Gratitude after illness

The following are gratitude insights opined by Dana Jennings, someone who blogs about his prostate cancer battle. To read his full musings, click here.

"I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude lately, trying to put my finger on what exactly I’m grateful for in the year since I had surgery to remove my cancerous prostate.
When you have cancer, when you’re being cut open and radiated and who knows what else, it can take a great effort to be thankful for the gift of the one life that we have been blessed with. Believe me, I know.
And sometimes, in the amnesia of sickness, we forget to be grateful. But if we let our cancers consume our spirits in addition to our bodies, then we risk forgetting who we truly are, of contracting a kind of Alzheimer’s of the soul.

.....Gratitude is an antidote to the dark voice of illness that whispers to us, that insists that all we have become is our disease. Living in the shadow of cancer has granted me a kind of high-definition gratitude. I’ve found that when you’re grateful, the world turns from funereal gray to incandescent Technicolor.
There are, of course, the obvious things to be thankful for. There’s the love and care of my wife, sons and extended family; the concern and support of my friends, colleagues and community; the skill and insight of the doctors and all the other medical staff who have brought me to this very moment: "