The backstory, part two

From my late teens on, I would develop seasonal patches on my elbows, knees, and calves that would still fade with the spring and summer, but usually return in the same place each winter.  Sometimes no change, sometimes worse, sometimes better.  Basically, it was a nuisance and I dealt with it as best I could, lotions and ointments and steroids, and dressing so as to hide it.  It made me very self-conscious at times, though most people never seemed to notice it. 

That was how it went until I was twenty-six, and the patches stopped going away.  They kept getting bigger and bigger until most of my body was covered in a red, flakey rash, and it was about then that everything in my life seemed to go tits up in one gigantic fail-swoop (that's like a fell swoop, but with more fail).  Eventually I went a little nuts and got clinically depressed, but as you may have noticed, I've recovered from that.  An enormous part of that recovery was my cancer diagnosis in December of 2008 (on my brother's birthday, no less).   

It was a huge relief.  Huge.  I can't stress that enough:  getting diagnosed with cancer made my life better.  After the diagnosis, I was able to get treatment properly, get the right doctors and get taken seriously instead of being handed a tube of topical steroids and told to go screw.  It got me onto a whole host of government programs that would handle the cost of medications (even in Canada, those costs were mounting). 

Most importantly, that diagnosis gave me something to blame for all of the weird tiredness and strange symptoms that had been plaguing me for years.  It was bliss.