Coming Home

I am just on my way home from a wonderful trip to Germany, Austria and Belgium where I met up with family and friends many of whom I have seen for the first time since I have been sick. It was quite an experience to see people in person again after only hearing from them over the phone or over email. It is really funny to notice how everyone of them seem to give you the identical greeting. They flash you the biggest grinning smile you have ever seen and seem to give a hug, gripping you tighter than usual, almost as if to make sure you really were still there. They then look at you with disbelief saying how good and normal I look, somewhat stunned that I show no outward signs of what I have so recently gone though. I guess everyone builds their own mental image of what is going on from far away. The moment they see me, they have trouble reconciling the mental image of a sickly cancer patient, with the one of a normal person. It was just funny to notice how uniform and consistent this reaction was.