Thanks all for the great advice. I think part of the problem is that I live in Canada, and we live for our short and awesome summers! I have a daughter who wants to show her horse, a family cottage that I love to go to, and I feel like c r a p with a promise of worse to come. I keep trying to remind myself of the long run, but when I talked with the radiation oncologist he said at the outset, that by the numbers, I had about a 40% chance of recurrence without the radiation and a 20% chance with the radiation. That's what keeps my mind going around - how much pain for the 20%.

Over the last few years my 'luck' has been on the downside, my mother got cancer and I kinda messed up my career taking time off with her, both at the time of her original diagnosis and then when it reoccurred (she has small cell lung cancer - very aggressive). She plowed through her treatments like an absolute trooper. I feel so wimpy in comparison. When I went back to work after her death, I ended up having a bit of breakdown, for lack of a better word, and was off for more than a month.... and I returned in a wobbly state of affairs - things just started settling out, and my husband ended up having a serious mental breakdown - was hospitalized for a couple of weeks, and really and truly not himself for months and months. I ended up having my two girls really struggling, one began cutting herself, and his family blamed me squarely for his illness.

Things got really bad - and then we started to see the light and just as we were starting to settle out again - BAM, here comes the cancer card. That stupid thing on my tongue had been there for months and months but with all the stress with my husband, it was the last thing on my mind.

I'm sorry - what a long rant... I really do try and catch myself all the time, I am lucky that I have had the treatment that I have, and that I have the support that I have, but .... I have a few ways of dealing with things when I am feeling very upset - eating, riding or talking (read: venting). And, none are working for me right now so I don't have any great backup coping strategies. Writing will have to do. And, when I write this down, I really struggle to find the perspective...

I guess a long way of saying that I feel like I have been hitting speed bump after speed bump for about 6 years now and my endurance is shot...