Six years after my cancer fight, I still GRIEVE the loss of my life as I once knew it sometimes, thinking that everything would always be okay, that my family would always be healthy, and friends that I truly love and care about will always be around. I want to believe that, but know it's just now how things work. Why do I get so sappy and emotional? Because I love you, and I want you to know that now, today, because I know that you might not be around tomorrow, or maybe I'm the one that might not be around.

The mental challenges that we can still face in our minds, even many years after cancer. "I've been feeling extremely restless lately, and I haven't known why. I realized I've been longing for that security that we all felt about our lives before cancer, and the restlessness is because I know I'll never feel that again. At the conscious level, I've understood and accepted this for a long time, but it doesn't mean that we don't subconsciously still long to feel that again, and that it can't affect us. A bit of depression perhaps, finding myself once again longing for something that I know I'll never feel again?

There were some fascinating inter-related but completely independent conversations amongst cancer survivor friends of mine this week that triggered an interesting cross-section of thoughts.

In my years after cancer, I experienced several recurrence scares that were so bad and so real, that I thought for certain that my cancer had returned, that I had just lived my last good day, and that I was going to die. This is what's going through our minds when there's a cancer recurrence, real or imagined, captured with the help of breast cancer thriver, Nalie Agustin

"Steve has a way of taking ordinary experiences and turning them over to reveal a side we had never seen before. Time and time again he has united the IHadCancer community with his work as he writes about the subtle ways cancer affects us years after we're given our NED card.

Best for: finding the strength to push through the physical and emotional challenges of a post-cancer new normal."

The irony had not been lost on me that, literally, a week after my 5 year oncology follow-up for testicular cancer, that I would be hopping on a plane to attend the celebration of life service for a young man who had died of his cancer after 9.  I’d known periods of huge contrasts in my life after cancer before, but none like this. Here I was quietly celebrating 5 years cancer free and finally feeling the closure that I had longed to feel for years, and so much weight being lifted off of my shoulders, yet feeling so humbled at the same time by the death of my friend, while prepping my eulogy speech to deliver at his celebration of life service on July 8th.