Finished.

This is the face of someone who doesn't have a port anymore!

It's also the face of someone who waited FIVE AND A HALF HOURS with no food or drink to get said port out, and who didn't even get any sedation via the pointless IV that had been inserted all those hours before and therefore could totally have eaten breakfast and had coffee like a normal person, but I digress. It's out, I'm done with treatment, that's that. 

I have a mammogram at the end of March and one in September, and the next year I go back to annually like any other woman my age. I don't see my oncologist until June. It's hard to trust they know what they're doing - that apparently the statistics bear out no further regular tests - but as my friend Emily said, "they've been right about everything else so far, haven't they?"

I GUESS. 

So here I am. Just a regular person again. "Weird" doesn't really begin to cover how it feels to come out the other side of this. I have no recollection of what it was like to be someone who had not been diagnosed with cancer. I don't think it's possible to go back to being that someone, even if I remembered what it was like. 

For a year I have taken life a day at a time; cancer took from me the ability to make assumptions about the future. Today I know for sure that in two weeks I'm going to have high tea at Kensington Palace with my mom (and hopefully Prince Harry), so I guess I'm starting to take it a couple of weeks at a time now. Maybe that will someday become months at a time, or even a year, but I'm not counting on it. Right now what I have is enough. It's certainly better than it has been, anyway, and if I don't lose the sense of urgency that goes along with learning we can all lose everything in the blink of an eye, that's not the worst thing in the world.