Oh, wow Christine - just been reading your medical summary in your sig - you've been through such heavy stuff! I don't understand a lot of it , but 3 weeks induced coma - my god - the level of surgery you have faced is amazing - did they have to remove the whole mandible? More power to your elbow, really! and here you are here. Fantastic.

Yes, they did an internal scan from within the oesophagus and there was a biopsy, I have not had the detailed report yet, just confirmation that it is cancerous and it is a recurrence (round 4, actually).

Thanks for the pep talk! I'm not really brooding too much - I just recognise in myself, I do not have the core of fierce positivity and belief and just the energy I used to have to pour into it. I just don't have the faith in a cure this time.

I know I am not in a very good social situation for jolliness - I actually have zero personal friends where I am living - my partner is a civil servant and his job means we change establishments at regular intervals. We live in a state appartment within the enclosure of the facility where he works, and the French do not go great guns on socialising with work mates - there are 4 houses in the enclave. I am not good at going out and doing things on my own and my partner is not good at going out and doing things full stop. I have a lively network of friends in the town where my parents live, and near where my brother lives - it's about 2 hours drive from me - but my parents are both old and sick, and I have spent a great deal of the last 2.5 years caring for them, in between caring for myself! My mother is now dying of inoperable bowel cancer. I had been there for 6 months (one of my partner's plusses is he is incredibly patient!), got home on 13th December, had dodgy scan 15th December. Yay. I realise this is pretty stream of consciousness stuff, sorry.

I am very lucky in my partner's ex-wife - she is a lovely, lovely person (shares my birthday!), and an extremely experienced nurse. If she can (depends on the shifts she's working), she will try to accompany me when I'm seeing the consultant. She supported me massively during the first bad period, and visited me in the re-education facility I went to after the lobectomy, which was some considerable way away - she is a bundle of energy and positivity, but her mother is also ill and she has to care for her, etc etc... it's just our age! But she lives over an hour away, there are no pop-in type friends here. The French social system is really quite different, and it's hard to break in!

But I'm not brooding, I don't feel depressed as such, I don't think. Just... resigned. And I do recognise that is not too good. But we all go through phases, eh - I expect I'll come up fighting again any time soon