It’s not about the chest, stupid

Posted: February 22, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: breast cancer, cancer fatigue | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Ugh, yet another reminder that my brain is filled to the brim with cancer ca-ca. I mentioned a few examples of the ca-ca recently, and here I am once again, consumed with it. The latest: while browsing on etsy, I came across a “store” called ETC Chest. My first thought was, hmmm, wonder what kind of breast cancer stuff they have in that “store.” Guess what kind of breast cancer stuff they have? NONE.

ETC Chest stands for “Embroidered Treasures and Crafts” Chests. It has nothing, nada, zilch to do with the human chest, flat or reconstructed.

Well, duh.

Reminds me of my second-favorite Far Side cartoon:

And because you’re probably curious, my all-time favorite Far Side cartoon is:

Thank you, Gary Larson.

This little exercise in idiocracy (I think I just made that word up; I like it. No, wait there was a movie by that title. Never mind.) reminds me of how pervasive the cancer fatigue can be. Lots has been written about how a cancer diagnosis wrecks your life, and even when the cancer is vanquished and you end up with the best-case outcome, it’s always there. The fear, the weariness, the unseen scars.

My blog friend Lauren writes an incredibly eloquent blog called After Five Years. I highly recommend you check it out if you’re curious about what it’s like to live with cancer. She recently wrote a post about going back for a mammogram and it so perfectly captured the fear, the anxiety, the all-around shittiness of living with cancer. I held my breath throughout the entire post, then was gasping and sputtering and although it was only 9:30 a.m., felt like I needed a nap.

Lauren is a lot farther along in the “cancer journey” than I am, and in fact I can’t even comprehend getting a mammogram right now. Of course, having no breasts, it would be a physical impossibility, but still. I’m not yet to the point of having the routine scans that every cancer survivor endures at regular intervals. The stress and anxiety of knowing that there’s a (hopfully) comprehensive sweep through your body to sniff out errant cells is all-encompassing. I can imagine people all over the world watching the calendar, knowing that an appointment is upcoming. The anxiety of waiting for the appointment time to approach is nothing compared to the feelings that course through one’s body during the actual scans (or blood tests, as the case may be), and even that is a drop in the bucket compared to the sheer terror of waiting for the results. Talk about PTSD. It’s a wonder each and every cancer survivor isn’t a raging alcoholic. Or seriously addicted to Twizzlers. I can see myself going down either path, maybe both. And I’m just getting started on this “cancer journey.”

Life goes on for survivors. That’s a beautiful thing, and it becomes all the more precious when a serious illness rudely interrupts your life. But it’s not easy. Cancer is a sneaky beast. It invades your body, and even when it’s caught early, small, and contained, it has a unique ability to rattle your cage, big time.

Office supplies

Posted: January 18, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

I’ve been trying to figure out how to print out all my old Caring Bridge journal entries without actually having to use my own ink cartridge. The one thing I really miss about having an office job is the access to free supplies. I’m no cheapskate (just ask poor Trevor how good I am at spending money), but there are certain things on which I just don’t like to spend money. Ink cartridges for sure. It used to be pajamas, too. Hated to spend money on those, but since I had to spend so much time in them in the recent past, I’m over it.

When I worked for a living, as opposed to working for my family and for society in general (via raising two upstanding citizens who will hopefully become productive members of said society), there were some perks. The bi-monthly paycheck was one. Since I was in the publishing industry, every time we came out with a new book that I had worked on, my name was listed in the “credits.” Not as exciting as seeing one’s name on the silver screen, but worth something nonetheless.

I also liked the wide variety of ink pens.

I’m a bit of a stationery connoisseur, and love the feel of good heavy cardstock, the look of watermarked paper, and the ease of a good ink pen. When I was editing by hand (I’m assuming it’s all done on computer these days, and boy howdy are my tired old eyes and I glad I’m not staring at a screen all day trying to fix somebody’s dangling participle), I used a red ink pen made by Flair. Haven’t seen one like it in a lot of years, not even at Office Max. Maybe they determined the red dye in the ink was a carcinogen. Maybe I have a lawsuit in the works.

More likely, the Flair pen went out of fashion, replaced by some fancy-pants quick-clicking pen filled with recycled organic range-free food dye. I still miss it. And like my favorite lip balm (Blistex Herbal Answer in the light green, .15 oz tube, comes in the yellow box with daisies on the front and contains aloe, avocado, chamomile, shea butter & jojoba, SPF 15), if I ever see it, I buy in bulk. All those people who go on Survivor and get to take one personal item (or at least they used to: I haven’t seen the show in years) may take a family photo or their Bible. I would take my Blistex.

But back to the lack of free office supplies. I’m too cheap to spend my husband’s hard-earned money on ink cartridges, so I’m not going to print my Caring Bridge journal for posterity. Maybe this blog will go viral one day and I’ll be sponsored by HP and get free ink for life. Or maybe I’ll just keep blabbing away into the ether, regardless of who’s reading.

Healer

Posted: January 7, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: breast cancer, literature | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

The body is a miracle, the way it heals. A factory of survival and self-repair.  As soon as flesh is cut, cells spontaneously begin to divide and knit themselves into a protective scar. A million new organic bonds bridge the broken space, with no judgment passed on the method of injury.

Wow. That’s pretty prose.  I wish I had written it.

I’d love to claim it as my own, but that would be wrong, and Lord knows I need the great karma wheel to turn my way. I can’t afford to tempt the gods of fate, as they seem to like toying with me.

Carol Cassella wrote that prose. If you’re a fiction fan and don’t know her work, I encourage you to get her books sooner rather than later. Whether you run to the bookstore or download onto your e-reader, get on it. You won’t be sorry. She’s an anesthesiologist-turned-author whose first book, Oxygen, is one of my all-time favorites. Her second book, Healer, wasn’t quite as good but I gobbled it up in hopes that it would be.  I liked her right off the bat, because she’s a Texas native and a Duke graduate. A girl after my own heart. She’s also the mother of two sets of twins (!) and how she got anything done, much less wrote 2 bestsellers, is a mystery to me.

I read Healer this summer, while I was trying to heal. I was struck by the passage above, and loved how dramatically it introduces the book. From the very first sentence, I was hooked. While I certainly didn’t set out to turn this blog into a space for book reviews, sometimes things happen that way, and I’m an equal-opportunity blogger, so there we are.

As a physician, Cassella understands the intricacies and magic of the human body. As an author, she’s able to capture that and express it so that someone like me, an impatient patient, can read it and say, yeah, that’s right–the body is a miracle!

I needed that reminder. I was so focused on wanting my healing to occur faster, I didn’t realize that the fact that it was happening at all was amazing.

Equally amazing is the education this experience (e.g., the “cancer journey”) has provided. I’ve learned a bunch of lessons I never wanted to learn, such as how utterly unfair life can be. I’ve acquired skills I never thought I could and hope to never have to use again. Anything involving packing a wound or administering IV drugs at home falls into that category.

I’ve certainly learned a new vocabulary. Not just the new definition of “normal,” either. Things like nosocomial (originating in a hospital, as in a nosocomial infection). Like debridement (removal of foreign material or dead tissue from a wound in order to promote healing). Like aromatase inhibitors (drugs like Tamoxifen that lower estrogen levels in the body by blocking aromatase, an enzyme that converts other hormones into estrogen). Like oophorectomy (surgical removal of the ovaries).

I’ve learned how to get a good night’s sleep in a noisy hospital. I’ve learned the difference between DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ) and invasive breast cancer, and that they’re both plenty scary.  I’ve learned that an injection can leave a bruise for close to 3 months. I’ve learned that the practice of medicine is both a science and an art. And I’ve completely forgotten what it feels like to wear a bra.

supplies

Posted: November 3, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: breast cancer, cancer fatigue, drugs, infection | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

I was just wondering what I could blog about, since it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. Now that my life is more or less back to normal, there’s just not as much fodder for posts. This is a good thing, because it means my health isn’t full of breaking-news updates, but a bad thing because I really like writing and many of you kind souls have said you really like reading my posts. So I was pondering this while doing something seemingly insignificant but actually quite momentous over the weekend. I put away all my medical supplies.

There’s been quite a collection on my bathroom counter since August. Way back in late July & early August, while I had home health care for the IV antibiotics, I amassed a huge pile of supplies. Everything from wound vac stuff (remember Sucky?) to heparin flushes to alcohol wipes to gauze pads. And a bunch of other stuff in between. I hated every piece of medical paraphernalia from the moment it entered my home. I know I should be grateful for it all, and for the comprehensive health insurance that paid for everything. And I am. I truly am grateful, and think a lot about how much more stressful this whole mess would be without insurance. But I still hated all the supplies.

I hated the supplies because they reminded me, in a very tangible way, of how perilous my health was. No one ever talked out loud about how dangerous this infection business really is, but you’d have to be be pretty dense to not get it. I certainly didn’t need a reminder to know that my situation was serious — I lived it every second of every day. Even now, 2-plus months after all that mess, it still scares me, just a little bit. I still look over my shoulder and don’t entirely trust the good health I’ve been enjoying lately.

So this weekend I got cocky and decided it was time to pack away the supplies. I no longer needed the saline and gauze to clean a wound, or the antimicrobial silver dressing to put inside the wound, or the antibiotic cream and tape. My skin can finally breathe now that it’s not encased in plastic dressing and tape. I’ve been lax in taking my temperature every day, and only do it every other day. I still have the syringes and teeny little vials of B12 liquid that gets injected in my arm once a month. And I still have a stash of pain pills, which I don’t need but I like knowing they’re around, just in case. But for the last several weeks, I haven’t needed to get into those supplies.

Once that nasty wound finally healed, there was little need for the plethora of stuff, but I was so used to having it on my bathroom counter, it all really seemed to belong there. It became a fixture, I suppose. Until this weekend. When I got cocky, again. Last time I got cocky, I decided I didn’t need the probiotic anymore, even though I’m still on two antibiotics twice a day. That lasted exactly 2 days. But several weeks had passed without incident, so I guess I got bold and decided it was time for the supplies to go.

Silly, silly girl. When will I ever learn? I’d been feeling not quite right for the last several days. Nothing I can really pinpoint, but something seemed off. So when I saw Dr S today he immediately noticed a reddish-purpleish spot on my right side that seemed pretty puffy. I think his exact words were, What the hell is that??? Never a good sign. So he poked around for several tense minutes and sure enough that spot felt different than the surrounding tissue. He squished it pretty good and said there’s fluid in there.

I won’t repeat the litany of curse words that went through my head at that exact moment, but suffice to say it would make a former Marine or tattoo artist or school lunch lady proud. That was some professional cussing going on in my head. The quality of the cussing almost distracted me from the inevitable: Dr S moved away from the exam table (which is like a second home to me) and headed for his supplies. He never says much but we’ve been down this road before, or as Payton’s speech teacher Ms. Pointer would say, this is not our first rodeo.

No, sadly, Dr S and I have been rodeoing together long enough that I know that when he heads for the supplies, he is going to come back with a sharp object in his hand and a very determined set to his jaw. He did not disappoint me.

He sliced me right open,  and sure enough the fluid came rushing out. Not as dramatic as the “black gold, Texas tea” segment on the opening scene of The Beverly Hillbillies but it did bring that little blast from the past to mind.

Long story short, we don’t know what’s going on. It’s probably nothing serious (repeat that phrase 1,000 times for good measure). He cultured it, so maybe we’ll know something by the end of this week. Or maybe not, because one thing I’ve learned in this long, rotten education is that you don’t always get an answer right away, and you don’t always get the answer you want. Fingers crossed that we’re not talking about an infection here. I shudder to think about the prospect of another infection, or a variation on the one I already had, especially since I’ve been on 2 oral antibiotics for something like 12 weeks. Yes, you read that right: 12 weeks. Nearly 100 days of twice-daily abx. If I’m not covered then I may just have to give up, tell the bacteria to come & get me. Have at it.

I’m not ready to start waving the white flag just yet. But I will get the supplies out of the bathroom closet and put them back on the counter, where they belong. At least for now.

Newer Entries →