lived the last 8 months with cheerful courage.

Spring has truly arrived and it just seems the good news keeps rolling in. After being declared cancer free - thanks to heady cocktail of drugs and a quick flick of the surgeons knife, we went back to the chemotherapy doctor. He was so pleased with the pathology results and really questioned if there was any need for a second round of chemotherapy. Seems the long term implications outweighed the possible benefits, especially as they couldn’t find any cancer under the microscope for it to treat.

It’s still a long road and to cover all bases Julia is now scheduled for 12 more rounds of Herceptin, which has much fewer side effects than chemotherapy and is super effective against Julia’s type of cancer. She’ll also be on other meds for 10 years but all in all it was better than we hoped and a great result!

Happily, there was the Baldock beer festival over the weekend and Uncle Max came over for it especially. I even volunteered to work behind the bar for a couple of hours, having never worked behind a bar before I found it a baptism of fire. It certainly was manic but I think I enjoyed it :) I’m up for doing a stint next year to see if I did.

The combination of good news and a beer festival certainly gave me a fuzzy head and the optimism of spring has really hit home this year.