Did You Ever Think Life Was Gonna Be This Way?

I have the tendency to leave out the messy, sad, difficult parts of my everyday life with cancer. The reasons for that are legion, but they boil down to one: we all like to present our best selves. No one likes to feel vulnerable and naked to the world. I don't want people feeling sorry for me or pitying me. There are only a tiny handful of people that I really open up to about this terrible disease, and that's because it's a huge burden and frankly, I don't want to trust just anyone with sharing my load.  But I don't want everyone to think life is all rainbows and sunshine, either.  When one of my closest friends, who loves me very much (and the feeling is mutual), urged me to stop obsessing over certain things and gave me a well-intentioned pep talk about how the big crisis was over and it was time to find my "new normal"...well, I knew I had some 'splaining to do. If someone that close to me thinks that we're all done with cancer around her...

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...