The Perfect Cancer Patient

It occurred to me yesterday that Joshua has four traits that make him the perfect cancer patient.

1) Personality - Josh is generally very easy-going, takes life as it comes, and is very good at entertaining himself. Very useful when your life is turned upside down and you end up stuck in a hospital bed for days on end with not that much to entertain yourself (although probably stacks more than there was a few years ago - praise be for mobile devices...)

2) Health - up until this particular incident, Joshua has always been one of the healthiest in our family (probably tied with Bethany). I can probably count on one hand the number of times he has had an illness of any significance (by which I mean a serious stomach bug or the like). The only time he has ever previously seen the inside of a doctor's surgery was for an ingrowing toenail. So his base position for fighting cancer was and is pretty strong.

3) Eating - Joshua takes after his mother and can pretty much eat anything anytime in any context. Useful when trying to build your weight back up after bowel surgery and chemo, for example...

4) Sleep - Joshua has always managed to cope with minimal sleep. He seems to be both a night owl and an early riser (although slightly less so in his teenage years) and seems to be able to get by no problem if he loses sleep (unlike the rest of us, who tend to crumble in one way or the other if we don't get our 8, 9, 10+ hours kip). Pretty useful with nights on chemo, where he has obs every 4 hours and has to get up to get rid of his 'fluids' every 1-2 hours.

Even though this may not have been part of God's master plan, I don't think He was taken by surprise...