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.  ...

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...