Did You Ever Think Life Was Gonna Be This Way?

It's the holly-dazed season once again, and as usual, it really snuck up on me. I feel like I am still considering what I should carve on my Halloween pumpkin...but bam! There are only two more weekends before Christmas! How can this be? The holidays are always a hectic time of year for me (join the club, right?) - although usually it's because I'm working and there are finals to prep and grade and next semester's courses waiting for finishing touches. But here I am, on medical leave, and this year is just as crazy as the last. Thanksgiving, in fact, was even a bit nuttier than usual, because we had most of my husband's family here for the holiday! It was a full, full house - 12 people sleeping here in our 3 bedroom townhouse - but we threw the kids into the basement rec room and the rest of it worked out well (with special thanks to our neighbors, who were away and lent us their guest room). With such a big guest list, I had lots of great plans for decoratin

I felt like a lab rat this week...and then I ended up becoming one! Pretty exciting stuff, really. Last we met, you'll remember, I was moaning and groaning about nausea induced by Xeloda, my oral chemo drug. Sadly for me, that situation continued to deteriorate, and by the end of the day on Monday, I had vomited at least 5 times, despite multiple doses of anti-nausea medicine. My onocologist, bless him, answers my emails at all hours, and so at some point on Monday, he said to take a few days off from my Xeloda and come into the clinic on Tuesday if I needed fluids. At 1 in the morning, I send a pathetic little email to my team and said, yes, please! to the fluids...and to another, stronger anti-nausea drug.  When I roused myself on Tuesday morning, my oncologist's nurse, Roxanne, who is truly one of the most efficient human beings I've ever met, had already sent me a note telling me that I had a chair ready to go at the infusion clinic for fluids and Kytril (the anti-na

The last few months have gone like this: bloodwork, discover platelets are too low for chemo, take N-plate to boost platelets, repeat weekly; get Avastin infusion every three weeks; pack, pack, pack, pack, and pack some more due to impending move; listen to husband warn that something will go wrong with the move; keep packing. Read some work from my honors students. Pack. Stand around in dismay when husband's Cassandra-ing becomes reality, then breathe a sigh of relief when it gets worked out. Repeat twice more. Move! Unpack, unpack, unpack, unpack, and keep unpacking. Discover both cars don't fit into the garage at the same time; feel secretly happy because I hate my car; trade in car. Realize all the moving wore me out; sleep a lot.  Watch daughter fall in love with acting, her new school, and her teacher (not necessarily in that order); rejoice when she makes new friends. Watch son also fall in love with his teacher, listen with glee as he comes home with lots of new informa

The kids start classes tomorrow at a new school. They are VERY excited, and so are we, because their new school is even closer than their old school and it also has an excellent reputation - and an awesome playground! They're also a little nervous, especially our fourth grader, because, well, it's a new school, and they don't know very many people there.  Me, I'm a lot nervous. There's some anxiety, of course, about them starting at a new school and hoping that we made the right decision to move them and that they make friends quickly and like their teachers and so on. But mostly I'm nervous because we don't know any families or teachers or administrators at the new school, and so now I have to figure out whether and how to share the news of my health status with various people. The kids' teachers need to know, in case there's an emergency and I wind up in the hospital or something, so that they'll have context if the kids are upset or perfo

...the title is sponsored, of course, by one of the best hair bands of all time - Def Leppard .  These are the things that spring to mind when you were a kiddo in the 1980s. All of us have special lockboxes in our brains just chock full of terrible lyrics and catchy tunes.  But enough about that. Let's see. Last time I checked in with you all, I had had my PET scan and started chemo again and summer was well under way. Since then, I've rallied a bit and gotten used to the new drugs, so we were able to take a family trip to Iowa by way of South Dakota (I know, I know - it sounded like a good idea at the time ), where we visited Mount Rushmore and the world-famous Corn Palace. (What? You've never heard of it? Tsk, tsk - you have no culture.) Iowa was lovely - we hung out at Nick's aunt and uncle's lake house and saw most of his family. The kids were wildly excited to spend time with their cousins! Then we came home and went up to the mountains for a long weekend

As my summer began, I was finally ditching the oxygen I'd been lugging around since April and was looking forward to finishing my steroids and having a nice, relaxing summer. And then my PET scan happened.   I have a PET scan once a year, and CT scans every 9 weeks, to see how my insides look. The last CT I had showed some growth in my lung lesions but nothing else, and so things looked pretty stable...although my CEA number, which can be a marker of the amount of certain kinds (including colon cancer) of cancer cells floating around your bloodstream, had begun to rise. So the PET scan would help us dig a little deeper and find out whether that rising number was a result of my pneumonia/pneumonitis (which can happen), or because of a new recurrence (keeping in mind that we already knew I had lung lesions that were slowly growing). Well, the PET showed those lesions, as expected, and also showed a little smudge in my liver - although nothing had shown up on the CT scan there.  Due t

I'm just going to say it: I am a puffball, a marshmallow. My face is much rounder and fluffier than an oval shaped face really has any right to be. Look at this:  Here I am, on Mothers Day, with my absolutely gorgeous baby girl. The decision to share the shot in black and white was carefully curated so that you'd notice the smiles, not the delivery mechanism that used to be my face and is now a cartoon iteration of it.  Why is my face so round, you ask, and why can't I get over it? Good questions. Fair questions. Somewhat easy questions, too - at least on the surface.  My face is round and pie-like because of steroids, which I've been gobbling down obediently since the middle of April, when my medical team realized that my pneumonia actually was radiation pneumonitis - a result of radiation treatments I had in February. Just between you and me, I'm getting a little tired of taking them. The steroids, I mean. Don't get me wrong -  I was and AM happy and grateful

I can see why they used to send people to the dry air of the mountains for "rest cures" related to consumption and whatever else they called conditions that featured craptastic symptoms of lung deterioration. I really get it now.  About a month ago, I was in the hospital for pneumonia, which turned actually to be radiation pneumanitis - a side effect from my radiation treatments in February. They sent me home with oxygen (the giant green metal cylinder kind that made me feel like a helium balloon salesman), and, once we figured out the pneumanitis part, steroids for me to take to help clear my airways and keep them open. And thanks to the fact that I have an awesome medical team and enough bandwidth to manage my care (thanks to my holy host of helpers that include my whole family, various indulgent friends, and so on), I've been weaning my way off of the oxygen and the steroids pretty steadily under my doctor's guidance. Or at least I was, until the last day or two. I

Two years ago this afternoon I woke up in an outpatient surgical procedure room after a routine colonoscopy. Water, some snacks, a little crackle of adrenaline, maybe, now that I look back, sort of sticking around. Definitely a sense of concern about where the person who dropped me off was (Nolan, our former nanny) and when she would return. Within minutes, the doctor couldn't stand the waiting and barged into the room to tell me, more than a little wild-eyed, "You have cancer." Hysteria -but slow, heavy and medicinally encumbered - ensued. My husband was called; my mom. My dad. Our best friends, who immediately asked about the children. I was bundled into a car (Nolan's?) and taken to the hospital for a ct scan - late in the afternoon, and bless the staff for keeping the lights on for me. And thus began my journey into a complicated and fucked up medical reality of metastatic colon cancer, a reality that, as I learned that afternoon while googling the info near my fr

Last Monday or Tuesday, I bragged on my Facebook page that I had managed to whisk my kids to SC and back to visit my dad without any problems; I was #kickingcancerlikeagirl and proud of it. On Wednesday, I was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia, and stayed there for two days. Now I'm tethered to an oxygen tank - which to my mind is just as claustrophobic as scubadiving but without the  fun of all the fishies and coral.  I'd had a cold when I left for my dad's house, sure, and the cough got worse while I was there; I actually had floated the idea of a doctor visit to my regular nurse practioner before I left, but she suggested I try some cold medicine and said I was probably fine. Okay, I was just being a complainer, I told myself when I woke up for the day feeling ready for a nap. My dad suggested that it was probably due to the high pollen count. So we had our nice little vacay and returned to Denver on Monday and I went to work the next day...but when it literally to

Two of my very best friends, who have been there for me and my family throughout my cancer experience, no questions asked, discovered recently that their loved ones (one mom and one mom-in-law)  have been diagnosed with breast cancer. Another very close personal friend - she knitted me Wonder Woman wristguards while I had half my liver removed, for Goodness sake - just learned that her father has a terminal cancer diagnosis.  This, of c ourse, is shitty news for all involved.  It's gotten me thinking, though, about my own first crazy, overwhelming weeks after learning of my own cancer diagnosis and what was helpful to me and my family as we sought to come to terms with our new situation. So in the hopes of helping my dear friends - or anyone, really, finding themselves or their loved ones reeling from the devastating reality of cancer, I offer the following suggestions and resources. I hope they are of use to you, and if anyone out there in the virtual world ever wants more

I had a CT scan on Thursday and, as usual, the week or two prior to the scan were anxiety ridden ones. The scan shows us what's going on inside my bod - they use a high contrast dye to help identify any possible new lesions and to track the growth (or lack of growth) of existing malignancies. CT scans can be done anywhere on the body but mine focus on the chest, abdomen, and pelvis because that is where my growths have already occurred, and my type of cancer likes to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak. Well, to the scene of the metastasized crime (places the cancer spread beyond the primary tumor site, which was my sigmoid colon), I should say - it's very rare for another colon tumor to emerge. Anyway, as I've explained before, my medical team is very attentive in their quest to keep me alive (Thank You!) and thus, I have undergone these scans every two to three months since my initial diagnosis. These are in addition to PET scans, which search the whole body for

Six years ago yesterday morning, my husband and I drove through the pre-dawn chill of a Denver February to Rose Hospital, where my beautiful baby boy with lips like, yes, roses, would arrive just a few hours later to complete my family and my heart. We listened to "Latika's Theme" from "Slumdog Millionaire," and I remember so well the feeling of peace, of happiness and expectancy that accompanied us, a little warm cocoon swaddling us as the dark and still early morning slipped by. I meditated and prayed - for a safe delivery of my son, for him to have a happy life, a life abundant in love and joy.   So far, so good. My gorgeous, funny, stubborn baby boy still skips nearly everywhere he goes, and although he's grown so long and lanky, he still folds himself happily into my lap and onto my shoulder for hugs and snuggles.       the two of us, a few years back A year ago today, my husband and I drove to a different hospital and received very different news: the