Did You Ever Think Life Was Gonna Be This Way?

Yesterday morning, I awoke and considered the day ahead: an Oxaliplatin infusion this afternoon, the first one in almost five years. I wondered briefly if I would see my friend Madeline at the cancer center - a mental image of her, smiling her little Mona Lisa smile at me (she had a whole wardrobe full of smiles, just as she had a closet chock full of fun clothes) from her infusion chair as we sat together, wafted up and forced me to do a mental double take, because I won't see Mad at infusion. Or anywhere else. She died on August 22 from complications of colon cancer. She was 41.  I tucked Madeline into my heart and head as I prepared for my day, knowing that her many years (she lived with CRC for over five years) of pushing back against this horrific disease with every medical option available to her would help me keep my perspective when I felt like whining. This woman exhausted all of the FDA approved treatments and then moved on to clinical trials, which are no small unde...

*to the tune of Don Maclean's "American Pie" Well, well, well! It's been a while, hasn't it? I got sidetracked as the second half of May engulfed me in a wave of "school's (almost) out, camps are starting and you should have registered in January" insanity, and after a couple of weeks, I realized that no one was asking me where the next blog update was and it was both a disappointment (for obvious reasons) and a relief (because I'd been starting to obsess a bit over the idea that I had to post consistently). So then I just started navel gazing rather than thinking and writing. I took a mental vacation, I suppose. It was sort of nice! But I discovered that the reason why I don't take mental vacations very often is because I get a little too cozy with my life-long nemesis, anxiety, and her BFF, depression. So the mental vacation is over and you'll all just have to pretend you're really eager for regular installments if I fall of...

I've been neglecting you, my dedicated blog readers. I'm so sorry. Don't worry, I haven't been languishing in the hospital or crawling from bed to rocking chair and back. I haven't even been in hiding. Nope! I've been out and about, and I've been busy! I've been...SPRING CLEANING.  This is a momentous event. Long, long ago, in a world before I was diagnosed with cancer, I was a tidy person. An organized person. A person who would work all day, come home, parent and perform various household tasks, and then end the day with some reading or hanging out with my husband. And then I would get up and do it all again the next day. I had energy! I'm sort of amazed, looking back now, on all that I was able to get done. Spring cleaning was one of those things. On a somewhat regular basis, I would tear apart the closets, purge the dresser drawers, weed out the bookshelves, and all the rest. But that was a long time ago. In my post-diagnosis life, some days...

Spoiler Alert: I guess it's possible: I finally complained too much. But I had no choice, with the complaining and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth and so on! I've spent about $9 kajillion on skincare solutions but my skin would not play nicely. I can't even believe I'm saying this, but it's not even the acne all over my face that has been bothering me the most. It's the fact that I feel like a cicada nymph about to become a glorious locust, but without the glorious locust payoff. Don't know what I'm talking about? Feast your eyes on this: If that's not interactive enough for you, it appears that you can buy empty cicada shells in a fancy jar on Etsy . And then you, too, can feel what it's like to have my skin, at least a little...by putting one of the shells on your thumb? (Seriously, though, what is going on with this, Etsy? I feel like I just stumbled into the dark underbelly of the craft world.)  Anyhoo, I'm gonna wh...

This time last year, I was starting a new round of chemo - Folfox, which we now know really REALLY wreaked havoc on my systems, especially my platelets and white blood cells - they even wound up testing me for leukemia this spring because my counts were so low. Andy platelets, once robust and normal as yours, still have not recovered. At this point, my oncologist says the damage is probably permanent and that my platelets have "reset" themselves at this new, much lower level. Just to give you an idea of what's normal in the world of platelets, 150k-400k is the normal range. During chemo, my oncologist required my platelet levels to be at 100k or higher. Today, my platelets are generally around 75k. Last time I had chemo, the medical team had to request (and thankfully, received) special permission ("compassionate use")for me to use a drug that would boost my platelets to an acceptable level for treatment. Fun stuff, right?  But I  digress. I started this post fu...

I'm getting my groove back. I can feel it. I stay awake all day (well, most days). I've been organizing up a storm. I'm enjoying cooking and baking again. The hideous acne/rash I had as a result of one of my chemo drugs is almost gone - I've actually left the house without cover-up on and not scared people. Yay for summer! Yay for recovery! Let's drink to that! June 2013, at the mountain house. God, I miss my hair. But wait. I don't have the energy I want. And I get terrible edema if I have drinks. One or two glasses of wine seems to be okay, sorta. But if I decide to have a vodka and soda, or if I have, over the course of an evening, more than two drinks, then I wake up the next morning having gained - and this is not a lie - at least 4-6 pounds. It's water weight. So then I start taking my edema drugs, which make me pee every 45 minutes all day long, for about three days. Then I am back to my regular weight, and then, sooner or later, the edema ...