Happy New Year!

                Happy New Year!

                We made it back from our trip to Washington state and Oregon to spend Christmas with friends and family. My robo-boob did not set off any TSA alarms, probably because I had all my documentation ready in hand to prove that even though I now contain some unexpected metal parts, I am still harmless. That said, the TSA totally missed the fact that I had a good-sized knife in my purse for my first two flights, which I had forgotten about. Alert TSA agends did find and confiscate a small bottle of bubbles that Matthew had unwittingly left in his backpack.

                The year 2011 was the one where, in my OBGYN’s words, we will look back on it together, in twenty years, and have a drink and laugh about how much that year sucked. And although getting cancer does suck, and having chemotherapy really sucks, there were some silver linings, too.  I found out I really do have wonderful friends and family who went miles out of their way to take care of me this year. I have a husband who loves me and was not scared off by hospitals or bodily disfigurement or baldness. I have seen the amazing effects of modern science and the amazing effects of prayer.

                God did not quite appear to me in a vision this year. There was one really cool hallucination, back during chemo, when I spoke with Jesus, in the form a middle-aged guy from West Africa. He was not making wine, but rather some very fine Scotch whiskey. I digress. However, God did sort of send me a message, to the effect of:  “You can be pretty sure that I exist and that in the end, Love Wins, because I have put so many loving people around you.”

                My prayers are going out for those friends who are still fighting illness, bereavement and other forms of heartbreak. I’ll be holding you in the Light in 2012.

                Resolutions? There are a few. Some of them are of a private nature. A new one on the list, this year, is, “Don’t die.” I do intend to do a ropes course at the Adventure Park this spring. I also intend to waste less time in the future—this, I believe, is a common one among cancer survivors. “Someday” is now.

                I hope you have some good resolutions of your own, and that you make them come true in 2012. God bless you.

My glass is half full!

The Second Reason Why We Had to Have a Party

                So the first reason why I had to have a party last Saturday is just that I’ve been pretty giddy lately. I was prepared to go all drunk and disorderly, but wiser heads prevailed. Are we getting old, or are we getting smarter? I think most people had a good time, and we ate a lot and got to catch up with each other a bit. It has been, literally, ten years or more since some of us have been in the same room together.  It was fun watching friends from my various worlds collide. My buddy, Sharon, and I did stay up until 2am talking, like in the old days before children, only this time, my daughter joined us for the first time. That was very cool.

                How appropriate that I am writing this blog entry the day before Thanksgiving. The second reason why I had to have a party is to try to say thank you to everyone for all the love and prayer and practical help they have given us.

                This saying thanks is an ongoing process. I will probably be at it for, like, forever. I have already had a crack at publicly thanking people a couple of times. I went to our Quaker high school’s Meeting for Worship a couple weeks ago, and tried to say thank you there to the students and teachers. And then I stood up in my own United Methodist church and tried to thank the folks there.

                First, I want to thank everyone for praying for me.

                Last March, when I first found that lump in my breast, the day before I went to my doctor, I sought out a friend at church and asked her to lay hands on me and pray for me, in the ancient tradition. She did. Later that week, when we’d seen the X-rays and knew I was in deep trouble, I put myself on our church’s prayer chain. At that point, my son, Sean, who was a sophomore at the time, stood up in his high school Meeting for Worship and asked people to hold me in the Light, as the Quakers say.

                Since then, I have been prayed for by people of many descriptions, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Wiccans, maybe others. I suspect maybe even a few atheists may have put in a good word for me with the Ineffable Mystery. I know of one classmate of Julia’s who, with her mother, has prayed for me every day since March. I have been prayed for in Australia and Africa.  I have had candles lit for me in Rome.

                I can’t tell you how much this has meant to me.

                The other day, when I stood up in Meeting for Worship to thank my high-school Friends, one of the things I told them was how well I was doing. I said I was lucky in the specific type of cancer I got, because it was responsive to chemotherapy and Tamoxifen. Later in that Meeting, our Head of School, Tom, had a few words of his own to add. He said he does not believe in luck; he believes in grace. I think what he was saying was that by opening up and asking for help from everyone, as we had done, we opened ourselves up to all the available means of grace. We sort of threw ourselves on the strength of the Community, and it helped us tremendously.

                Now, I am not ready to claim that prayer is what caused me to get better. (I am not ready to deny that, either.) I know our church has prayed for other people, recently, with the same diagnosis as me, and some of them got better, and some of them died, leaving small children in tragic situations. I can’t begin to say why sometimes the answer is “yes” and sometimes it is “no.”  It is a mystery to me. However, I can honestly say I did feel the power of everyone’s prayer, and it gave me great peace. That, in itself, had to help my family and me heal.

                I believe everyone’s prayers kept me from going off the rails, emotionally. I was unusually able to not panic. This was very important when I was making serious medical decisions. It also freed up a lot of energy. Instead of using all my strength to freak out, I was mostly able to conserve it to get through the chemo and the other crap.

                I believe everyone’s prayers also got me through depression. This summer, in August, I hit a low point. I was exhausted and feeling absolutely lousy. In addition to me being sick, Matthew was not doing well at all, and there was some other stuff going on, too.  I was running on empty, physically and emotionally. At some point, I had what you would call a faith crisis. I pretty much believed God was there, all right, but I didn’t personally care. His ways were so mysterious they had pretty much become irrelevant. I may have been clinically depressed; it lasted for a couple of weeks.

                In the end, I snapped out of it. Not through any strength of my own, but because, even when I stopped praying, lots of you guys didn’t. When I had no faith, I used yours. And when I was at one of my lowest points, Dennis and Luke would walk in the door with a meal, and a blueberry cobbler, or Brenna would show up with a plate of Rice Krispies treats. Or a box of fresh huckleberries would arrive at my door. Of course, in the end, I realized the bottom line was:  of course there is a God. I was seeing That of God, in all of you. Where else would all this love come from? So you got me through that, too.

                In addition to all your prayers, your practical help and love were magnificent.

                You sent me wonderful notes and cards and drawings. I have them stuck to my fridge and sitting next to my computer screen. I am now getting remission cards. I have one on my fridge right now from Matthew’s buddy, Ben.

                At the beginning of all this, I was terrified that people would freak out and hide from me.  I had seen that happen before to seriously ill people. When a potentially-fatal illness strikes so randomly, it can scare people away. You become a walking advertisement for mortality, a reminder that this can happen to anyone. And people don’t know what to say, it’s awkward, and they become so uncomfortable, they run away.

                This did not happen to me. At all. None of you guys even blinked. Everywhere I went, at school, at church, at the grocery store, I kept getting my hugs. Even when I was at my sickest, and the chemo made me swell up and turn red and go bald, nobody flinched. You gave me silly hats. You made sick jokes. We got through it. Nobody ran away.

                You all drove my kids around and fed them, when I was in the hospital or at chemo. You had Matthew over for play dates so he could have a little normalcy. You drove to Jessup to go dancing with me—with an oompah band, for God’s sake—when I needed to go dancing. You drove me to Idaho, at one point, when I wanted to see the camas blooming. You went to the movies with me while I waited for biopsy results, and you sat with John while I had surgery. You brought us all kinds of delicious food. You brought me books to read. And when I got too sick to read, you brought me audio books and funny DVDs instead.

                You never stopped inviting me out or asking me over for dinner, even when I could hardly eat anything, and you knew it. Sometimes you just let me talk, even when I was saying some pretty dark stuff.

                Those of you who are reading this, who have good and loving parents, do you remember what it was like to be a little kid and have the flu? And no matter what time you woke up with your fever, your mom was there? That is what you were like, for me.

                At one point in June, it’s the day after I got my chemo. I am pretty much unconscious for two full days; when I’m awake, I’m pretty much on the planet Tralfamadore. And our dear friend, Peter, is here, all the way from Canberra, Australia, helping John take care of me.  He just sits with me and sends emails and makes phone calls while I sleep. I wake up, and I don’t know who or where I am, but that is Peter sitting there, so this must be Maryland and it must be okay. And I go back to sleep.

                I will always love you guys.

The First Reason Why We Had to Have a Party

  

                I’ve spent a large chunk of this blog, in the past months, explaining various kinds of fear and pain. Let me try now to explain, somehow, the other end of the spectrum. Let me try to explain how good I’m feeling these days, and why I had to have a little party at my house on Saturday, with loud music and lots of drink and cars parked up and down the block.

                I’m feeling very good. Frighteningly good. I have been going around laughing and looking into my friends’ eyes and telling them I love them, and so forth. I’m probably scaring people. I want to go dancing. I want to drink exotic shooters with silly names. I’m just feeling intensely alive. Life is very good, and it is of finite duration, and I am going to try not to waste it just driving back and forth through suburbia. I am still working out the implications of that. And recently, I had felt such an intense, almost physical, need to have a party that we did.

                We can’t blame medication. I’m not taking any wacky drugs right now. Part of it is probably just not feeling bad any more. When you’ve been feeling as bad as I was during chemo, not feeling bad any more feels pretty damn good! But what I’ve got is more than just the opposite of feeling crappy. It’s tipped over into borderline euphoria. There is just something uniquely exhilarating about thinking you are about to be dead, but finding yourself alive, instead.

                It’s Biblical. It says in Ecclesiastes, there’s a time to weep, and a time to laugh, a time to mourn, and a time to dance. Well, this is the time to dance, if I can find someone to dance with me.

                It’s also like the parable of the lost coin, where the woman has ten coins and loses one, and cleans house until she finds it, and then invites all her neighbors to party with her.  Only, in my case, it wasn’t a coin I had lost; it was almost my life.

                I can only remember one other incident in my whole life that gave me this same sort of giddiness that not dying of cancer has given me. It was maybe twenty years ago, before kids and domesticity. Even then, John was already a poobah with the World Bank. I was accompanying him on a business trip around east Africa and southern Africa; at this point, we had flown from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to Lilongwe, Malawi.  We were going to rent a car and drive the long way to Blantyre, where John had World Bank business to attend to. We were going to take one day first and drive through the middle of absolutely nowhere so I could see Lake Malawi, which I had read about, and maybe go fishing there.

                This was back during the reign of President-for-Life Hastings Banda, and Malawi was seriously messed up. It was one of the poorest places in the world. This is the only place I have ever seen starving children. This is the only place where you would see women dressed in shirts and skirts with Banda’s face printed all over them. And it is the only place, where, although my husband was a big shot with the World Bank, and a delegation of dignitaries had come to meet our plane and escort him through the V.I.P. lounge at the international airport, I was stopped.  I was not allowed to leave the V.I.P. lounge because I was wearing a Hilary-Clinton-style linen pantsuit, with trousers, in a country where women were not allowed to wear trousers of any description.  (John adds that one of his Japanese colleagues was also stopped and made to have a haircut, since his hair actually touched his shirt collar.)

                You can imagine what level attitude problem I quickly developed. I am not a dress-wearing person in the most normal situations, much less when I am about to go driving through the African backcountry to a fishing spot. And never before had I personally been on the receiving end of what felt like a human-rights violation. But they told me that if I left the V.I.P. lounge in trousers, I would be arrested. Fuming and humiliated, I dug through my luggage. By the grace of God, I had a cotton skirt in my suitcase, and I put it on and was released by the very relieved local official who had detained me. This all took some time.

                So I was in a floaty skirt, but still loaded for bear, a couple hours later when we wrecked our car.

                We were driving along, as fast as you could go on that African dirt road, maybe 40 mph, when suddenly the road wasn’t there.  A bridge was completely washed out, and utterly unmarked. We went headfirst over the edge. In the sort of superhuman-strength-moment you read about in the National Enquirer, John, who was driving, braced himself with one hand. He put his other arm out and kept my head from going through the windshield.

                The car landed nose-down, in the bottom of the riverbed. The riverbed was nearly dry. I don’t remember getting out of the car. The only blood we could find anywhere was John’s, where every nail on one of my hands had dug into his outstretched arm. (He still has the scars, twenty years later.)

                This was before cell phones. We were in the middle of nowhere with our car at a 90-degree angle with reality. And then, out of the maize fields a farmer and his whole extended family materialized, like a host of angels. They did not speak English. We did not speak Chichewa. But quicker than you could believe, they organized themselves into a human crane and together we bodily lifted our car up and put it back onto the road

                I was in shock. I don’t remember trying to thank them; I don’t remember giving them any money. I am sure we did both. I do remember giving our only food, half a package of Romany Creams, to some of the children, and a fistfight broke out over the crumbs.

                We had to turn back. We limped into the city. Miraculously, we did not run out of gas. By the time we got there it was dark. We found a room in the fancy expats’ hotel. We were ravenous; we went to the hotel restaurant to have something to eat. I don’t remember what we ate, but I bet I ordered a steak. I hope we got drunk later and had a crazy night of passion, but I don’t remember and neither does John. I remember what the restaurant looked like. And I remember laughing.

                I had looked down, in that fancy restaurant, and noticed there was black grease from the car all over my only skirt.

                “I messed up my skirt when we picked up the car out of the river,” I said, and that struck me as hugely funny.

                I started laughing. We both started laughing. Laughing until we couldn’t breathe. Laughing until people stared and shook their heads at the loud Americans.  People thought we were drunk, and we were thinking, you have no idea. We thought we were going to die, and here we are, eating a steak. We thought we were going to die, but here we are, just laughing and laughing.

Getting better all the time

I just managed to run a whole mile.  Very slowly, but I did it. This hasn’t happened in months.  I couldn’t do it last week.  Couldn’t do it two days ago.  So I continue to get better.

                I hadn’t realized how messed up my brain truly was until I started feeling better.  “Chemo fog” is an understatement. There are big gaps in my memory, especially from last spring. Whole conversations that I apparently had are gone. There were church committee meetings that I myself led, and I can’t remember what we did or said. Now, that is embarrassing.

                Have you been in your kitchen when a light bulb has blown out in your fixture, but you don’t notice for a while? And suddenly it occurs to you, boy, it’s dim in here. Well, it has been dim like that in my own mind. But slowly the gray cells are coming back online, and I’m feeling slightly less out of it as time goes by.

                It’s been hard to multitask at all, to hold too many threads of information at once. It’s like how my old PC grinds down to a halt when I have too many windows open, and there isn’t enough CPU to go around. Some information goes to the wrong place. Some just gets lost.

                Under normal circumstances, I like to paint and draw and do glass lampwork. For a while there, I stopped doing all of this, completely. I couldn’t think that hard. (Side note:  it was interesting to learn that I think hard when I do art; artist friends of mine say they stop thinking actively at all.) Anyway, a couple months ago, I started drawing again. But I could only handle pencil or pen, strictly black-and-white. I could not keep too many categories in my head at once. I could handle value, and line, and general design, but not color.  Too much to process. But a few weeks ago, suddenly I could cope with color, as well. I have yet to sit down at my torch and try the glass, but I look forward to that day.

From my recent black-and-white period.

from last week

Cancer-free, with an asterisk

                Hello! I’m still basking in the glow of yesterday’s good news. In the afternoon, my son Sean’s soccer team, the Sandy Spring Friends School men’s varsity Wildebeests, won their league tournament championship in a too-exciting game against their archrivals, Washington International School. It was sweet.  There was, in particular, one very lovely goal.  The November sun was shining on the fall foliage. Nobody got seriously hurt.

                Earlier in the day, I had my LAST miserable radiation treatment…YAY! They said the burns were likely to get worse for about three days, and then they would start getting better.  I am ready for that. Also, I am ready to have three hours a day of my life back! What will I do?  I will paint!  I may finish the laundry! They actually have a support group for people who need help figuring out what to do now that daily treatment is over.  I told them I didn’t think I was going to have a problem with that.

                The best part of yesterday, for me, though, was my radiation oncologist laying out what she thinks my prognosis is.  It turns out, it is very good.

                I was prepared for not-good news from her. About two weeks ago, I had asked her when I could have the “Katie beat cancer” party.

                “Are you asking me when we are going to say ‘You’re cured?’” she asked.

                “Yes, I guess I am.”

                “We’re not.”

                “Not now, or not ever?”

                “Not ever.”

                Damn.

                She told me, flatly, that I was never going to hear the word “cured” and I should get my head around that. Once cancer goes as far as mine had, spreading to a bunch of lymph nodes, you can never be sure you’ve killed every last cancer cell. This is going to be a lifelong project. We just hope it is more like a chronic illness in the background than an active crisis. She said, basically, my kids can declare my final victory over cancer when I’m 90 years old and I die of something else.

                To use a tired military analogy, this is not like fighting the Civil War, where at the end of the day someone signs the surrender papers and hands over his sword and it’s finished. It’s more like fighting Al Qaeda, where you only know if you’re winning when, over time, nothing blows up in your face. You never assume it’s over, because you just never know.

                So I am sitting there looking distressed, apparently, and trying to digest that she had just told me this was NEVER going to end. Damn. And then she asks if I want to hear the good news.

                Yes.  Yes, I did.

                The really good news, she said, is that I was already in remission. I asked what that meant, exactly, and she said it means that as of right now, they have poisoned or bodily removed every cancer cell they can find. That means I can currently say I’m “cancer-free.” This does not mean cancer won’t blow up in my face in the future, but it means right now, I’m healthy, as far as anyone knows.

                This is another example of how the English language doesn’t stretch quite far enough to cover certain scientific truths. All we can talk about is probabilities and risk, and we aren’t good at doing that with any precision or clarity. Right now, I am not cured, but I am not sick. I will “have cancer” the rest of my life, but simultaneously, I can be “cancer-free.”

                (I am worried about people misunderstanding that distinction. My kids are, this morning, excitedly announcing on Facebook that I am “cancer-free” and counting the “likes” this gets. This has been a gratifyingly large number. But, although it is true to call me “cancer-free,” it is also misleading.  I have explained the difference to my kids between “cancer-free” and “cured,” and they get it. Even Matthew, who does not handle uncertainty very well, seems to get it. But other people are clearly assuming this means I am cured, it’s over, and we move on, and that is just not true.)

                It took me more than a week to process what my doctor had said. I could not tell even how I felt about it. So I convened what I think my Quaker friends would call a “clearness committee.” I needed a reality check. So I consulted two of my dearest friends, Sharon and Pam, and also my mom. I ran it past them. I told them what the doctor had said. I told them I didn’t even know how to feel about it. Was I happy or sad?

                They were unanimous.

                “Oh, you’re happy,” they said. “Definitely happy. Very, very happy!”

                Of course, this was the right answer. I have spent every weekday morning for the last six weeks waiting around at the Sibley Hospital cancer center. And being a former reporter, I basically eavesdrop on my fellow patients and the medical staff all the time, which is naughty, but there you go.

                My fellow patients are both men and women, most of them older than me, but not all. They have all different kinds of cancer. You can sometimes work out what kind of cancer they have by observing the hospital gowns they are wearing. In women, a short teal-blue gown often means breast cancer. In men, a long dark-blue gown often means prostate cancer. It’s much easier to figure out the situation of the people who are gabbing on their cell phones, about even the most intimate details of their conditions, so loudly that even people who aren’t actively eavesdropping can’t avoid hearing.

                Most of these people would give anything to hear the word “remission.” Some of them are just trying to stay alive long enough to make it to a certain wedding or see a relative through his own medical emergency, or hold the first grandchild, or whatever. To think they could be declared “cancer-free” for an indefinite period of time is beyond their dreams.

                So I’ve slowly been working into happy. Happy, with just the right amount of caution. We don’t want to get cocky, or jinx this. I am a Cubs fan. I understand that too happy would not be prudent. I can think of myself as “cancer-free,” but only with an asterisk. The footnote says, “For now.”

                But then, yesterday, I had my exit interview with my radiation oncologist, and it was hard not to be too happy. She told me things had gone very well, indeed. Bottom line was, she thinks there’s a very good chance—she estimated 70 percent or slightly more—that this cancer will not come back at all. She called that option “permanent remission.” It’s like being cured, only you can’t confirm that you’re cured. And even if it does come back, she said, we have plenty of treatment options that could give me another 15 years or more from that point.

                This is much better news than I had thought I was going to hear. Mind you, the most recent book stats for a person in my own situation said it was 56 percent chance of surviving a while, 44 percent chance of dying, which had scared the hell out of me and those of my friends who had tracked down this information. That book is old, I am told, and does not include the new generation of chemo drugs I’ve taken. Also, the stats include so many people who are much older and sicker than me that the numbers are meaningless for my situation.

                 I was, in fact, pretty lucky. In a nutshell, because of the specific type of breast cancer I have, and my relative youth, and my overall good health, my odds are much better than average. For example, I don’t have underlying heart disease, which meant they would whack me extra-hard with chemo drugs, and that helps.

                I had also thought previously that, if breast cancer did recur, you are automatically toast. It turns out this is not true; it depends on what kind of breast cancer it is, and a bunch of other variables. The kind I’ve got, even if it comes back, there are still a bunch of things you can do about it. It isn’t an immediate death sentence.

                So, in the end, I went home and celebrated. Prayers of thanksgiving. Loud music. TWO glasses of wine with dinner! Woo hoo! Lots of hugs and high-fives from the soccer folk. Everyone in the house posted the good news on their Facebook pages, and was amazed by the number of responses there and the pure love in so many of them.

                There are a couple of new organizations that have sprung up nationally to advocate for younger cancer patients. Technically, I am too old to belong to these organizations, but I appreciate their edginess. They do not do the pink ribbon thing. Instead, they organize happy hours and singles nights and such. They are not so much about finding “the cure” or remembering the dead, but about making the most of the here and now. Their motto, which you can find on their web sites and their T-shirts, is, “GET BUSY LIVING.”

                I’m with them.

                I’m cancer-free, for now. What had I been thinking, that I was going to get a guarantee for the future? Nobody gets that.  It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got cancer, or not. So get busy living.

               My radiation oncologist, Dr. Victoria J. Croog

                

While I was Busy Having Cancer...

                I have got 27 radiation treatments under my belt. Just one left!  That’s good, because these burns are bad enough right now, in my opinion. They have switched me over from using the lotion that looks like Vaseline to a new one, one with some badass antibiotics that they use on people they’ve pulled out of house fires. I am not a doctor or an E.M.T. or a person who works in the E.R., and I never could be one.  I don’t like looking at stuff like this, and it’s on my own self. The only other place I have seen burns like this on a person is in South Africa, where people in the townships cook on kerosene stoves in dodgy conditions, and sometimes one gets tipped over or it blows up, and you see badly burned people in the line at Pick n’ Pay or wherever. I look like that now, only not on my face and hands, but one side of my chest and one armpit.

                A couple days ago, I did have words with my radiology techs for not telling me how bad this was going to get, when clearly, they knew.

                “We don’t tell you,” one of them said, “because we don’t want you to freak out.”

                But then in the shower one morning, there were lots of bits of black stuff on the floor, and damn if it wasn’t burned pieces of my own skin.

                I freaked out.

                I told her it would have been better to have known the score in advance, actually, and she said, “Well, for YOU, maybe, yes, but not for most people.”

                What does that mean?  Most people I know—most women, anyway—can handle pain.  For Pete’s sake, I’ve had three babies. If you tell me, “This is going to hurt like hell, but it might just save your life,” I can totally deal with that.  But if you tell me to expect a minor sunburn and some itchiness, and in fact I am going to have second-degree burns and charred flesh, I might not be mentally prepared.  In any case, don’t be lying to me about it.

                So a couple more cancer lessons learned:  1) Some of your caregivers will lie to your face, and you’d best figure out which ones, and when they’re doing it; and 2) I can totally deal, anyway. Turns out I am a tough little bastard.

                Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

                Some weeks ago, somewhere in this blog, I mentioned that my youngest kid, Matthew, was having a hard time with my situation. He is eight years old. Last spring, after my diagnosis, we started seeing some very weird behavior in him, very unlike his normal self.  He had fits of irrational anger, almost always directed at me, although, by August, everyone in our immediate family had been on the receiving end at least once.

                Then, this summer, there were some heartbreaking bouts of clinical depression, where he did not want to go to camp, or to the skate park, or anywhere.  He wanted to lie on the couch and cry. For days at a time.

                And then there were some panic attacks. We could be getting ready to go somewhere in the car—possibly some place fun or harmless, like Target or a friend’s house.  And Matthew would burst into tears and beg us to not make him get in the car.

                “What if we crash?” he would say. “What if I get sick? What if there’s another earthquake, only this time the buildings all cave in?”

                Clearly, the little guy was going through his own private hell. So we sought care from an excellent psychiatrist recommended by our pediatrician.

                (I wrestled with whether to go public with all this. Mental health is a personal thing. But only my friends are still reading this blog, anyway. And Matthew has had a couple of panic attacks so publicly, at school, in front of everyone, that it seems ridiculous to pretend any longer that there’s nothing going on.)

                The psychiatrist initially thought, as did we, that Matthew was struggling with fear over my illness and whether I would die. We were all struggling with these things, at that point, so this made sense to us. A few rounds of talk therapy would set him right.  Teach him some coping skills, and he’d be fine, especially since I seemed to be getting better. Later, after I had my surgery and it was behind us, he would improve.

                Only, my surgery came and went. And, although I was getting better every day, he wasn’t.

                One day in August, our psychiatrist said he thought there was more going on. Matthew wasn’t just having problems handling my cancer.  This was much bigger, an actual anxiety disorder, a mental illness. My own illness wasn’t the cause; it was merely the trigger, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

                We spent at least a month digesting that. We thought once school started and a regular routine began, Matthew would feel better. We researched the medication they wanted to put him on—Zoloft—and saw the black-box warnings on it that tell you that this can cause suicidal thoughts in children. Gulp.

                We talked to friends who had been down this road. We took very, very seriously their good advice that sometimes, children are misdiagnosed because mental illness can present differently in children than in adults. A misdiagnosis, followed by the wrong choice of powerful drugs, can cost you dearly in terms of time and misery.

                In the end, though, he was already so miserable that I couldn’t not do anything any longer. He was asking us, daily, was there nothing we could do to make him feel less sad?

                One thing that helped me make the decision was speaking with one of my cousins, who has suffered bouts of depression since childhood. She said she could remember being Matthew’s age, and feeling utterly despondent. She said she wished to hell someone had helped her when she was a kid, instead of years later.

                So Zoloft it is.

                It’s been a few weeks, now. We think it is helping, though not completely.  We are told it can take a long time to get the dosage just right, to optimize those serotonin levels or whatever brain chemicals are causing his demons.

                We haven’t seen the fits of anger for some time now. He hasn’t been lying on the sofa crying. He seems much happier.

                But the panic attacks are still with us. Everyone in the third grade, and some of their parents, witnessed a doozy the day the class was supposed to take a field trip to Skyline Caverns. Matthew would not get on the bus. They could not make him. Eventually, his poor teacher called me to come get him and take him home; they couldn’t delay any longer.

                A week later, another field trip, this time to St. Mary’s City. Another public panic attack. But this time, I skipped my radiation treatment so I that could go along as a chaperone. When the crying and the shaking started, I put my head down, horns out. I made him get on the bus.  He cried all over me for a while. He begged to get off the bus. But as soon as the bus started moving, he settled down and was fine. It was a great day. We both had a blast.

                This week, at his Tuesday night soccer game, another perfectly-timed panic attack struck. Matthew, who has played soccer for almost four years and loves it, begged me not to make him go. He was sure he was going to throw up. I didn’t know what to do. I called the psychiatrist on the phone for advice, but could not reach him.

                This was not a behavior problem. God knows Matthew didn’t want to be terrified of one of his favorite things. Usually, in the normal course of motherhood, I am inclined to encourage my kids to get up and face their fears. I wanted to make him get out there and play. You get back on the horse after you fall off. But is that right, when your kid is mentally ill? I mean, I knew by now this was Irrationality speaking. Rationality had left the building. If I made him play, was I just being cruel?

                His head coach, puzzled, said Matthew said he has a stomach ache. Maybe he shouldn’t play.

                I gave him the ten-cent abridged version of what was going on. Matthew’s stomach is fine, I said; this is mental illness.

                There.  I had said it out loud.

                This is new to us, I said. I am not sure what to do. I am making this up as we go.

                Both his coaches, bless their hearts, took all their cues from me.

                I told Matthew he was utterly brave, and he should get out there and play.

                “I’m not brave,” he bawled, right there on the sidelines, in front of all his friends. “I’m scared.”

                I told him get out there. He was crying. I was crying.

                His sainted coaches put him in the goal, his favorite position. They found him some goalie gloves. He played goalie the entire quarter, weeping the whole time.

                He made four great saves.

                Afterward, his coaches praised him for his play, and for his bravery. Not one of his friends teased him for crying, or hassled him at all, that I could tell. And their kindness and understanding mean that Matthew has a fighting chance next week, next game, to get back on that horse again, and tell his demons to shut the hell up and let him play soccer.

                “Don’t ever tell me you’re not brave,” I told him. “You are the bravest person I know.”

                He was exhausted, but in some way happy with himself. He seemed to be considering the possibility of his own bravery. He ate a big lunch. He was in a good mood the rest of the day.

                Turns out, he’s a tough little bastard.                     

                

I don't like Mondays

                On Friday, my radiologist said I would be cursing her name by Sunday. It’s Monday now. She was right.

                She could tell on Friday I was about to have a nasty burn “blossoming” all over my right side. An interestingly euphemistic verb they use for what did indeed happen, as if it were a flower or something pretty. It’s not. It looks awful, like your worst blistering sunburn.  It hurts, a lot, though it’s nothing my pain pills and I can’t handle. But I’m crazy tired.

                Have you ever spatchcocked a chicken?  Basically, they spatchcock me daily.  You take off your clothes and they arrange you like a half-chicken on a grill.  Your right hand has to stay in an unnatural position, just so, above your head, and your left hand has to stay out of the way.  You have to turn your head to the left and stick your chin up so that your esophagus doesn’t get in the line of fire. And you have to hold this position, on a Monday, for 40 minutes or so.  (Mondays this all takes longer than on other days, because they take a bunch of x-rays every Monday in addition to the regular treatment.)  The room is freezing cold, because the machinery likes it that way. By the end of the 40 minutes your arms are shaking, because they can’t stay in that position much longer, and you are shivering. Then the tech comes and pokes you in your burned armpit again with ice-cold fingers, because apparently you have moved, and she needs to find her target dot. You try not to jump, and she tells you to relax.  You would like to relax, you really would, because if you don’t, your shoulder could be a centimeter out of line and the x-rays might come out blurry and they will have to do this all over again tomorrow, which would suck. You look at the insipid photos of cherry blossoms they have put on the ceiling, for the thousandth time, and try to relax your right shoulder.

                When they finally finish and they come back to tell you that you can take your arm down, you almost can’t.  And your neck is stuck at a strange angle, and you could sure use a neck rub from someone, but you don’t want anyone to touch you, unless their hands are really warm.

                What is extra fun is when they use a “bolus,” which is a fancy name for a big, soaking-wet towel.  Every other day, they drape you in a sopping wet towel before they zap you.  The wet towel, which gets cold pretty fast, helps you brown evenly.  It’s like when you drape slices of bacon over a turkey breast before you roast it. I am pretty well done; put a fork in me.  Crispy on the outside, hopefully not too dried out on the inside.

                I am not joking.  I had to ask the tech this morning if I am supposed to be turning this color, or if I have got skin cancer now, too.  Oh, no, she said, this is what you’re supposed to look like. Your neck isn’t quite brown enough, but the rest is coming along nicely.

                How brown do they want me? If I were poultry, I would be Peking duck already. That’s what my armpit looks like, anyway. If I weren’t such an uptight person, I would post photos, but that ain’t gonna happen.

                Enough whining. There is good news, too.

                I aced rehab.

                I have enjoyed all the recent rehab jokes, friends, but here is what I really had to get rehabilitated from:  all this radiation, along with the surgery, where they took a bunch of lymph nodes out of that same armpit, causes scar tissue.  The scar tissue started interfering with the movement of my shoulder and arm.  I couldn’t reach the top shelf where the glasses are, for example, or push the vacuum cleaner without some pain. The answer to this problem was physical therapy at the rehab place at Montgomery General Hospital in Olney.

                Well, I was the star pupil at rehab.  I was motivated, as they say.  I did not want to piss around with any more medical appointments than was strictly necessary.  Also, I did not like that place, where it is crowded, and there is no privacy, and one of the old biddies in the office there thought I was Matthew’s grandma. So I did all my exercises just like they told me to, and I studied their pamphlet on how to not get lymphedema, which is when your arm swells up because your lymph nodes are gone. My therapist was impressed. When they measured my arm movement and it was back to normal, and I correctly recited my lymphedema facts, I got a gold star and an honorable discharge.

                I know I shouldn’t be glib about lymphedema. One of my friends has it. It sucks.  And one of the other women at rehab has it, and I wouldn’t like the treatment she was getting.  They wrapped her entire arm tightly in thick, stretchy foam and left her trussed up that way for a couple of days, to try to compress everything back to where it should be.  I cannot tell you how claustrophobic this would have made me, or how hard it would be to drive or eat or sleep in that getup.

                So, I basically have to be very nice to my right arm from now on.  I’ll have to wear a pressure sleeve on it when I fly. I can’t take my blood pressure on that arm any more, or get flu shots in it. Everyone at the cancer center at Sibley Hospital bitches at me if they see me carrying my backpack on my right shoulder, so I try not to let them see that. I have to get a Medicalert bracelet that tells people to leave my right arm the hell alone. For now, my right arm and right hand are exactly the same size as my left—we measured them—so I’m pretty lucky.

                The other thing that seems to be going well is boob reconstruction. Without going into too much gory detail, let’s just say that I can look past the scars and the blistered skin and see where the plastic surgeon is going with this.  In the end, I am going to have two fine boobs, even if it is going to take a while to get there. I’m not posting photos of that, either.

               

               

This is what the fingernails look like, with tree rings caused by each chemo treatment.

Sex and Cancer: Your Intimate Questions Answered

                One side effect of cancer is bad writing.  I do not mean bad amateur writing, like this blog for example, because at least most of the amateur writing I’ve found has a certain amount of honesty and personal experience in it.  No, I mean bad writing by professionals.  The cancer community, as it likes to call itself, is just bloated with bad writing.

                As you can tell by walking through any grocery store during October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, there is plenty of money to be made in Cancer Land. Potato chips for the Cure?  Pink breath mints?  This month our local Giant store is full of large signs that say, “Fill your cart for the Cure,” with big pink ribbons, and they piss me off every time I go in there. Well, the geniuses that run the world of publishing have also figured out there is money to be made, here.  They are pumping out cancer magazines like the Duggars pump out babies.  They are full of ads from pharmaceutical companies. And most of the writing is really, really lame.

                They have racks full of these publications at every cancer doctor’s office I’ve been to. I end up reading this dreck because I am a compulsive reader and I have already read every other printed material they have there that doesn’t have the word “golf” in the title.

                This week, I just have to vent. The headline on the most recent stack of cancer magazines says, “Sex and Cancer:  YOUR INTIMATE QUESTIONS ANSWERED.” Of course, every shred of information is geared toward persons above the age of 60, because that’s where the money is.  The frisky old cancer patients in the cover photo look as if they might actually want to kiss each other, and then it would be Katie-bar-the-door. But worse, almost every paragraph in the story is insipid.

                Did you know, for instance, that missing body parts, such as breasts or prostate glands, might affect your self-image or your sexual desire?

                Did you know that chemotherapy dries out every part of you that is supposed to be moist? (We can sell you some products to help with this, by the way. We got ads for this stuff in our cancer magazine.)

                Did you know that:

                                --You might be experiencing some degree of tiredness.

                                --You might be experiencing some stress.

                                --You might be experiencing some pain. And if you are, and if you’re getting high as a                                    kite on your pain meds, you might also be experiencing some libido issues.

                It breaks my heart that they killed perfectly good trees to make paper to print this stuff. I am sure someone got paid a lot of money to write this.  Why wasn’t it me? I would have taken their money, and I could have sucked the whole thing out of my thumb. Here is an actual quote from this magazine:

                “Try timing intimacy when you feel your best. For instance, before your next course of chemotherapy; in the morning when you’ve rested, or just after taking your pain medication, but before you’re too sleepy.”

                Gee, we hadn’t thought of that.

                I can confirm that chemotherapy is really bad for hot sex, unless your partner enjoys sex with unconscious persons, or persons who are hallucinating about soccer games or copper mines or whatever.  In that case, I would say go for it right in the middle of your chemo.  I would say wait until just after they hit you up with a boatload of Ativan.

                Hell, I could have given them lots of tips on cancer sex. Here are a few more:

·         You will need a robust sense of humor.

·         You will need a partner who has a robust sense of humor, and is not a jerk. Do not attempt this with a humorless asshole. (Query: you of all people know that life is short; why are you still with a humorless asshole, anyway?)

·         If you have a humor-enabled, kind partner who likes you, and has waited around while you’re doing chemo, for, say, three or four months, until the nausea has worn off enough that you would consider having sex with someone, lucky you! By now, that person probably won’t give a damn what you look like. So throw those silly self-image issues out the window.

·         Chocolate martinis. Tasty and expeditious. Have a couple.

                Enough of this.  We are about to veer off into Too Much Information, and my mom is probably reading this, anyway, and here we’ve already visited sex, drugs, alcohol, and foul language!  If you are personally experiencing a cancer sex crisis, just call me up on the phone.  We’ll talk.

               

                

Ode to Eyelashes

My sister, Judy, shared with me her Ode to Eyelashes:

Oh, lashes, lashes, where are they?
I miss 'em in an expressive way. 
They filter dust, and look so purty. 
And I could use 'em to be quite flirty. 
"They'll grow back", yes , I have been told. 
But will they grey and make me old? 

Mid-October update: Hair!

We’re about two-thirds of the way through radiation treatments, and it’s time for an update. Exhaustion is the theme of the week.  They said the daily radiation could make you tired.  They were right!  But when tired is the baseline, it’s hard to know if any extra perceived tiredness is because you’ve been having radiation, or you’re still tired from the chemo (which ended in July, for Pete’s sake), or you spent the week getting your 8-year-old’s face stitched back together after some playground exuberance gone wrong, or you stayed up watching an old James Garner movie until 1:30 a.m.  Who knows?

                I am now rocking an impressive radiation burn.  It looks, and feels, pretty much like a sunburn—a bizarrely localized sunburn.  I will have the strangest farmer tan ever. It covers half my chest, half my neck, and one armpit.  The treatment for this is to use one of two possible ointments.  One is greasy, and makes you look funny, like a body builder who has just oiled himself.  The other one feels nice, but smells like compost.  Would you rather look weird or smell weird?  I opted to look weird, because I don’t have to look at myself all day, but I couldn’t live with that smell.  Yes, cancer keeps finding new ways to make me more attractive! (I know, I know, this, too, shall pass.)

                My fingernails are also pretty interesting.  Every one of them has rings like the rings on a big old tree stump.  There are six rings on each nail, one for each chemo treatment. Those were truly badass drugs.

                But there’s good news, too. I have rudimentary hair, though it’s pretty mangy-looking right now, and a lot grayer than I had hoped it would be.  Every day, though, it’s a smidge less pathetic. And I got all excited this morning because I actually had to shave my legs! Yes, if I’m this excited about shaving my legs, I probably need to get out more.

                The best improvement this week has been the return of eyelashes.  English-teacher friends reading this, do you know if anyone has written an ode to the eyelash?  Someone should. I never realized how awesome they are until they went away.  They keep lots of crap out of your eyes, and save you pain and trips to the eye doctor.  They are purty.  They stop you squinting. And they are expressive.  Have you ever tried to flirt with someone without benefit of eyelashes?  It’s just not the same.

Radiation starts

                 People keep asking me when my radiation treatments will start.  That means I’m overdue to update the blog, because the treatments started last week.

                The effect of the radiation is cumulative.  I will eventually have a sunburn-like reaction, but not for a couple of weeks.  They tell you to buy a lotion made from marigolds because they’ve discovered that marigolds produce chemicals that are beneficial for radiation burns. It has a nasty chemical smell.

                They say the radiation might make me tired. Hey, I’m already tired.  But the process is mostly painless.  The first day, it was harder, because I had to maintain a really uncomfortable position for 45 minutes while they took lots of x-rays.  This messed up a tendon in my thumb, of all things. But otherwise it’s been okay.

                The machine they use, a linear accelerator, inspires a weird mix of awe and gratitude and absolute creepiness.  It’s not something that makes a person think, “Yes, I should get naked and lie down in front of that.”  Of course, it is amazing that they can pinpoint-target nuclear energy with such precision.  But it feels wrong, unnatural, to be the target.  You think about the hero firemen who got irradiated at Chernobyl.  You think about the book Hiroshima.  You think about that series they just ran in the New York Times about all the things that can and do go wrong in nuclear medicine.  But now they are drawing on you with blue Sharpies. They have put two real but tiny tattoos on your breastbone and armpit and the therapist lights them up with red laser beams like she was about to unload a smart bomb in your general direction. She hides behind a wall of concrete and lead.

                It’s time-consuming, an hour drive each way, five times a week, but the treatment itself only takes a few minutes. On Tuesdays, it’s longer, because you get to talk to your radiologist.

                She asks if I’m still having any weird side-effects from the chemotherapy—which ended in mid-July.  Yes, the left hand is still kind of numb, the eyes are still messed up, the stomach still has some issues.  She says that, in truth, I probably won’t feel normal until maybe January of next year.  Wow. Not even my oncologist ever admitted that.

                But she says I’ll have some hair by the time we’re done with radiation, in November. And the brain seems to be coming out of the fog a little bit.  All my life, I have drawn and painted.  I haven’t drawn or painted anything since March, because the chemo truly messed up my brain.  I couldn’t think hard enough to actually draw anything.  But I’ve started sketching again.  I hope this means the brain cells are not dead, they’re just stunned.

Fat Tire? Or Flat Tire?

                It’s almost four weeks since my surgery, and an update is overdue.  Sorry for the delay!

                The surgery went well.  No complications so far.  The anesthesiologist was great. I had told him that eight years ago, after my emergency C-section when I had Matthew, I had been horribly nauseous.  Nothing like that that this time, the guy was on top of it.  I spent one night in the hospital, and came home uneventfully.

                It was a bit of a bummer, though, when my surgeon spoke to John after the surgery.  They had removed nine lymph nodes, and they still found cancer cells in six of them. When I spoke with the surgeon two days later, she told me not to worry about this; it was what she had expected and it was something we could deal with using drugs and radiation. However, I didn’t really believe her.  From what I had heard and read, this was news that could actually decrease my life expectancy.  I began to feel like I really was going to die of this, and I began to feel pretty down.

                Happily, I have met with both my surgeon and my oncologist since then, and both of them are pretty optimistic.  My oncologist said it would have of course been better if all the cancer had been wiped out by the chemo, but the chemo did take a big chunk out of it.  The main tumors had greatly shrunk and most of what remained in the lymph nodes was in the process of dying.  That bodes well for our chances of having eliminated any cancer cells wandering through my bloodstream.

                My surgeon said that in my gloomy appraisal of the situation, I had not accounted for the type of cancer I have.  The kind I have is fairly non-aggressive and very dependent on estrogen.  So first we nuke it with radiation, and then I take Tamoxifen for the next several years, and that should handle whatever is left.

                I also have some new lifestyle guidelines.  I am supposed to exercise every day, because this kind of cancer does not like a revved-up metabolism.  I am supposed to limit my alcohol intake, because this kind of cancer responds to metabolized alcohol the way it does to estrogen.  Depending on which of my doctors you ask, that means no more than three or seven drinks a week. Neither the exercise nor the alcohol limits should be too hard for me.

                The doctors differed a little on the question of fat.  Estrogen levels are related to fat.  One of the doctors said that means I should eat a low-fat diet.  The other one said that diet theory has been largely refuted by the science, and that what I should be doing instead is to get to a healthy weight. Either way, this will be the hardest part for me.  I’m about 20 pounds overweight, and most of what I eat is high-fat.  So I am going to be working on this, but it won’t be pretty.

                Anyway, both doctors assured me that my situation is not dire.  They both offered to put me in touch with other women who had very similar illnesses to mine, who are still going strong 20 years later. So I am trying to switch gears from feeling like I am dying, to feeling like I am going to be here for a long time and I had better figure out what to do when I grow up…

                Meanwhile, the plastic surgeon has been happy with the way things are going.  They’ve basically put a water balloon in there, with a metal valve in it.  Every week, they blow the balloon up bigger, until it gets big enough to hold the space while we do several weeks of radiation.  Some time down the road, we remove the water balloon and replace it with a proper implant.  They can’t get make the space any bigger after radiation, so they have to do it now.  This has all been very surreal, to watch them inflate half of my chest like a basketball.

                “Let us know if it deflates suddenly,” they said.  “That’s called ‘a flat tire.’ It’s just saline, so it’s not dangerous, but we have to fix it sooner rather than later.”

                How do you fix it, I asked.

                “We change your tire,” they said.  Duh.

                They also said I am under NO circumstances to have an MRI of any kind on any part of my body.  That would result in a catastrophic tire blowout they said, basically explosively sucking the tire right out of my chest. They didn’t need to tell me that twice.

                I go for my first radiation appointment tomorrow, where they make the custom mask or stencil or whatever they call it.  That takes a while. A shout out to my friends for entertaining Matthew while I am down there in DC!

Katie's blog, post-op edition

                Hi! I had my mastectomy eight days ago, and I’m finally ready to write again. I was in the hospital  for one night, and on some serious painkillers for several days thereafter. The surgery itself seemed to go well as it could.  It was pretty straightforward.  There were no reactions to anesthesia or anything like that.  Of course, I was pretty sore for a while.

                There was the normal amount of hospital-related silliness.  Their pre-op admissions person told us to be there at 6am.  When we got there at 6am, they asked us why we had some so early.  We sat around for a long time. Then they told me, after I had already been to the bathroom, that I had to pee in a cup for a pregnancy test.  Really.  As I hadn’t been allowed to drink anything, including coffee, since the previous day, this was easier said than done and I was grouchy about it. I also told them it was pretty unnecessary, since I’d had my tubes tied eight years earlier and I am also post-menopausal.

                “Humor us,” they said.  We game some thought to having John pee in the cup for me, and debated whether they would even notice, but  eventually I did it, because  pissing off my crack team of cancer doctors is not what I want to do.  But then the nurses forgot to process the cup of pee, so when 10am rolled around and it was time to do surgery, they had to wait while they went off and ran the pregnancy test.  Of course, I still wasn’t pregnant.

                Many, many thanks to Pam, who drove my kids around that morning, and Deepika, who drove them around that afternoon and fed them, and Sarah, who did it the next day!

                So far, I’m hanging in there.  It is still a bit sore, but manageable with just regular old Tylenol. This morning, one of my surgeons told me I could start driving again. Still can’t go to the gym or do much that’s active, but, hey, that includes vacuuming, and I am told I can start with physical therapy probably next week. They will also start inflating my new boob next week, so I hope to look less lopsided then.

                Yesterday, my surgeon sort of took the wind out of my sails with my pathology report.  It was not nearly as good as I had hoped it would be.  Everyone had felt the chemotherapy just went great—and it did.  My plastic surgeon was pleased at how much the tumors had shrunk.  They were able to use all my own skin as a result, that sort of thing.  But I had thought that “successful” chemotherapy would have wiped out the cancer cells in the lymph nodes, and that was not the case. During surgery, they removed nine lymph nodes, and six of them still contained cancer cells.  This is not good, and it sent me into a panic. For a supposedly faithful Christian, I am still totally not wanting to die.

                However, my surgeon says I should not be panicking at all, and that this was pretty much what she had expected to see.  She said it is still “most likely” that we can get a full cure via radiation and tamoxifen, which I began taking yesterday.  I had hoped for a cleaner bill of health than that, but that was probably just inflated expectations on my part.

                A friend of mine who is a medical doctor helped me put it into some perspective.  He said it is disappointing when you think you see the finish line, but then you realize it wasn’t where you thought it was.  Still, that is how a lot of cancer cases work. There is a  great deal of ambiguity, even when things are going relatively well, for the first several years, at least.  I just have to get my head around that.

                It was very helpful talking with him, and with my friend who brought us dinner, and my other friend who brought us another dinner, and my other friend who brought my kid home from day camp yesterday!  You all are keeping me sane and treating me like a queen.  Another example:  we are enjoying fresh HUCKLEBERRIES that two of you sent me from a place in Oregon!  Heavens, they’re tasty!  And expeditious. 

Surgery day after tomorrow

                We are gearing up for my big surgery the day after tomorrow, trying to get all our kids’ schedules aligned and all our ducks in a row.  We owe a lot of thanks to friends who are running here and there to pick up and feed and entertain and comfort our kids this week!  Thanks, guys!

                In the end, I decided to not have surgery on the second breast.  The odds are pretty good it will never develop cancer, and I just don’t feel like any unnecessary medical procedures right now.

                This attitude on my part made for an interesting exchange with my plastic surgeon, when we first met.

                “What is your current bra size?” she asked.

                I told her.

                “What bra size would you like it to be?” she asked.

                I just sat there and looked stupid for a minute. This was not a question I had ever asked myself.  I had never wished my breasts were smaller, or bigger, or more even.  I had become aware, at some point when I was breastfeeding children, that my breasts were not perfectly even.  Well, that is why God made bra straps adjustable, I thought.   Really, until my breasts tried to murder me, I was quite happy with them the way they were.

                Silly me!  When you really measure them and photograph them and take a plumb line to them and think about them like a plastic surgeon does, there’s a lot of aesthetic problems there we could fix.  They aren’t even.  And they’re too big, apparently, or too “generous,” as one of the doctors put it, trying to be nice.  And they’re getting sort of saggy, compared to what they could be.

                Because, it turns out, my boobs and I have Options. We could do an old-fashioned implant.  Or we could take one of my back muscles and fashion a new boob out of it.  Or they could use of my abs.  Or part of my middle-aged gut, and give me a tummy tuck at the same time.  And then, I could have surgery on the other boob, to make it smaller and perkier and match the other one more perfectly.  And when they tattoo the colored parts on there (which they do) I could get a sexy little butterfly or something on there as well.  The girls could be better than they were before…better…stronger…faster.

                But I’m just no fun.  Unless it is going to give me a real chance at living longer, I am not interested in a boob job right now.  Which is just as well, it turns out, since none of those more-complicated plastic surgeries could be done until some months after radiation is finished, anyway.  And I don’t even start radiation until some time in September.  So I have time to think it over. Meanwhile, all they can really do is basic reconstruction, where they implant a sort of inner-tube in there, which they gradually fill, over the course of a few weeks, with saline to make room for whatever we implant in there later. That won’t be for maybe nine months or a year.

                For now, the rest of this cancer management seems to be going well.  It is so good to not be on chemo anymore!  I still feel a little better every day, and I finished chemotherapy a month ago.  I have pretty much got all the feeling back in my fingertips.  My fingernails never fell off.  Most of them did get nasty brown spots that looked like nicotine stains, but even those are fading now.  I did have one big toenail that I kept on with Band-Aids for some time, but it is also doing better. I have some nasty scars on my arm, from a PIC line and another Taxotere burn, but they are beginning to fade some. I am still bald and my eyes are still tearing all the time, but those problems should start coming right soon.

                I did have a scare about a week and a half ago, when the person at Sibley who was giving me my pre-op physical found what she described as a “growth” in my right eye. I hadn’t known it was there, inside my lower eyelid, but darned if she wasn’t right.  A really ugly-looking thing, too, and she said I should have my doctor look at it since we don’t want to mess with our vision, do we?

                I certainly don’t.  I am a painter, among other things, and messing with our vision would certainly play hob with that, or with driving kids around town. But even worse, when you say “a growth” to a person with breast cancer, that person immediately jumps to the conclusion that there’s been a metastasis and she now has breast cancer in her eye, and is going to die.

                Fortunately, after I left there and panicked for about a half an hour, I called my oncologist.  One of his wonder nurses called me back almost immediately, and explained to me that persons like myself who go utterly bald after chemotherapy—and that includes losing your eyelashes—well, you get all sorts of cysts and things in your eyes because your eyelashes aren’t there to keep junk out.  Who knew eyelashes are so functional? I didn’t.

                But happily, today I finally got in to see my eye doctor and he confirmed that this little lump in my eye is annoying but totally harmless.  Yay!

                On a more serious note, perhaps our largest problem of late has been our youngest child’s reaction to all this.  Matthew, who is 8 years old, is an anxious kid anyway.  But my illness really threw him for a loop, and he started both acting out aggressively and also having anxiety attacks.  We are now seeing a very good therapist in D.C., and we think this is helping him.  It’s a schlepp to get down there, but Matthew likes him, which is great. Thanks for everyone’s prayers and good thoughts in this area!