Did You Ever Think Life Was Gonna Be This Way?

Ever since I learned the term, I've hated it: "cancerversary." I mean, who the hell wants to celebrate cancer? Who wants that rubbing up against celebratory anniversaries of love and growth? Not me.  The bottom line is this: words matter.  If you pay close attention to my discussions and conversations around my disease, you might notice that I don't use the word "cancer" very often, and I don't use the word "tumor" (*shudder*), either. It's part and parcel of my own ongoing efforts to assert power over my life, my health, my body.  Personally, I also am not a big fan of the "warrior" mentality.  Don't get me wrong: there are days when nothing else will do, and fighting through a feeling, a complication, a recovery, a piece of disagreeable news is the only way for me to get from one end to the other. But I've never been a fan of war, and I find the concept of going to war against - let's face it - myself very hard ...

It's Friday, and we all know what that means - a weekend ahead full of kids playing soccer, lacrosse, and all the rest of those sports that make spring skiing impossible. No, no. That was my inner parent speaking. Let's try again.  It's FRIDAY! And we all know what that means - HAPPY HOUR!  CANCER POSSE PEOPLE ONLY: For Friday afternoon fun: get a nice, robust glass of your favorite drink. Have someone read these out loud, one at a time. Drink for each one that someone has unironically said to you! You'll be soused in no time at all.  BONUS - PROFESSIONAL DRINKERS ONLY!: Have whoever is reading these to you top off your drink every time they guiltily admit that they've said one of these things to someone (even, perhaps, to you).   Illustration brought to you by someone I don't know - but was sent to me by one of my favorite people in the world. A kindred cancer spirit, if you will. Awful that cancer was what it took to bring us together, but......

Tucked away in an actual scrapbook, and squirreled away here in my digital files, there's a picture that I love and hate in somewhat equal measure. I literally can barely stand to look at it. But the time as come, as the walrus said, to talk of many things, and thus I'm sharing the photo that sparks fear and tears and anger in me even as I well up over the happy little peek into the past that it affords. Behold: My husband, Nick, turned 39 on April 19, 2013. The little tykes (and they WERE little, weren't they? Our sweet girl had just turned 6 and our little guy was barely four) and I celebrated by making him mint chocolate cupcakes, complete with the appropriate minty oreos on top. And we sang "Happy Birthday" and they helped him blow out the candles. I wonder what he wished for, way back then. I wonder if the kids had thought to wish for anything. I was just happy that I had completed the cupcakes, because I was also working full time (finals were jus...

So, if you've been following my story, you know that I've had not one, not two, but three (yes, THREE!) partial splenic embolizations within the last year. All have been part of a larger effort to boost my platelet circulation so that I'll be able to treat my disease as aggressively as possible. To recap, #1 PSE resulted in a four day hospital stay to get my pain management under control and did exactly nothing to boost my platelet numbers. They continued to act erratically and would bottom out around 30K. #2 PSE included an exciting dead of night emergency dept visit to stop a pseudo-aneurysm near my incision; my leg ended up deeply bruised from hip to knee - but my platelets did recover somewhat! My new floor was around 60K. Better, but still not great. As the new year rolled around, my platelets, in an apparent burst of holiday celebration, shot up to 169K. Strange but terrific. The following week, they were still firmly in the 100K orbit, and this, combined wit...

Something you need to know about me before we continue: I am not an adrenaline junkie. I've spent my entire life, more or less, attempting to keep myself from bodily harm.  So why did I agree to do this procedure again just a few months later? Yeah. I have no explanation, aside from the observation that cancer and faith lead to strange outcomes sometimes.  The first procedure failed spectacularly. Therefore, the reason why I had pursued that option remained: my platelets were still unpredictable and scarce. I was clocking in with 60k platelets one week, 30k the next, and 75k or so from time to time. This became the cutoff for me to receive chemo - otherwise, I wouldn't have any at all - but it still wasn't achieved on a regular basis. So. After meeting with my medical team about what had gone wrong (They had killed off part of my spleen and as everything became inflammed, my spleen pushed up against my diaphragm and had nowhere else to expand to, so that created a bad cycle...