The Chemo Waltz

Tuesday would have been my eldest sister’s 58^th birthday. She died in her mid-20s from the ravages of childhood diabetes gone unchecked.  She died very young. 

Her death came as no surprise at the time, we all knew we were going to lose her.  And she was done, really.  Diabetes is a cruel disease, much like cancer, it chips away at your health and steals your soul.  As the end nears, you long for death in that sleep forever, no more pain sort of way.

My sister never knew my daughter, her name sake, she never got to know Brittany or follow where life took us along the various paths.  She died so young. She didn’t marry or have children, her illness stole that from her too.

I don’t think getting a serious illness such as diabetes or cancer later in life makes you more prepared for everything you are about to lose.  Someone in the medical profession that I know and who is about to start chemo told me that chemo is poison and once you put it in your body, your body is never the same.  Wise words from somebody who cannot have a clue as to what chemo actually does to you.

Fact, chemo kills everything. And thus chemo nearly kills the cancer patient in order for them to survive.  It’s a deadly dance really, how close to the edge of the cliff can chemo take you medically while making sure that post chemo, your body can still pull back from the brink?

My sister’s journey was a one-way trip.  Medically, she never had my options or my odds and I remind myself of that when I get too wrapped up in the fact that my health and body are not what they used to be.  No, they are not but the alternative was not something I was willing to risk.  I took my chances and danced with Death.  Death only dipped me a couple of times, right over the abyss, but then he put me up right and I staggered away, the Chemo Waltz is not a pretty dance but cancer patients can and do master it. 

More and more of us are living proof.

Revenge of The Elf Baby

My youngest grand-daughter, Scarlett Rose, could not be more different from the eldest, both in temperament and baby style.  Whereas Claudia is outgoing and energetic Scarlett is tranquil and almost Zen-like in her baby ways.  She is easy going and naps well, she eats like a baby moose and is generally mellow.

This is what we in the baby business like to call an Easy Baby.

This is why I was so surprised that she tried to kill me this past weekend.  The angelic little Elf Baby (she truly does look like my daughter had a fling with Legolas The Elf from Lord Of The Rings), decided to test my mettle.  All 16 pounds of her were put into motion as she refused to be put down, was not sick in any way, was uncooperative and high maintenance as nothing I did soothed her.  I despaired, what was I doing wrong?  I tried every baby trick in the book and felt bad that I could not give Claudia more attention. Tiny little Scarlett Rose was having none of it.

I battled the flu as well, having not watched kids while this sick in a very long time.  Surviving cancer makes you tough, what can I say.  Please Scarlett, please take your bottle, please don’t fuss, please, please, please. No napping either.  Well, nothing more than a ten minute snooze and that just to lull me into a false sense of security.  The infant’s equivalent of baby bait and switch.

And just when I thought I was not going to make it, just when I was about to throw in the towel, my daughter swooped in, scooped up Evil Elf Baby and suddenly?

All was calm.  Scarlett smiled her signature, dazzling little grin, leaned against her mom’s shoulder and signed as stared me down coolly as if to say, “See Nana? That’s all I needed, MY MOM.”

After they left, I sat in the tub, scrubbing off the various body fluids little Scarlett had graciously decided to donate to my person.  Where had I gone wrong?  I pondered this until my skin was scrubbed clean and overwhelming fatigue took over.  I crawled into bed, defeated.  I am not her mom; she was just firing an emotional warning shot across the bow of Nanadom to make sure I knew my place.  I do baby, I really do.

The fatigue I experience from the meds I take to stave off a recurrence of cancer is overwhelming at times.  It doesn’t help that the meds also seriously muck up my sleeping habits.  I do the best I can but frequently I am simply, utterly, wiped out.  The alternative would be risking a much higher risk of the cancer coming back so I suck it up and take the meds but there is a price; I am wiped out most of the time and fighting for a decent night’s sleep the rest.  The only way to really get enough sleep is to start around 11 and fight until around 3 a.m. and then sleep through until 10 or 11 the next morning.  Not practical by any means and downright impossible given that I’m not retired or a lady of leisure. So, I suck it up, exhausted but on duty so to speak. I get up and keep going because as a cancer survivor, this is what we do.  We keep going. 

Even in the face of determined Elf Babies who vow to take us down and keep us in our collective place.

Forgetting Death

The news is full of some puzzling findings regarding some forms of skin cancer and a dramatically reduced risk of Alzheimer’s. Given that I had your basic, garden variety skin cancer just a few years ago, I had to smile at this news.

I guess of all the health battles I fought including breast and skin cancer, and for those I may have to fight in the future, it’s a good bet that Alzheimer’s won’t be what takes me out.  How refreshing. I will have all my faculties in place when the Grim Reaper comes calling.

So I will recognize him.  We are old friends, Death and I.  Death sat at my bedside as I woke up after each breast cancer surgery, smiling.  He put a finger to his dead, pale lips as if to quiet me.  No one will believe you he said to me silently.  And through my anesthetic haze, I was so sure that Death was really there that I bolted upright, to the utter shock of the surgical room recovery nurses.  I watched, astonished, as Death sauntered down the hallway.  Am I the only one who sees him? I wanted to scream.  Lots of easy pickins’ in hospitals.

Not even a minute ticked by before a Code Blue ensued.  Cha ‘ching.

I laid back down, content in the knowledge that at the very least, I wasn’t crazy.

Death continued to pay me visits from that day forward.  I have actually seen Death on the step of my fire captain boyfriend’s fire truck, smiling, fingers to lips again. The call they respond to that day was an auto fatality and Death hitched a ride.  And even when I am thousands of miles away, when a burning roof crashed down on my boyfriend, when a house exploded as he had just stepped outside the strike zone, I was certain Death was standing across the street or leaning under a shady tree, lurking nearby.  I woke up that day in an icy sweat, having seen Death leaning against a tree holding a small dog. 

My boyfriend later told me that they got the human occupants out of the house before it exploded but not the pet. 

A small dog. 

I don’t ask about the tree, I know it was there.

And now I also know that no matter how old I am privileged to become before I take my final swan dive, Death won’t let me forget. 

We are old friends, Death and I.

Scorched Earth Revisited

I am well known for my anti-celebrity ways. I don’t read celebrity magazines, I have to look up the spelling for Kardashians (this may be the very first time I’ve actually written that name out come to think on it) and I honestly believe that most celebrities are megalomaniacs, impossibly self-absorbed and dangerously under educated.  The ones that I’ve read about having fought breast cancer only reinforced these notions.  And while I give Angelina Jolie a lot of credit for having drastically reduced her chances of getting breast cancer by having a double mastectomy after she found out she carried the BRACA gene, I still don’t think it is any of my business nor the public’s business.

The decision to have surgery this way is an impossibly difficult, agonizing choice that many women now face.  The advancements in DNA and gene analysis mean that more and more women are armed with knowledge about their odds and can be proactive in their medical choices.

But the choice is still a tough one.  Now that I am heading into my fourth year cancer free, I find that I have more choices and at least for now, more time to reflect on my medical treatments.  This is a luxury that cancer survivors can really appreciate.  When one is first diagnosed, there is NO TIME really, to makewell thought out choices regarding medical care.  One is so scared, so shocked, so shell shocked in fact, that one often just numbly does what the oncologists recommend. At least that’s what I did.  I refer to this as ‘scorched earth’ strategy wherein you get the doctor’s recommendations and simply do the most aggressive, most evasive treatments possible in order to maximize your odds for survival.

At least that’s what I did.  Flooded with so much information, medical options and outcomes, I was overwhelmed as it was just simpler to do the toughest thing possible and deal with the medical fall out. At least that way I knew I had done everything medically possible to survive and to maximize my chances for long term survival.  And I know that if I found out I had the BRACA gene I’d go back to scorched earth too.  Having to make this choice I know is highly unlikely as unlike Jolie, my family has absolutely no history of breast cancer, not an aunt, a cousin, a sibling, a grandmother, no one.

It’s just that I’d keep it private because the decision is something I find so intimate and so intense which is my final point.  The decision is difficult enough, keeping it private is easy, talking about it, making it so public, I cannot fathom.

Clearly, I was never meant to be a celebrity.

Being a cancer survive is just about all the notoriety I can take.

Finding Hope

It can only get better, or so I keep telling my daughter.  She and her family are going through a tough time, having discovered that my account of a fierce dog fight last month was not only entirely accurate but disheartening from the standpoint of the keeping their pet family intact. Somebody is going to get seriously injured or killed and having seen a replica of what I described just last night, they are finally willing to admit I was right.  My daughter called with a heartfelt apology.  Being in PR means that I tell a compelling story. I know how to hold an audience’s attention, this is what I do for a living.  But when it comes to my family, it is strictly the facts, ma’am.  My daughter knows this now, right down to the finest detail on how difficult it was to break up the dog fight using conventional means.

Being the insane dog lovers we all are, this is a particularly heart wrenching time for us.  We all love our dogs, the adopted one as much as any of our other pets.  To have to give her back to the adoption agency and have her re-adopted out, is breaking our collective family hearts.  It’s not what we do but even the agency thinks we have no choice.  This dog clearly belongs with a single pet family with older children.  Still, we are all devastated.  My daughter, who never gives up on any animal EVER, has been particularly impacted by this. She takes every animal issue personally, just like her grandmother did.  This is one of those situations where I simply need to stop trying to fix the impossible.  Some things cannot be fixed, they just are what they are.

It at these times, I focus on the things that I CAN change or impact; my career, my home, my life.  I obsess over minor chores and errands because organization and order calm me like nothing else.  As a cancer survivor I know better than most how quickly my little world can implode around me. 

I take nothing for granted. And at times like these, it helps to know that however tentative my world is, for now, for this moment, I’m still cancer free and that is a hopeful thought indeed.

Super Moo

My daughter and her family like to call my dog Sophie, the Moo, because they feel she looks like a bit like a cow, a California Happy Cow, but a cow none the less. My boyfriend has sworn from the day he gifted her to me (a present for successfully fighting cancer) that she was there to protect me.

Until last night, I never suspected how much.

I have a predictable schedule, at least when I don’t travel. That means, at least according to my local police force, that I am a target.

Apparently not as much of a target as one predator may have been hoping.

Well after 9 p.m. last night my doorbell rang. It was somebody claimed to be a deliveryman for a national delivery service.  I happen to know this service does not deliver that late. I loudly informed the man, on the other side of a very locked front door, of this fact.

Then he heard my dog bark.  Sophie, who normally isn’t much of a barker had gone into full Staffie protection mode.  She was barking furiously and oddly, the fur along her back was sticking straight up.  She wasn’t kidding around.  Danger Will Robinson, Danger barked my dog.   The man on the other side of my door never left a package or even a delivery slip.  He ran for it.  Literally.

I called the cops.  They said that no legit delivery guy would behave that way.  I kept thinking it was all me, I was paranoid, I had overreacted, etc.  The cops said my only mistake was that I didn’t call 911; I had called the main police number, hence delaying their investigation.

This morning, I called the delivery service and come to find out they DID have a record of someone trying to make a delivery only….and how odd they found this.....it was fully more than an hour after he had clocked out.  And clear as day, per their records, there was no signature required for the package and why oh WHY didn’t he leave a delivery slip if not the delivery itself?  Curiousier and curiousier, they said amid apologies and promises to make things right.  The delivery company claimed to be so concerned that they were launching a formal investigation; phone calls flew back and forth.  In the interim, my boyfriend and daughter both decided, from different coasts, that I needed a handgun, preferably something that could blow a hole the size of a Boeing 747 in my front door.  I demurred, pointing out that Milpitas was not Duck Dynasty nor even Virginia.  A wise friend at work cleverly suggested bear spray which has a much further reach that pepper spray apparently.  My manager even lent me her pepper spray though I had I promised to get my own on the way home.  Obviously, everyone else felt the way that I did, something had seriously been amiss. 

In all this my little Staffie Sophia Eleanora, stood proud, having sensed danger and reacted with enough ferocity that whatever the deliveryman’s intentions, he took off.  The cops now call him a person of interest in several home invasion/sexual assault cases.

But I am not one of those assult cases and all thanks to not opening my front door to a stranger at that hour.  Cancer made me a survivor and intent on continuing to survive, I took the opportunity to reassure my daughter who had been forbidden from driving down late in the evening when I told her what had transpired. 

“Honey, cancer didn’t get me, so what makes you think that some random predator could take me down?”  

Even so, Sophie is getting the femur bone of a cow as a reward for her puppy bravery, the bemused butcher has already placed the order.

And I’m so picking up that pepper spray.

Clean Sweep

Fighting cancer has made me look forward to lots of things; my grandbabies birthday parties, seeing my long-term partner, a weekend devoted entirely to myself, getting peeved at my beloved hockey team for choking in the playoffs and yes, even spring cleaning.  I now actually look forward to and plan for, a thorough spring cleaning.  Out with the old in with the new.  This is likely because I now take mindful joy in the simple tasks these days though I am sure my dog, marooned on my bed while I gave my bed room a thorough vacuuming last night, would not agree.  Vacuums, as all dogs know, are evil.  Sophia Eleanora was not amused and even gave the offensive minor appliance an obligatory growl after I was done.  At least she missed the part when I was in the garage last night taking out the trash bins and sweeping out the garage.  That was around 10:30 in the evening.  I am sure my neighbors were puzzled to see me sweeping busily into the dark of night but no time like the present is my motto.  If not now, when? I have so little down time given my busy work and travel and babysitting schedule that spring cleaning gets done in the oddest mini chunks of time. While speaking on the phone the other day I cleaned an entire door, doors get grimy by the way, they need a serious wash down every so often.

Last Sunday, I managed to flip my mattress all by myself, a feat that most people cannot manage solo even if they have not had cancer.  I have good balance what can I say.  I then washed every coverlet, sheet, pillow and piece of bedding I had.  Ah spring.  Everything smells so fresh and nice even though Sophia promptly rolled around on the freshly made bed the second I turned my back.

I am not the only one with spring rituals it would seem.

My friends join me in this spring renewal celebration by planting gardens.  Mostly, well none save one of my close friends actually do housework I’m afraid but I enjoy doing my own cleaning these days.  Simple, mindless tasks give me balance in an otherwise cerebral-driven existence.  But my friends do garden, at least they now plant a seasonal patch of vegetables.  Then, come July and August, we all spend an enormous amount of time trying foist surplus crops off on each other.  I have a team who works for me so I always know I can strong arm them into taking extra produce.  There is an overflowing bag of lemons in their work area as we speak.  No pressure, no pressure at all.

There is something renewing and promising about spring cleaning, a fresh start, a ritual that you mentally expect to do year after year. After fighting cancer, you first hope to make it to your next birthday.  After a few years cancer free, you start hoping for something longer term.  One has to balance this hope with the reality of knowing that cancer can and does come back, that ‘cured’ is a relative term and is actually differently defined for different kinds of cancer.  A radiology oncologist told me that I was 'cured' just six months into my battle but that one of my radiology buddies who was diagnosed with a far more aggressive type of breast cancer, could not be considered ‘cured’ for a number of years.  Fifty shades of unfair. 

So while we who have walked through the fire of fighting cancer ponder the validity of words like ‘cured’ and ‘remission’ we also find ourselves building these little rituals into our daily life, like planting a garden that you fully expect to see grow to fruition in a few months, cleaning doors and windows and vacuuming under beds where dust bunnies lurk and multiply even when nobody else can see them or knows they are there.   

But as I know they were there and as I fully expect to be around for quite some time excuse me while I go and find the scouring powder, I have a showdown with a seriously dingy tub.

Hamunaptra

Here we go again. Not me, not this time, but my BFF’s other dear friend is fighting ovarian cancer and that puts us all back in Hamunaptra, City of the Dead.  That’s what I call the waiting period when pathology is trying to decide how bad the cancer is and how far it has spread.  I get this metaphor from the movie The Mummy where the main characters kept ending up back in the fabled ancient Egyptian city of Hamunaptra battling some seriously cursed mummy who was prone to sucking the life out of innocent people in order to regain his pre-death appearance.  The cast of characters certainly didn’t want to be there, the city was buried under sand mostly and seriously cursed with all sorts of evil things, but for the sake of the plot and of course the humor of it all, they kept ending up back in Hamunaptra.

But nobody is laughing now.  This woman is a nurse by trade and very medically savvy so she knows what she is up against. And of course I now can read between the lines. Surgeons never want to talk chemo, that’s the dominion of the oncologist so if you ask a surgeon about the possibility of chemo, he or she will likely put you off saying they are waiting for? You guessed it, pathology results.  And surgeons always say they think they got all the cancer, it’s a matter of pride for them I believe. I want to scream, how the HECK DO YOU KNOW? It could have spread to other organs; you certainly don’t know that by cutting into someone at the source of the cancer now do you? You have NO CLUE if you got it all.  So, any surgeon who tells you that they ‘got it all’ is full of crap in my opinion.  There is simply no way to tell without MRIs and cat scans and all sorts of other tests and time, you need time and even then, tthe tests can all up clean and six months later, they find it in your bones or liver or lungs.

I’m incensed and upset for my BFF because on one hand the surgeon told her the tumor of her friend was contained and had not spread and yet also remarked that they had removed cancerous lymph nodes. If they took out cancerous lymph nodes the cancer has spread thank you very much and is NOT contained by definition.

Really, sometimes I just want to throttle these people with their own stethoscopes. I get that this is not an exact science and that there is no magic bullet or cure but come on, be honest. Twenty years of medical school does not give anyone a free pass to divinity.  Hubris and pride; hubris and pride.  And maybe it is just that no surgeon wants to hand out bad news, they leave that thankless task to the oncologist. Yet another reason I am often quoted as saying that oncologists never have a good day.

When I get upset at the unfairness of something, I tend to simply get mad.  I do not process the abstract concept of unfair very well, if at all.  I suck at it apparently.  I do however know how to comfort another cancer patient while I am at a loss as to how to help my BFF through this. She already did one tour of duty with me which was more than any one BFF should ever have to go through. She’s been terrified enough already thank you very much. I never wanted to see the fear in her eyes ever again and now I know that I will.  There is also now that fear in my eyes for her friend whom I admire and like very much.

We who have fought cancer often say that we would not wish what we have endured upon our worst enemy, upon anyone in fact.  This is true even for the people who treated us so horribly when we were fighting for our very lives.  Nobody, even the bad among us, should go through what we cancer survivors have faced.  Cancer doesn’t discriminate; it takes out nice people, even the downright saintly as easily as it does the bad seeds of humanity.

And now, I find myself in the same position as so many who stood by me when I fought my own battle.

I am hoping to hell that it’s not as bad as we all fear and that this lovely person makes it into the club that nobody, given a choice, wants to join, the league of extraordinary, cancer survivors.

Tower Of Power

As a cancer survivor, I try to find my power in many things.  Other cancer survivors, my family, my work, even the rise and triumph of NYC over 911.

I had not been to ground zero, even though I do business on the east coast business at least once a year.  Last week was the first time I’d had the chance really.  The enormous print shop that prints my company’s annual report needed a few hours to perform maintenance on one of their giant printers so that left me with a long lunch.  I decided to risk the Holland tunnel and venture deep into Manhattan. Being a slave to the Food Network I headed straight for Katz, a world famous 125 year old deli that was packed to the rafters and absolutely charming.  I kept ordering food, a giant loaf of rye bread, bagels I would have to freeze at my boyfriend’s house, blintzes, knishes, latkes and best of all, matzo ball soup from heaven.  After one bite, I knew I was going back on a diet to lose the weight I was gaining with each and every taste of paradise.

Since I had a driver for a few hours I also asked him to take me to the Freedom Tower, ground zero essentially. 

I was unprepared.

It was cold and windy enough to chap my cheeks and water my eyes; a good thing too since I was crying nearly the entire time.  Luckily, those tough guy New York City contractors are secretly beyond kind and generous souls.  One even took my phone and stepped inside the construction zone and snapped a few photos for me.  I didn’t dare visit the local fire station, the one that lost nearly their entire crew.  I knew I would not make it through a single sentence without breaking down.  I talked myself into a good lie, that I was the girlfriend of a fire captain and I could not go there without Hampton fire tee-shirts.  It’s a fire guy thing, you trade shirts and I didn’t have any.  I told my boyfriend later that we would go together next year; possibly the only way I would not lose it entirely. 

I think it was the first time since cancer that I stepped entirely outside of myself like that.  There was nothing about me in that experience, it was all for and about the victims of 911.  And more than a decade later, the enormity of the loss of all those innocent souls lingers in the cold spring air, a poignant reminder of the fragility and uncertainty of life. 

And yet, as I looked up at the steel structure, sharply etched against the bitter powder blue sky, I felt my breath catch with realization; gone but not forgotten, not done yet but getting there, just like me.

The adorable construction worker (who actually knew that I was wearing designer Coach pumps of all things), smiled from under him hard hat.

“She’s getting there,” he remarked and smiled.  Through my tears I smiled back.

Me too.

Normal

It is weird to be normal. At least in the medical sense.  I have spent the past few years joined at the hip at heart to my oncology team so much so that when I carelessly put my hand in-between two scrapping dogs and got bit, it honestly never occurred to me to call any doctor but my oncologist.

Turns out, oncologists know a great deal about cancer but dog bites, not so much. At least this was the wisdom imparted by my seriously worried vet when I asked him how I should have broken up the fight. As he gently petted my dog (who was, for the record, not involved in the dog fight in any way whatsoever), he explained that dog and cat bites are quite nasty and as a cancer survivor I really needed to see a doctor who was NOT my oncologist.  Now.

I was suddenly afraid.  After fighting cancer for the past few years I no longer knew from regular doctors, I only knew the comfort and expertise, the safe haven of my oncology team.  Plus, the bite was on my left hand and I knew that to stitch it I would not be able to have any local  numbing agent.  The on-going perk of having had so many lymph nodes removed.

My family doctor was not available but his back-up took the call and called me in some antibiotics.  He made me promise, due to the lateness of the hour, that I would not pass go, not collect 200, that I would go directly to Acute Care.

Logically, turns out that Acute Care doctors know a whole lot about dog bites.  Duh.  And even more surprising, I was suddenly interesting to a doctor.  Not that my oncologist isn’t a caring wonderful soul but let’s face it, I am cancer free going on four years now.  My cancer was, compared to other types, quite curable and downright boring.  I get that.  But to this doctor me not having lymph nodes on one side made me a bit of a curiosity if not mildly interesting.  I would see the medical wheels turning, how do I treat this girl without the lymph nodes?  As luck would have it, an animal bite is one of those wounds that doctors do not like stitching up, it can actually make the infection much worse.  This bite was also six days old and mending well.   But I had been correct; if the wound had been from any other source, he would have had to stitch it without numbing it first.  A lovely thought.

So, they patched me up and then talked me into getting a tetanus shot which actually comes with diphtheria, pertussis and whopping cough vaccinations thrown in for good measure.  Say what you will about my health in general but I am now officially ready for the Peace Corps. I can safely teach sanitation in the Sudan.

Even if my hip is still sore from the shot.

When I saw the dog who accidently bit me again I was in a dark mood.  “Get away from me,” I growled.  “You made me get a shot.”

Being the clueless dog that Zena is, she merely panted and wagged her tail, the bite for her at least, a long forgotten memory.  Pet me, please.  For her at least life had returned to normal and since this was my first visit in four years to a doctor other than an oncologist, it seemed as though things were also returning to normal for me as well.

And it only took a dog bite to make things feel normal again.