Passages In Pink

Of Fromage and Power Bars

2012-02-25T16:01:00.000-08:00

I am starving. I get that way on business trips to far away time zones that mess with my blood sugar. This is typically any trip that takes me more than an hour outside of Pacific Standard Time. I managed to not eat much while in Orlando, Florida, mostly because while Disney knows how to animate and to market, they cannot cook their way out of a Rescue Ranger sequel. For the most part, the hotel I stayed at for a trade show had horrific food and that is meant kindly. Even if they had picked up the call to room service which they often did not even an hour or more prior to room service closing, it was not worth eating. I had one marginally decent meal and I had to shell out $52 to get into Epcot Center to get it. Then, onto Munich, where this slightly hypocritical vegetarian was not interested in most of the food. Cheese plates from the Hilton Hotel, sure, but little else. German food is clearly not my thing.

Once in Paris however, I made up for lost culinary time as well as excess calories. There is nothing like Paris to awaken one’s culinary senses as well as one’s taste buds. Paris you may recall, is actually where I got my sense of taste back after chemo. Trust me, after chemo you really will get your appetite and sense of taste back, it just takes some time. For me, in case some of you survivors/new readers were wondering, it took about four and a half months post chemo before everything started tasting ‘normal’ again. I bit into a plain, ordinary baguette while walking down the street, literally in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and viola! The taste of warm, freshly baked bread filled my mouth and I could taste not only the baguette but Paris itself. I stopped dead in my tracks, stupefied and excited. I wanted to scream to the world, “Hey everyone I can actually taste this!!” Instead, I hurried back to the hotel to feast on the gems I’d bought and called my BFF. I had not been that thrilled in a very long time and it gave me genuine hope that I was really starting to recover. May every cancer survivor experience a similar moment of gastronomic joy.

But back to this trip. Having arrived in Paris on a frigid Saturday afternoon, totally exhausted, I lay down in my room for a nap and when my stomach harkened, I bundled up and wandered down the street to buy what I could.

The totally cool thing about Paris is that on every street there are always a handful of little markets and a decent bakery or boulangerie. There you can get your daily baguette as well as tiny sweet filled tartlets and various delicious pastries. I remain thankful that they are no such institutions near my house or I would truly be as big as my house. But in Paris, after walking miles every day I never seem to gain weight and I really do indulge. My favorite food in the entire world being of course, any kind of French cheese. I can buy the absolute best at any local Parisian market and when in Paris, I do. I find a simple meal of bread, cheese and wine absolute perfection to my taste buds. I try and do it every chance I get, eschewing fancy French restaurants. Give me some Fromage and a baguette any day and I’m good. This past trip, I managed to do this almost all weekend long. It was heaven. I even found the energy to buy food on my way back from an exhausting day at the Louvre. Sitting on my hotel bed, a bathroom towel serving as a tablecloth and a glass of simple French wine to warm me from the bitter cold and assuage my aching thighs, it was heaven. I actually only ate out once this past trip while in Paris, a lunch that was Italian which was an odd choice since I was headed to Milan that very evening. But pasta is a good thing. A modest plate full can smooth out jumpy blood sugar long enough for me to get to my next port of call and sustain me through a night’s sleep without wanting to rip someone’s head off. For me, low blood sugar is that kind of hunger, the get out of my way before I beat you over the head, I see a cookie in that four year old’s grubby little hands, sort of hunger. I do not have this happen very often but it is the reason I suffer the pitiful existence of power bars, the so-called cardboard-y food fuel that is an affront to every decent chef the world over. They too, can keep me from chewing through my luggage tags and I will admit that is what I mostly subsisted on while in Orlando which surely has better food than what Mickey and Minnie had to offer. Someone tried to convince me that the food at the Coronado Springs Hotel was actually aimed at kids. My response was to point out that with the exception of the occasional bagel, I would not feed my kid or grandkid the garbage they claimed passed as food. I’d rent an apartment and slave over a seriously hot stove making three square a day before I’d feed my family the kind of food that hotel had to offer.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect Orlando to be Paris though you can find a rather silly replication of The City of Lights at Epcot Center. I do, however, expect marginally decent food and that was in very scarce supply. Sub-zero Munich and heavy German fare were looking better and better. Until of course my trip brought it home by taking me to Milan, Italy where suddenly, magically, my blood sugar smoothed out, I was not hungry and I fell in love with a raw artichoke salad that I am scheming to master upon my return home. Which brings me to my point, the famed epicure and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was oft quoted as saying, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.”

If this is even remotely true, I must be…wait for it….the head cheese.

Claudia The Baby’s Lion

2012-02-25T05:38:00.000-08:00

I am on a mission to photograph the world’s most amazing lions, mostly rendered in statue form because real lions have a tendency to either be camera shy or annoyingly, indiscriminately hungry. This is for Claudia The Baby’s nursery which I plan to adorn with thoughtfully framed photographs of lions. Claudia The Baby is a Leo and my daughter has always called her our little kitty because she growled at us when she first came into this world. I think she was just mad at having to leave her nice, warm womb but our little kitty stuck and the lion became, by default her mascot. Also, it gives her Nana an on-going project when she travels.

I do not mind. Thus far I have taken photos in China (three cities), Japan, Germany, Great Britain and of course, France. I have loads of photos of lions but I consider this one latest find, this one is Claudia’s very own lion. I found it near the Etruscans salon of the Louvre. The signage, always in French, said it was likely a funereal lion which is as far as I got because kitty was pure white, and nearly on scale with a real lion. The marble fairly shouted at me: Yo, where you been girl? Get over here and take my photo! Meow… We were best mates instantly. Normally, I am in awe of artistic masterpieces but with Claudia’s lion, I had to restrain myself from stroking his pure white marble lines. He was magnificent, far more than just a funereal big cat, he was inspiring. I knew Claudia would love him.

I called my daughter from the Louvre. “We need to take Claudia to Paris,” I announced in a tone that booked no push-back.

“When she’s older,” my responsible daughter said gently.

“Immediately would be better,” I replied. “I found her lion, he’s at the Louvre.”

“I see,” my daughter replied, clearly not seeing at all.

“This is important,” I persisted. “This lion is Baby Claudia’s muse, it’s her mascot, he is waiting here for her.”

“How old is he?” my daughter drawled. I replied that I was not sure but given that he was situated near the Etruscans salon, it was a good bet that he’d been around a thousand years, give or take.

“Mom, if Big Marble Kitty is that old then he can surely wait a few more years to meet Claudia,” she said, exasperated.

Is everyone in my life a buzz kill right now or what?

It is just that after cancer, I found myself in a bit of a hurry. Not because I believe the cancer is coming back or anything but because after fighting for my life I just cannot stand to wait for the great moments in my life any longer. And I used to be so good at delayed gratification but no longer. I am officially a dessert first kind of gal now and that means that I cannot wait to take Baby Claudia to Paris, take her to see all of the treasures the Louvre has to behold, light a candle for her great grandmother at Notre Dame Cathedral, lunch with her at the Eiffel Tower, the whole nine yards. I want to take her shopping for ridiculously fashionable baby clothing, see her wearing baby French berets with her typical toddler aplomb and teach her that breakfast is all about the croissant and hot chocolate. By the time we leave Paris, she will have the refined taste buds of a Parisian baby and the fashion sense to boot. All the French babies will approach her speaking Baby French and Claudia will be able to answer them back perfectly being the global baby sensation she is.

I am determined to build a lifetime of memories with Claudia and Paris seems like a good place to start. My daughter, of course, is far more practical.

“Mom, Claudia is just happy spending time with you feeding the ducks around the corner from your house,” she said.

Well, yes, I suppose we can do that too.

The H7 Factor

2012-02-18T07:02:00.000-08:00

I refer to the Italians in general as, “My People” although by DNA, I am far more loaded with Irish genetic markers than Italian. But I like Italian food way better. I know allabout my genetic swamp because my BFF and I had our DNA analyzed. For about $125, you can get this done via a mail order cheek swab and a mere six weeks later you get an email from the nice DNA folks with links to a bunch of migration maps and confusing charts and specs via your personal on-line account. They take credit cards.

When we did this, I had to resort to calling a sibling who actually teaches genetics. After reviewing the results, she was perplexed. “This,” she announced gravely, “cannot possibly be right.”

My sibling was learning a hard truth I already had embraced: DNA doesn’t lie but people often do. What my sibling was struggling with is that our mother and grandmother had always told us we were part French. This was something we had heard our entire lives. This was an out and out lie as in turns out, we were and are not remotely French. This information had originally come from my mentally unstable maternal grandmother whose name was, hint number one, Maurine. She had flaming auburn hair. Hint two. This all should have been something to question though we never did. DNA reveals that we were, in fact, mostly Irish with a smattering of British, Scottish and even a marker or two of Welsh, at least on our mother’s side. Oh and couple of sub-markers that were actually German. Chalk it all up to those persistently invading Saxons and all the warring (read, rape) the United Kingdom inflicted upon women hundreds of years ago.

For someone who makes her living teaching science and math, my sibling was surprisingly resistant to the hard, cold facts but I figured out the divergence in information (meaning the truth) quick enough. The grandmother in question, had back in her day, married into serious east coast money. When she did this, at the dawn of the last century, the Irish were considered labors and lower working class. The knowledge of her true heritage would have rendered her unsuitable for marriage into New York society. Unfair as it was, the Irish were considered the white trash of that time. But this relative was anything if not creative; she sold my grandfather a bill of goods about being French on her mother’s side and her father was certainly wealthy enough. My grandfather bought it and they married. The truth however, was that she was as French as the average Arctic penguin. She was entirely half Irish and on her father’s side, Cherokee Indian, at least we think so.

Thing is, if you are female, you can only have your mitochondrial DNA analyzed. Meaning your mom’s DNA, some of the markers via your X chromosome. Females don’t carry a Y chromosome obviously, so we could not analyze my dad’s heritage, at least until my father or brother decided it was something worthwhile doing and come to think on it, only my brother could actually carry the maternal great grandfather’s native American marker.

I am not holding my breath.

I actually found this whole turn of events hilarious but my mother was livid. She was a bit racist and more than a touch elitist to say the least and looked down on her nose at the Irish even though my father is half Irish and half Italian. We actually dithered with the notion of informing her that we had African American markers, just to see what kind of reaction we would get because she had lived in the Deep South as a kid and like I said, she was somewhat of a racist. The potential of that joke was short-lived because turned out we had some sort of marker called H7. At least I think that was what they called it. Chalk up poor memory to the meds I take to stave off a recurrence of breast cancer.

“That,” my sibling marveled, “cannot be right either.” She was speaking of the genetic marker.

This H7 or whatever they call it, very rare but found in those of European extraction, is a really one of those one of a kind genetic markers. Most genetic markers are hundreds of years old, mitochondrial markers being far more stable and mutating less often than male markers because women as we all know, are not nearly as fickle as men and thus neither is our DNA. The H7 has actually been around for about 20,000 years old and those who study genetics and human migration paths throughout history get awfully excited when they find someone who has it. I found this out when I received a thick information packet from the nice folks at National Geographic. They were trying to figure out how a marker that started out in the depths of Asia some 20,000 years ago, ended up in a tiny pocket of pallid Europeans in upstate Ireland, at least in my case.

Beats the heck out of me but I decided that H7 had made us totally one-billionth Asian and therefore, vaguely exotic when it came to ancestry. “We have totally cool DNA,” I announced to my still resistant sibling. “We are not just plain old Irish any longer, we are officially now genetically cool.” It is to her credit that she came around much faster about the H7 marker than she did about not being French.

The packet from the NG folks was but a shy, entirely private request, a hope that I, armed with this marker, could somehow personally help the scientific community pin down the H7 mystery. I was genuinely happy to help out with this serious project until I opened the packet and realized that they wanted information like what hamlets and towns my ancestors hailed from and where they moved to and when. I carefully wrote back and said while I was happy to help, my grandmother had been a pathological liar as well as a pretty successful social climber so I was pretty sure that anything she had told me was likely a big, fat lie.

I did not hear back from them but I still have a theory:

Some time back in the migration days of Asia, humans wandered toward the land bridge that would take many to North America. My ancestors, however, refused to ask for directions, took a right at Mongolia when they should have turned left and ended up in Ireland actually pretending that they intended this to be their final destination all along. You can grasp the implications of this immediately. It means that it is a near miracle that on this last trip to Paris I actually managed to get myself on and off three metro lines and to and from the hotel to the Louvre successfully without ending up in Helsinki which is pretty darn far from Paris.

My father actually thought my mother’s reaction highly humorous but then again, he knows all about President Thomas Jefferson and his liaison with a slave that resulted in five children, replete with the DNA that can be traced to a multitude of good American citizens ranging from blue-eyed pale skinned folks to dark skinned, dark eyed descendants. Only don’t tell the docents at Monticello this, they actually tried to convince me that the good president only had sired one child, a WHITE ONE, of course. I loudly proceeded to inform the lot of them that they were a bunch of racist old biddies and had to be dragged out of the historic site by my boyfriend before they could throw me out. I was livid.

“Think of it this way,” I told my over-reacting sibling. “It’s like Siobhan the lusty barmaid and Guido the drunken Roman foot soldier accidentally fell into each other, creating a genetic catastrophe that ended up being us.”

To this day my sense of direction is appalling though I read a map well enough. I just cannot ever pick the right direction. If someone tells me to walk due west, you can bet my feet will take me meandering south. This is how I ended up at Les Halles metro stop instead of the Louvre metro stop which is of course in the opposite direction. I therefore spent the greater part of the next 45 minutes trying to get to the other side of the station without jumping the tracks, something even the French frown upon.

This whole genetic thing bugs me a lot more since I’ve fought cancer. I wish my grandmother had been truthful. The only thing I know for sure is that my great grandmother died from consumption before she was 30, a genuine tragedy that scarred my already emotionally tenuous grandmother for life. But then again, a lot of people died too young back then from what is now better known as tuberculosis. To my knowledge, I am the only one in my family who has ever fought and won a battle with cancer. Mostly relatives in my family die from heart-related coronary conditions. My father’s mother, however, died at 86 from pancreatic cancer, a fate I would not wish upon my worst enemy. She was a nice lady and 100 percent Irish, something she was proud of. Being Irish is not anything to be lied about or kept hidden.

I spend a good deal of time doing business in Paris so I have nothing against the French. In fact, I wish I had their fashion sense embedded in my DNA. It’s something I really have to work at, at least when I am in France or Italy. In Silicon Valley, I am often considered tres chic but then again, Silicon Valley is the land of dress down grubby jean Fridays and God help us, Birkenstocks. Just so you know I’m not being held to a particularly high standard. My pink-bowed high heeled pumps have been known to cause a runway riot in my home town. Like I said, it doesn’t take much.

So, the on-going irony in all this chromosomal brew-ha-ha stew is that it really never mattered to me what I was, much less where my ancestors came from. I’d sure like to find out if any other female in my genetic pool ever had breast cancer but aside from the medical aspect of it all, I never much cared. Though it all does explain, very neatly, why Irish tourists persist in stopping me on the streets of Europe, to ask for directions.

Sculpting A Memory

2012-02-14T07:49:00.001-08:00

I called my boyfriend from some lofty corner of the Louvre and asked him to order me a bit of pure white marble. “A couple of tons ought to be enough to start with,” I said placidly while two English speaking women sat next to me, café mochas suspended in mid-air, mouths agape as they apparently tried to figure out if I was joking. I did not notice this until I told Bob where the marble should be placed in his backyard so I could catch the light just so. This was absolutely necessary as I was planning on immortalizing Shea, our beloved Staffordshire terrier, in marble.

But first, I would need sculpting lessons. “Maybe,” I mused aloud, “A local university has a decent art program back home.”

I had to find somebody to teach me the basic techniques of sculpting on account of all the master sculptures having up and died centuries ago. I find this very inconvenient but then again, there is always Google.

Bob being Bob did not even ask how he was supposed to locate, pay for and transport several tons of pure white marble (with one vein of pure black so I could capture Shea’s ‘pirate eye’ naturally). Ever the practical one in this partnership, Bob is more grounded than that.

“How in the world are you going to get her to sit still for this?” he asked calmly.

Talk about a buzz kill.

Still, I am not deterred. I am totally taking up sculpting because this is a way the great artists of their day committed their subjects to immortality. This is also why the Winged Victory of Samothrace sculpture is my first artistic muse, the one masterpiece I absolutely must see each and every time I visit the Louvre.

The old girl hasn’t changed from what I can tell, she’s huge and imposing and robust despite missing her head and all. I like to think that she looked a bit like me, only with longer more flowy hair and a firmer butt. For you history buffs, The Nike of Samothrace as she is also called, was discovered in 1863. She is estimated to have been created around 190 BC though it is totally rude to ask a lady her real age. She was created not only to honor the goddess, Nike, but to honor the victory of a sea battle. Artsy types will tell you that this work conveys not only a sense of action and triumph but by portraying artful flowing drapery and through its features, the Greeks considered her ideal beauty. Yet for me, this masterpiece is all about winning, triumph, overcoming the odds. No surprise that we cancer survivors are all about overcoming the odds. And immortalizing something important. We modern folks need more Winged Victories both metaphorically and in solid marble. Someone ought to commission a statue of Steven Jobs for instance. The iconic should never be forgotten.

Every so often, as I cruise the Louvre, I take a random photo (never using flash of course) of a face, usually a sculpture but occasionally I find a compelling image in a painting or some other medium. It’s always a face that haunts me, that makes me pause and there is always something in it that causes me to wonder how this person lived and yes, how they died. They must have been important in some fashion or another, as some genius chose them as a subject for immortality. And since I don’t see the Louvre parting with these treasures any time soon as something that should really be gracing my yard or mantle, I take photos of them all. Sometimes I find myself holding my breath because I am so awed by the genius and perfection I am privy to. Sometimes I even say goodbye. But the Winged Victory is the only masterpiece that I promise to return to. She makes me think I will be back ─ and that I will somehow find a way to get Shea to sit for her portrait in marble.

Even a dog deserves to be immortalized now and then.

Falling To Pieces

2012-02-13T07:15:00.000-08:00

It’s no joke that after 40, things literally start to fall apart. This is why archeologists get all whippy excited when they find the remains of a humanoid that they can fix at having died at an age past 40 because millions of years ago, that’s really, really old. For a Neanderthal, a Cro-Magnon, even a plain vanilla old Homo Erectus, over 40 was pretty much ancient, a genuine anomaly. Ergo it follows, students of physiology, that even though medical science has saved a whole lot of us, it has yet to find a way to speed up evolution and fix the inherent flaws in the human us. Knees? They howl as I grudge up the steep escalators of Charles De Gaulle airport. Feet throb even when I am not literally pounding the pavement and they protest violently when I take a fancy to any new, high-heeled shoes. Joints ache, ligaments truly hurt…

God, but I’m falling apart.

Nowhere do I feel this more than when on a grueling business trip. Putting aside the usual jet-lag related fatigue, the actual physical pain of traveling is tangible. My tail bone aches ─ in no small part due to an unstable hip joint that has been bothering me for years now. I am not of a mind to try and fix this hip ligament thingy, having had more than one doctor offer to, “get in there and take a look around and see what can be done’. No thanks. Sounds dodgy to me. After cancer and the disciplined medical protocols and methodology followed by my team of oncologists, my take is that doctors should actually have a plan of action before ‘getting in there’. So, it flares up upon occasion and I just deal with it.

The joy of decades of teaching fitness and yoga are revealed, folks. It’s called a repetitive motion injury. Or, in the vernacular, the old bod is simply getting older.

I really felt my age as I ran around the Louvre. Ran is actually a misnomer, I wandered, albeit quickly, all over the museum that houses some of the greatest artistic treasures in the world. I moved quickly, wanting to drink every conceivable treasure in like inhaling the perfect wine, too quickly and too much. But I didn’t care, I waved to the Mona Lisa, nodded to a couple of giant paintings from the Renaissance and worked my way through the Greek sculpture wing before heading to the Egyptian salons and this after spending some quality time with the Etruscans. Every meter, my body was screaming fatigue but I didn’t give up, the chance to spend a Sunday afternoon, at the feet of genius, was too much to waste. One afternoon, one lifetime would not be enough.

As I left the Louvre, my thighs aching, feet protesting so loudly that I was sure the locals could hear them through my Uggs, I glanced up at the dome made famous in The Da Vinci Code. How easy, I thought, would it be to just take the lift up. The sky, pallid and frozen overhead, loomed. It would be a miserable cold walk back to the metro, provided I could remember all the stops, landmarks and directions to get back.

What the heck, I walked up the stairs, probably upwards of fifty of them, into the freezing Paris day.

After all, far as we know, you only live once.

How He Sees It

2012-02-12T10:31:00.000-08:00

Not that I’m blaming the old ball and chain or anything but the boyfriend clearly does not ‘get it’. Death is such a constant, attentive companion for the fire and safety professional that they scare notice unless Death is actually not around like when he’s in the Sudan or something. So, my beloved clearly does not understand why I remain so upset about my daughter’s on-going medical scare. After all, at every call, be it fire or traffic, medial or property related, ever does Death lurk. Behind the tree some poor soul just wrapped around his car around, sitting idly on the porch as the house burns behind his shadowy figure, even smiling perched on the fender of my beloved’s first truck while the brave and chosen try and resuscitate a fragile senior citizen. Death is there at every turn and those who face him daily, come to think of him like an old song: familiar and annoying but always and forever there, stuck in your head.

This is Death to my boyfriend and he accepts Death as readily as he does life; they are but different verses of the same song. He was accepting when he called to tell me a beloved cousin had just died, far too young. We still do not know why though we both suspect an underlying heart condition. Rest in peace, Debbie, you are already missed. Bob just figures, my daughter is still around. Sure, sure, scared as we all were, she is likely to be fine and I should just stop, ‘wigging out’ as the boyfriend says.

I could always pull the: you don’t have a child of your own so you could not possibly understand’ card and I’d technically be right to do so but that would not bring together our mutually exclusive points of view.

So, I’ll deal with the specter of Death in my way and the boyfriend in his.

After all, we will still end up in the same place; Death is the winner who takes all at the poker table, no matter how long we manage to hold him off.

Death beats a royal flush each and every time. We who have fought cancer and those who battle him on a daily basis, know this all too well.

An All Too Familiar Dance

2012-02-11T14:10:00.000-08:00

I am sitting in the Munich airport in Germany, letting my cappuccino cool a bit while I try not to throw up from stress and lack of sleep. Last night should have been a nice evening followed by some deep end-of-jetlag sleep. Instead I lost a grandchild and nearly lost my daughter.

I can smell death even thousands of miles away.

Death and I are all too familiar with each other. We nod at each other in passing and upon occasion touch base like old colleagues who no longer have much in common but still recall closer times.

I remember Death like this.

My precious daughter found out she was pregnant which didn’t make any sense given other symptoms so off to the doctor she went. After hours of anxious tests the diagnosis came back horrifying; an ectopic pregnancy. This is a serious, life threatening condition. This news was followed by a shot to shrink/dissolve the dying or perhaps already dead fetus and the threat of invasive surgery to come if things did not drastically improve in just a day or two. Ironically, one of the drugs administered used to be used in chemotherapy treatment.

I lost a grandchild and I nearly lost my daughter and yet there I sit, thousands of miles away unable to do anything but continue this all-too familiar and eerily silent dance with death. Leave my child alone, I scream in my head but Death shakes its demonic head back at me, smiling beneath a shroud of horror and inevitability. Death does not discriminate nor is Death inclined to do me any favors, I having, after all, beat him a few times already.

Hey, you got to keep the kid, Death says mocking my pain over the loss of second, instantly loved and dearly wanted grandchild. Pain for the loss of second grandchild and pain from the heart stopping, stupefying fear of the near-loss of my child. Had I not just recently told her all those terrible cramps were ‘likely nothing’? What kind of idiot excuse for a mother was I? I should have insisted she go straight to the doctor then and there but I never connected the dots. She has a tough time getting pregnant so we never thought it was possible, not without the hormones she took to have Claudia The Baby.

Just like when I found a dent on the side of my chest that turned out to be breast cancer, I never made the connection.

Something, I think, Death was counting on.

Boy you sure don’t learn, do you, Death commented mildly. Death can afford to comment mildly because in the end, Death always wins. Even though I give Death the proverbial middle finger every chance I get, Death is patient, Death knows Death is going to win eventually.

Meanwhile, I am watching the scudding icy clouds frost the Munich skyline like celestial, angelic icing. It is an arctic-worthy fifteen below zero here and I’m off to leg two of a press tour ─ something that sounds totally glamorous and jet-setting but actually is nothing more than really hard work, long hours, split timing logistics and praying that my otherwise really nice executive doesn’t get pulled away to do something else by the European sales team because this project took a heck of a lot of work to put together. Forget that that next leg of this trip is actually in Paris, it’s still freezing cold in the City of Lights and my only solace is that the German airport security didn’t make me take my snow boots off, a seriously weird turn of events since you always have to take your shoes off while going through security in a U.S. airport.

While I sip my cappuccino, feet warm and heart icy cold, I am silently grateful that my executive and business traveling partner is spending the weekend with his cousin in Stuttgart while I go on to Paris for what was to be my own culture-fueled weekend. I don’t want him or anyone else to see me this way. Death has done, yet again, a fine job shredding my poise and humorous reserve. Humor, in fact, deserted me entirely around dinner time last night when my daughter called with the news that she was pregnant and that something was ‘wrong’. I proceeded to drink a little too much at dinner while a friend who held my hand, metaphorically speaking, and tried to reassure me that my child would be ok. It was a short evening and I was not good company.

Back in my room, I slept a fitful hour or two while I waited for text messages to update me. I called my BFF, nearly hysterical, though I was calm and soothing when I spoke to my daughter. It was going to be ok, I kept repeating over and over while not believing a word of what I was saying.

Please don’t die, I kept repeating in my head, tears resolutely unshed but my stomach twisting violently in bitter, sickening knots. Please, please, please, please, please do not die. When my daughter told me she was opting for the less invasive treatment and turning to surgery only as a last resort, I was absolutely livid.

Give Death your God Damn Fallopian tube!!! I kept screaming in my head while calmly saying aloud that it was ‘her choice’. At that moment in time, I felt it should be anything but her choice. Clearly, I should be the only one making decisions, I thought irrationally. I was the one who, after all, knew Death best. I kept speed dialing God who, as usual, was busy dealing with things like bloody riots in Syria and earthquakes in California. And sometimes even making images of the Virgin Mary in tortilla chips in Mexico or something.

Death conversely, always has plenty of time for me.

This morning, I crawled out of bed, violently sick to my stomach and on auto pilot. I packed, checked out and got myself to the airport like I had a hundred times before and would likely a hundred times again. I thanked my luck, once more, that I had the weekend to pull myself together and then I called my sleepy, mildly sedated daughter. The shot had not hurt she reported, brave as ever. And she had experienced no violent reaction to it as we had feared. The doctor would do more blood work on Monday to see if her hormone levels were reversing; apparently a reassuring sign that the medication had worked and everything was on track and that surgery would hopefully not be necessary. I kept my voice modulated and calm, telling her how sorry I was about the baby. She cried a little and was overwhelmingly sad. I could taste her tears. I did not say there would be another baby because while that was likely true, it was also a fact that there would not be another ‘this baby’. There could be a different one but not this one. I understood her lost and I was never more grateful for a non-English speaking taxi driver. At least our pain had some measure of privacy save for Death, of course. Death continues to tap on my shoulder to remind me he’s always around.

See you next time, Death says casually as Death saunters off to destroy someone else’s life.

Not, I think darkly, if I see you coming first.

Then I board a plane so I can get to the fabulous City of Lights, check into a genuinely French hotel where I can finally lie down and, like a child bereft of comfort, crawl up into a ball while Death wraps is icy cold arms around me and whispers in my ear.

Death will always haunt me, asleep or awake. In my nightmares or my waking days, Death is always with me.

Dog Gone It

2012-02-02T17:56:00.000-08:00

We cancer survivors are quick to say that not everyone gets the life they deserve. Life, as it turns out, is random, brutal and very often, just plain unfair. Some of the nicest people I know I met in the chemo infusion room. I also met some really pissed off, angry folks but given that they were most often battling a terminal illness, I sort of got the angry part.

So, we all can agree that not everyone gets the life they deserve. What I have found, however, is that people often do get the dog they deserve.

Case in point, my brother, an intellectual if there ever was one, grew up, got his PhD, raised a family, kept a marriage together and his reward for all this was a wife who collects neurotic dogs the way other women collect jewelry. Worse, after years of what can only be rated as ‘terrible dogs’ my brother somehow found himself saddled with the mother lode of rotten dogs, a German Short Haired Pointer.

This is a fate I would not wish upon my worst enemy, much less a sibling. My brother didn’t even go out and get this dog willingly, the dog found him somehow. Since then, Trixie the GSP has treated him and his little family to an unending host of canine dramas. She runs away, lives for days on end with well meaning neighbors who feed her people food, she is quite adept at attracting all sorts of unwanted puppy attention and getting into a world of trouble. I am somewhat surprised that the Dog Police have not banged on my brother’s door, staging a sort of a canine version of Cops. I can almost see the video cameras humming and spot lights blaring as my brother and his family run the sleep from their eyes and stare in bewilderment at the puppy search warrant the Dog Cops hand them. I almost hear my young nephew speed dialing the puppy lawyer to bail Trixie out of jail….again.

My mother had a thing for GSPs, the more obnoxious the dog the happier she was. She obviously did this to torture my father. I think divorce would have been kinder but everyone has their personal arsenal of martial military hardware and my mother’s weapon of choice was a growing herd of GSPs. The worst of the lot was named Bonzai.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love dogs, the best gift I ever got was from my boyfriend who found Sophia Eleanora for me to celebrate my one year anniversary being cancer free. She’s the joy of my life and I would not trade her, mange and all, for anything. On top of that, nothing gets me more worked up than cruelty to animals. I still think Michael Vicks should have gotten the death penalty for what he did to all those poor pit bulls.

That all being said, Bonzai was pure GSP evil. First of all, she hated us kids. She wanted to be an only puppy child more than anything and every one of my mother’s biological children she considered a genuine rival. She would literally growl under her breath when we came to visit and only marginally tolerated grandchildren in front of their doing grandmother. She plotted against us like she was starring in a remake of Dynasty and if anyone ever were to say the merest suggestion of an unkind word, she would go running down the hall to another wing of the my parent’s house and seconds later, my mother would come charging back down the hall, singling out the person who had upset her precious dog. We never knew how our mother always knew who had upset the dog but somehow, she knew. My mother claimed the dog simply told her though that in itself was never enough to commit the old lady to a sanitarium. We tried.

I have another sibling who willingly chose to have a GSP as a pet, and she wonders why we all think she’s a total nut job. Another sibling has rescued teeny, tiny neurotic Chihuahuas and we always thought her to be the ‘big dog’ sister. She never had kids of her own so maybe they are her substitute babies. That I can understand despite what they cost her boyfriend in medical fees. But to willingly choose a Bonzai dog? I cannot fathom it. When my father became a widower he cased having pets overnight. I think they reminded him too much of his half-century-long tour of duty with the old lady.

And if you think that doggy karma doesn’t follow you forever then think again. When my father’s heart flat lined during a routine stress test, he was paddled and literally, brought back to life. Amid jokes about not ‘even getting death right’ he seemed troubled. When he finally explained, it was all about having actually experienced the white light at the end of the tunnel. Not being a religious person, my father had long believed that once you die, that’s it, you are done, dust. Then he had that out-of-body-experience and guess who he confessed was at the end of the tunnel waiting for him?

That's right, Bonzai.

Good Enough

2012-02-01T17:34:00.000-08:00

Some empty nesters have problems with the whole kids spreading their wings thing.

Not me.

Much as I love my daughter, my BFF was never more right when she pointed out that only one woman should ever run a home. And never were there two women who needed, more than anything, to have control over their environment. My daughter and I thrive in our own space and now that we both have our own, we are both calmer and dare I say it, sane.

This is not to say that there are not little insider jokes (read, revenge). When we helped to unpack my daughter’s kitchen on Moving Day my daughter’s mother-in-law as careful to place all the plastic bowls, containers and lids in a very conveniently located cupboard. And by conveniently located I mean that Baby CJ had instant access. Apparently, she finds the plastics cupboard in every kitchen fascinating enough to proceed with her own very special brand of baby demolition. Maw, ha, ha.

And I thought I was the only one, you know, special. Anyway, my daughter was so grateful that we set up her kitchen for her that she has yet to notice that Baby Claudia’s favorite thing to do − tear apart an entire cupboard full of plastic containers − continues at her new house.

Don’t you just love tradition?

Still, I am careful to feign surprise when my daughter tells me of Claudia The Baby’s latest adventure into kitchen cupboard land. Ha. As if I didn’t know. But even at my house the mess is never enough to motivate me to move my plastics stash to higher ground. I haven’t the heart to be honest. Claudia The Baby loves plastics, colored lids are her absolute favorite. She loves to peer through them, giggling with glee at some unseen blue or green translucent treasure.

Who am I to mess with a baby’s creativity?

What I am finding, amidst the peace and quiet, clean counters and careful order, is a sense of good enough. I can finally stop trying to get to perfect because it’s mostly just me and the boyfriend when he’s in town and good enough is just that, good enough. Things stay clean after I clean them and items stay put after I move them. That has been enough to restore a sense of rational behavior and taken away the frantic need to pick up and tidy endlessly.

For the first time in my life, it can be all about me. It wasn’t even all about me when I got cancer, I was pretty busy trying to reassure everyone in my life that I wasn’t going to like, DIE, a full time job. I had back-to-back surgeries and brutal chemo and then 30 doses of radiation and this when it seemed that every single day someone I cared about would get that look of sheer panic on their face and I’d have to find a way to be strong and reassure them that nope, I wasn’t going anywhere. When it came to the people who really loved me, I could actually smell the fear, I could taste of it. When my soon-to-be-son-in-law and I broke to the news to my daughter (he happen to get home first so we strategized over the best way to tell her), she collapsed in sobs and terror. She could not believe that her healthy strong mom, the mom who ate vegetarian because she didn’t even like the taste of meat, the mom who not only worked out but taught fitness classes her entire adult life, the mom who led a clean and healthy lifestyle, her mom was sick. Real sick.

It was inconceivable and yet, there we were, in the fight of my life.

Like with addiction, cancer patients soon learn that it is not only the person fighting cancer who is sick, the whole family is sick. Sick with worry, sick with fear, just plain sick, sick, sick. And often, sick from trying so hard not to show how terrified they truly are. I even found out my BFF was sick from being so darn brave. About three quarters’ the way through my treatments, we were at a hockey game and the mascot decided to try and pull my hat off my head. I was wearing a wig of course. I never got the chance to fend him off, my mild mannered BFF leap to her feet and screamed in fury at the hapless person in the costume, she totally and completely lost it. I actually forgot all about my hat and wig and how stupid the mascot was because watching my BFF have a melt down was a sight to behold. When we got to her car later that evening she burst into tears, she had just had it, she was so mad, so scared and so…

Sick.

Turned out, we were all sick.

In the aftermath of chemo, when one is trying so hard to find equilibrium and normalcy again, there is really no one day when everyone is ‘all better’. There was a day that I got my taste buds back and even a day when I first discovered I was finally pain free, but there is no one day to mark when everyone is all better. Instead, you get good enough. Days when nobody brings up the ‘C’ word and days when you don’t think about the next round of tests and blood work and even days where people totally forget what you went through, you, the people you love, everyone your cancer made so darn sick.

And good enough days are just that, good enough. In fact, I’ll take as many good enoughs as I can get.

Letting Go

2012-01-24T17:34:00.000-08:00

It is official: I have my house back. My daughter and her family moved out, right on schedule, to their new home. I needed to take off for a business trip the very next day so I actually did not get to enjoy the solitude and potential tidiness until my return fully six days later. They even had to come back with a second rental moving truck, mid week, to get most of the stuff they left behind the first time. There was no rental truck big enough to take all their belongings in one trip so back they came. Despite repeated warnings on my part, my daughter was still openly astonished at how much was left.

Yes, I know.

First, just to get to my son-in-laws’s beloved bar-be-que in my backyard, they had to haul to the dump a couple of cubic yards of old, rotting wood from the deck renovation project. Just to clear a path. Once that was done, they cast a look around and to my daughter’s shock and honest dismay, 70 percent of everything in my house STILL belonged to them and STILL had to be transported.

Yes, I know.

I was not there to help; I was in Las Vegas, dealing with logistic nightmares of my own like everyone else who braves the biggest electronics show in the world. But I could well envision my daughter’s expression of horror, trying to come to grips with the fact of just how, so much of the actual ‘stuff’ in my house, was all hers.

This is because I am the family minimalist. I always have been, having been the only child of five forced to do hours upon hours of housework and childcare from such a young age. Thus, I learned very early on that the less stuff you had, the less you had to dust, wax, clean, polish, and generally tend to. I carried that over into my adult life until I had a child of my own who, through the luck of the murky depths of the family gene pool, happen to inherit my father’s clutter DNA. He only sees clutter that someone else needs to clean up, never anything he should have to pick up and to be fair, my daughter genuinely does not see the stacks and stacks of CRAP that I see being as all hers. She’s been that way since childhood and I long ago accepted it as part of her nature but when she and her growing family moved back in for a spell, waiting on a new house, the clutter overwhelmed me at times.

My BFF, in her quest to forge an even closer relationship with my one remaining cat (who already clearly loves her best), walked into my house while I was away and called me. “Do they even guess at how much of this stuff is actually theirs?”

I responded with a short huff, meant to pass as a laugh. “Not a chance, they are completely clueless.”

“Are you enjoying this as much as I think you are?”

“This is one of those joyous moments of motherhood,” I replied thoughtfully. “You know, like when the baby has a screaming tantrum and I get to hand her back over to my daughter? It’s sort of like that only without the toddler sob fest.”

“I would not be so sure about the sob fest, they are going to be crying plenty when they see how much they have left.”

“I will send them a check list,” I said, warming to the idea.

“You are seriously evil.”

Yes, I know.

So, I thoughtfully texted my daughter a non-judgmental, very basic check list of all the items she needed to make sure made it into the moving truck this time around for the haul back home. Initially, this gesture went over exceedingly well. In fact, she thanked me for being so thoughtful and detail orientated. Ah, but then she and her husband drove up in the moving truck and the visual reality hit home. She quickly realized just what, “garage items” and, “all of your bedroom furniture and boxes” really meant.

It meant a whole lot of stuff.

“This is a disaster,” my daughter wailed in her call from my house to me in Vegas. I mentally imagined her in the mist of chaos.

“Yes,” I agreed calmly. “It certainly is.”

Then I told her I loved her and hung up. I had to go to work, chaos not withstanding.

I am better with chaos than I used to be. I roll with the punches better than BC, Before Cancer. Very little, in short, surprises me in the least. And this when a terse or careless word from some high-strung executive I hardly ever interacted with was the sort of stuff that used to keep me up nights. No longer. I shrug and move on because life is short and I’m good at what I do for a living. I also realize because of my daughter, I’m pretty good at calmly and sympathetically calming people because my kid is, as I write this, knee deep in boxes still trying to figure out how her clutter got so out of hand. But she's no longer freaking out.

I let things go these days.

There was a time when I would have flipped out over my daughter’s mess in my house and worried endlessly as to how she was going to get everything moved. I would have interfered, I would have micro-managed and totally mucked it up. Cancer taught me to finally only fight the battles I could actually win. And my kids’ deeply embedded clutter DNA isn’t one of those battles I can ever win. I now let her rail on about how I am clearly overreacting, how there is ‘nearly nothing left to get’ and how overly sensitive to, ‘just a few boxes’ I truly am. I let her figure it out on her own. I don’t even expect – but still often get – an acknowledgement that I was actually right all along. I just let it go because it isn’t worth the, “I was right and you were wrong” angst that so many people seem to get riled up about.

So to that end, I say that cancer is a very good teacher. Cancer can teach one to distill down to the important only. To roll with the punches, to let the unnecessary and the extraneous go. It can teach you how to be happy because nothing beats beating cancer and nothing is worth getting upset over like cancer upsets.

Locks Of Loving

2012-01-18T13:27:00.000-08:00

Heroes come in many shapes and sizes and apparently, ages too. My son’s little girl, Emma, is 12. I guess most people refer to him as my step-son, former at that. But in the divorce, I kept the son and the honorary title of secondary mom. His biological mother was always generous enough to share him so I figured, I wasn’t giving up the easiest kid I ever had. Then he grew up and had a daughter of his own, Emma.

Twelve year old girls are supposed to be narcissistic and self absorbed. They are supposed to be consumed with boys and their looks and the latest style and when oh when is their mom going to relent and get them the latest cool phone? They are not supposed to spend literally, half of their life, growing out their hair only to donate most of it to Locks of Love. But that’s the kind of child my son raised.

If you figure that Locks of Love takes at a minimum, a ten inch donation, Emma has been growing out her hair for literally half of her young life (she ended up with below the shoulder length hair post donation). The generosity of spirit and sacrifice did not go unnoticed by those of us who keep FaceBook up and running, just so I know what is going on in my inner circle. As I read about her gift, I felt my breath catch in my throat, it was such a hugely adult thing to do for such a young girl. And so breathtakingly selfless and fearless that I felt tears well up in my eyes.

I know what it feels like to lose your crowning glory, your hair. When my oncologist told me, none too gently, that I would require chemo, he was savvy enough to also blurt out that the worst of it would be losing my hair. Like most cancer patients, reeling from the news that the cancer had spread, I only was able to take in the fact that I would be losing my hair, not fighting for my life. The fighting for my life came soon after of course but initially all I could think of was how was I going to cope with losing my hair? It was unfathomable. Even in my 50s, I had retained beautiful, finely textured hair, my crowning glory indeed. All my siblings ended up with female pattern baldness (or, in the case of my nearly bald brother, I suppose it is the male version) and as a result, very thin, scraggily locks. I was the sole survivor of good hair, a genetic luck of the draw courtesy of my father who, in his 80s, still has pretty darn good hair. Then I lost my hair. By round three of chemo, it was gone, at least most of it. I resorted to the wig and hat, uncomfortable as it was. I kept up the pretense of looking ‘normal’ which, considering how I felt most of the time, was a feat in itself.

Most women have a very complex relationship with their hair at the best of times. I personally cannot imagine cutting off ten whole inches. I remember the day my hair started to come back in and I have jealously guarded every single glowing lush inch, not allowing my hairdresser to cut it since. Straighten, colored, styled, yes, but not cut. And probably not cut for a very long time to come.

I admire Emma, look up to her and marvel at her gift. I just wish I had the words to explain to Emma just what it will mean to some child, fighting for her life and how her gift will help repair battered self-esteem. Remember, little girls from 8 months to 88, we have a thing about our hair and looks in general. Emma, however, seems to know at the tender age of 12 that true beauty comes from within because the gift she gave is far more beautiful than any new make-up or fashion trend could ever be. Stunning as her hair donation is (blond, thick, wavy − she is a hairdresser and wigmaker’s dream), what Emma did transcends society’s narrow and often painful concept of beauty.

What she did came from the heart and that in itself makes Emma more beautiful than all the pageant queens in the history of the world.

New Year, New You

2012-01-17T14:31:00.000-08:00

I am really big on New Year Resolutions. These days, I am mostly concerned about resolutions that revolve around such enthralling goals mainly summed up with the mantra of: “do not get cancer anymore’. That’s the goal for 2012 and beyond. As part of that I know that I have a couple of things I need to attend to, primarily losing some weight though my oncologist keeps reassuring me that it’s not an easy thing to do on the meds I take that significantly decrease the chances of the cancer returning. So, I’ve come up with a plan, eat less, exercise more, be crabbier but ultimately get thinner. Simple enough formula but it’s all in the execution and that part of my personal theme for 2012: execute. Execution is what I believe will help me achieve my goals.

I’ve read that it takes 20-something times to instill a new habit but I believe it’s actually far more than that because I’ve flossed my teeth 20-something times in a row and I still get the twice-annual lecture from my dentist because apparently 20-something times every six months isn’t the same as every single day. Flossing ─ a very good health practice ─ continues to elude me no matter how often I attempt to make it a regular habit. And I know that cardio, which is what I need to personally lose weight, is what also triggers incredibly painful bouts of lymphedema so I am going to get thinner but while enduring more pain. Story of my life.

Meanwhile, I don’t grouse when on business at really dreadful trade shows in places like Las Vegas. Think consumer and you will know which one I mean. It’s a spectacular logistical nightmare and one I don’t care to repeat if I can help it but meanwhile I endure the long walks (miles and miles every day which totally count toward my new exercise goals). I tolerate the even longer taxi lines without complaint. That’s because despite the unreal crowds and general total and complete lack of organization, the hotel room is a luxurious nightly retreat and the shopping stellar.

I lost my mind for about 20 minutes and bought a pair of the shoes you can see in the photo below. I know, I can’t even touch them, they will cut me the spikes are so sharp on them but I had to have them and yes, I can walk around in them just fine. I think they were tailor made for some future board meeting or a guest spot on Nadia G’s Bitchin’ Kitchen. She would appreciate these shoes. I remember when I looked at them, thinking, when am I going to be able to buy such amazing shoes? Cancer treatments messed with my balance for a very long time, forcing me to (uncharacteristically) wear flats. Serviceable but definitely not my style. I am more of a four-inch stiletto open toed scarlet red pump kind of girl. And I have the foot problems to prove it. But after cancer, I find that I occasionally have to do crazy (though within budget, despite their appearance the shoes were well under $100) things. As the great Sheldon Cooper (character on The Big Bang Theory) once said, what is life without a little whimsy. Though I am sure he didn’t mean shoes.

Which brings me to my real point, my most important resolution for 2012 is simply to add more whimsy into my life. Cancer took away my nativity, the ingrained belief that that life was mine for the taking, that I would always have time. Time for grandkids, time to make a dent in my mental bucket list, time to master a cheese souffle, time, time, time. Cancer made me grow up and realize that time is actually gifted to no one, life is a random crap shoot at best and that one can do everything right and still get hosed. So, I have changed my tune. I now believe that time seriously waits for no woman least of all a cancer survivor such as myself. I therefore grab every moment I can, savoring every opportunity. I take no chances and I buy the insane shoes because life – and an insane pair of shoes, are guaranteed to none of us.

Better Than Spackle

2011-12-22T10:53:00.000-08:00

I sometimes wonder what kinds of questions my oncologist gets from other cancer survivors. I wonder about this because when I called to ask if I could have a little Botox or other cosmetic facial ‘perk’ the receptionist didn’t flinch. “Oh gosh, you would not believe the really strange questions we get, this is nothing,” she said cheerfully.

My vanity query was apparently, nothing special. It made me smile though, thinking of my doctor, frowning perhaps, as some busy admin handed him my chart with a sticky note: Botox? Juvaderm? He could have well rolled his eyes and thought, here we go, another cancer survivor trying to undo all my good work. This is because while chemo can save your life, it can also, at least in my case, visibly age a cancer patient years in mere months. Thus, if we survive, we may get to a point that we want to undo or at least cosmetically speaking, spackle over some of that accelerated aging.

Even the people who love me most gently admitted I had aged a decade in a year due mostly to the chemo.

The magic (and risk) of chemo is that it shuts down everything that grows. This conveniently tends to kill off the deadly growing cancer cells. However, chemo does not discriminate. Everything in the human body that renews stops renewing; skin cells, hair (actually not an entirely bad thing since along with the huge hair loss I also didn’t have to shave for six long months; Mediterranean girls take note).

Everything that keeps you fresh and dewy and vital simply stops during chemo. It’s like one of those bad B Sci-fi flicks where the evil vampire gets tricked (during the epic life and death finale battle) into the light of day and then shrivels up ages hundreds of years in mere seconds and perishes. Sometimes, if the budget allows it, the special effects team even gets to crumble the vampire to dust or the undead one will exit this mortal coil in a ball of fire. Either way, fast aging is something I understand all too well. And I am at a point in my recovery where I’d like to undo some of the side effects of the chemo.

So, enter my BFF who went and got her impossibly smooth and unwrinkled (especially for a 60 year old) skin Botoxed and Juvaderm filled. Being the bestest friend EVER, she dropped by my house last night to model the cosmetic handy work. The impact was like she was showing off a pair of one-of-a-kind Jimmy Choo shoes that nobody else was ever going to be able to buy. Translation: Gosh, I love shoes.

“I simply must,” I announced. “Get this too.”

The only thing that gave me pause was when I suddenly remembered that to get all this, you actually have to have stuff injected into your face. Which takes a needle. Wince. I am frankly needle shy after all the poking and needles of my treatment protocol to say nothing of how much it hurt to do a biopsy that proved to my dermatologist that yes, the lesion on my leg was actually skin cancer. So I asked her, did it hurt?

Ever the practical one, my BFF gave me her signature golden smiles.

“Compared to what you have been through with cancer? Are you serious? This will be nothing!”

So, you have to hand it to cancer, it gave even the people who love me great perspective on what I’ve been through. And in the end, a little nudge to patch up some of the cosmetic mess cancer left in its wake.

Taking A Bite Out of The 21st Century

2011-12-20T10:15:00.000-08:00

I finally am in the ‘I’ of it all. “I” as in Apple as in IPhone. I finally got an IPhone. I have been meaning to get a new phone for some time now but even with the best of intentions, the legacy of my father’s incredible cheapness kept rearing its frugal head and so I waited until I was eligible for an upgrade. Then, I had no time. It’s a curious thing that cell phone stores are now like beauty spas of old. People hang out for hours and hours, and happily so. I want to get in and out in record time and not stand around fussing over a demo on a phone I am never going to buy. I tend toward expediency and efficiency in most all transactions so when three cell phone stores in a row told me that the phone I wanted was on back order and would ship in (vaguely) ‘three or four weeks’ I wasn’t interested. However, when I walked by the cell phone kiosk closest to my home and asked what the back order time was, the sales clerk held up an box and told me he had just taken receipt of a new crop of the very phone I wanted.

Sold.

I quickly became a devote of everything Apple but, as my father’s cheapness again poked at my virtual wallet, I stingily only downloaded four apps; words with friends (we writers love this sort of thing), hockey radio, a daily calorie counter and of course Angry Birds.

I instantaneously developed a love-hate relationship with Angry Birds. That’s because I whipped through 20 levels with my eyes closed and then got stuck, stuck, stuck.

Stupid Angry Birds.

I never play on line games, not video, not on a phone, not anywhere but the sheer futility of Angry Birds, launching themselves, willy nilly, at smug green pigs that (virtually) stole their eggs really has some serious appeal. I totally get the whole Angry thing, cancer having brought all my simmering resentments and rage to the surface where they rightly belong.

This is why, stuck as I was for nearly four long days at level 21, Angry Birds remains oddly though incredibly therapeutic. Cancer taught me in the most brutal way possible that there are so many things outside of my control, even my health which I took such pristine care of for so many years. But I can still express frustration and rage even, launching Angry Birds at egg-stealing pigs. The results, which are rather temporary, can also be surprisingly soothing. Take that you miserable egg-sucking pigs, take that!!! Since my doctors all think I should find new ways to de-stress, I’ve decided to add Angry Birds to my regime of yoga, deep breathing, aromatherapy and meditation.

My initial take is that AB will do more for my stress level than all the other techniques combined.

If only I can get past Level 23…

Running Away From Home

2011-12-15T15:29:00.000-08:00

I whole heartedly endorse the notion of fully functioning adults running away from home. Children and teens, no, but adults, absolutely. This strategy represents an excellent down time/chill-lax option when your adult kids are living at home. It is even better when your son-in-law is tearing up your back deck.

My son-in-law has generously offered to replace my entire back deck; all I had to do was buy enough wood to raise a barn in Amish country or wipe out an entire mountain side in the Pacific Northwest which I happily did. Ever the optimist, he figured he would have the deck completed (don’t laugh, it’s rude) in one single day. And this was even before he figured out that the frame below the rotting wood was in pristine condition and would not require replacing.

This was also before he realized that the small pick-up truck my kids had would not begin to bear the weight or accommodate volume of wood we’d bought. He therefore he had to track down his uncle’s massive pick-up truck and after that logistics fiasco, oh let the DYI games begin. He didn’t even get started ripping up the old deck until after supper. Around 10, my daughter says she gently told him that firing up the band saw at that late hour might not endear us to the neighbors. Me, on the other hand, I was freshly showered and cozy in a local (clean) hotel, glass of wine in hand, making goo-goo eyes at the visiting boyfriend.

It was lovely.

For someone who travels a great deal on business, hotels generally represent a means to a business end. I check in, shower, order room service and get myself over jet lag, that’s what hotels are for. I don’t generally think of hotels as escape mechanisms or a way to relax but if you can afford it, by all means, hotels can make you sane again.

My daughter and her family are moving out just 24 days. They are actually doing the walk through for their newly purchased home today and will get the keys in just a week. After they paint (and you can now see why the deck had to be done prior to my son-in-law diving into the spackle and sheet rock world of DYI), they will move and I will get my home back. Just 24 short days from now and we all get some badly needed SPACE but tempers are increasingly thin and that’s because it is more than a little crowded with three adults, one baby, three seriously deluded freeloading cats and two dogs − all crammed into a small townhome. There is a turtle in there too but Gracie tends to shy away from conflict.To say we have been residing in close quarters the past six months would be an understatement. We’ve all tried to get along but sometimes we are just crowded out of our preferences for how we like to live day-to-day. That would mean me because Claudia the Baby takes precedence, always. Even last night as I was hurriedly headed out the door to pick up the boyfriend, suitcase in hand, the baby had her first ever major emotional melt-down. Check that, it was a virtual baby sob fest. I dropped my suitcase and ended up rocking a sobbing baby, hoping the boyfriend’s bag would be the last out of baggage claim. Claudia simply had a bad moment there, the first I am sure of many. And her sobbing, tiny self took priority over everything else. She had used up her baffled mom and dad by the time I was ready to leave so I offered to give it a try. Twenty minutes later, a red-eyed and still sniffling Claudia was in the bathtub, mollified and relatively speaking, calm. Well, at least calmer. I then ran away from home, secure in the knowledge that the kids had everything well in hand. And even if they didn’t, I knew they would be completely on their own in just 24 days so I had to let them fly solo at some point. So, I ran away from home.

There are currently ten living creatures residing in my small home. In just 24 days, seven of those creatures are moving. The cats haven’t been told yet but two of three of them are relocating, along with a turtle who causes me no grief. They all belong to my daughter, along with the world’s most obnoxious dog, Max. They are all leaving with me, one dog and a singular cat that has repeatedly made it know that she prefers to be an only kitten, behind. I can already see myself on my new back deck, relaxing while MY dog, the residential non-obnoxious canine, suns herself in absolute puppy calm. I am confident that this will happen because my daughter, sensing a long-term disastor on the immediate horizon of her life, called in some serious, heavy weight 20-something male reserves in the form of family friends, both whom have done this sort of work before. My kid is nothing if not pragmatic.

Meanwhile and until the deck is completed, I just may have to make a serious habit out of running away from home. Not only can my kids leave the dirty dishes in the sink and I won’t stage those a silent hissy fits over SOMEBODY putting my expensive cookware in the dishwasher (a total no-no), but everyone gets more breathing and living space. This can only be good for my continued recovery.

Oh, yes, that’s totally what I am going with.

The Truth Of It All

2011-12-12T17:04:00.000-08:00

I make it a habit to never get involved with local politics which I like to think is because I don’t have the time for petty agendas and small minds. I also fancy myself as someone who should be spending what little mental mind share I have leftover at the end of the day pondering a Higher Cause. But that’s only an excuse. A great deal of this localized avoidance is the direct result from having been slightly acquainted with, eons ago, an extremely minor local politician who took to leaving her poor young children at my house for days on end without ever calling to tell me when she was going to pick them up. She defined self absorbed behavior and could be downright creepy. My daughter tells me that we ran into her years later (I am proud to say that I honestly didn’t remember her) and the first thing out of her mouth was to ask me, ever so anxiously, if I had a boyfriend, as if no woman of value could exist without one. Imagine how I reacted internally to what I perceived as a perfect stranger, asking me such intimate questions. And thank goodness this was BC, Before Cancer, because had this happened after the Big C, I cannot vouch for what would have come out of my mouth.

Especially since the CP, Crazy Person, could not fathom that I didn’t remember her, nor than I’d gone on with my life to the point that I no longer had a clue who she was. That kind of God-given deluded self absorption can be impressive to behold as it is usually reserved for deposed royalty and third world dictators.

Since we apparently still live in the same little hamlet, upon occasion I run into this whack-a-doodle. My daughter says I’ve become incredibly adept at avoidance, hastily departing from random public locations all in the name of not having to deal with Crazy Person. I do this still because I am frankly uncertain of her mental stability if she accidentally figures out that I don’t share her belief that she is center of the universe. And again, I have no clue what will come out of my mouth only that it won’t be pretty.

These days I simply don’t trust myself not to blurt out The Truth. My ‘inside my head voice’ seems to be seeping out of my mouth in the form of words best left unsaid all the time now. I used to call it ‘Chemo Mouth’ wherein the brutal truth would just pop out but I know I can no longer use that as an excuse.

But I still try and blame the cancer. I figure after the battles I’ve fought that life is uncertain, brutal and often unfairly cruel on a good day so why waste my valuable time suffering fools? Only The Truth will serve and I find that anyone who crosses my path that I have no use for, I continue to run the very real risk of letting them know it. In fact, the last time I ran into Crazy Person, I spent the entire uncomfortable and mercifully short time in line at the dollar store on a business call with China, a call that could have surely waited until I got back to my car but it sure seemed a deal better than listening to her talk endlessly about her so-unimportant self and to ask, ever so anxiously, if I have a boyfriend because, as we all know, a woman just can’t be recognized as a viable human being if she isn’t openly claimed by a man via being in a relationship.

Really? No, not in my book even though yes, the old ball and chain and I have been together a lot longer than most marriages we know of. That being said, I maintain that I was a viable human being before I got into this – or any other – relationship. And really, what kind of rational person whom you haven’t seen in eons presumes to ask a now virtual stranger such personal questions? The solution is simply that it is best to avoid such whack jobs.

Thus I keep my mouth shut and occasionally run the 50 yard dash out of a local retail establishments, all in the name of keeping my inside my head voice firmly inside because believe me, after facing down death and fighting cancer, it’s all I can do not to blurt out The Truth every chance I get.

Fight Club

2011-12-09T11:19:00.000-08:00

I have calmed down since my last blog entry. At least calm enough to feel genuinely sorry for anyone so in denial about the necessity of cancer treatments. I get how scary it is to think of losing your hair – my oncologist actually warned me that it was going to be the toughest part of chemo and he was right. And these days, it is actually the first thing I tell any breast cancer patient, fresh from the terrifying news that they are going to need chemo. It’s always the first thing they ask, what weighs most heavily on their minds. In fact, I usually jump the gun and just come right out and tell them all:

“Five weeks, five weeks to the day after your last chemo treatment your hair will start growing back.”

I realize this exact timeline is probably slightly inaccurate as the experts say that hair starts to grow back anywhere from four to eight weeks after the cessation of chemo but I picked five because I can also hold up my hand to a frightened woman and even if she is not registering the meaning of most of my words, the number five always sticks. And I am never happier when I get the inevitable email with the exciting news that yes! Hair is growing back! It’s the one milestone that actually resonates with every breast cancer patient, fresh from the horrors of chemo. And despite the fact that most will be in starting radiation and still feeling pretty dreadful, the moment they realize their hair is growing back is the moment they realize that they are going to make it, that life continues. There is hope in every fuzzy little strand. And this rings true even when the regrowth is typically goofy. Mine was initially bizarre; coal black with a couple of splotches of pure white, a baby panda’s fur run amuck. A quick trip to my intrepid hairdresser Gina fixed that right up.

In a few short months it will have been two years since my hair started its triumphant comeback tour. Already it’s nearly shoulder length though this is something I don’t promise other cancer survivors. Human hair grows, on average, a quarter of an inch a month so that’s just three scant inches a year. On the other hand, mine grows at more than double that rate so I’m careful to set the proper expectations with survivors on that front. And what grows back is always a crap shoot, the color, texture, it’s all up for DNA grabs. I started out with my father’s coal black curly locks but now, nearly two years into regrowth, I’ve managed to get back my usual reddish brown hue, minus most of the white so a bit of a reset that some of us get after chemo. Oddly enough, we don’t go ‘gray’ in my family, we turn white as snow, at least those of us without the male pattern bald gene. My mother’s hair, in her twilight years, was such a lush shade of silvery white, she often was asked who her hairdresser was and what color that hairdresser was using on her. My mother’s hair grew about an inch a year so she rarely needed to go to a hair salon for more than a manicure and never for color, the icy perfect white was all mom. I like to think of it as going back to our baby roots, my dad and I were born silvery tow-heads. I was extremely blond for my formative years and fancy the idea of coming full circle on the hair front. It just has a nice feel to it.

So the whole point is, hair grows back. It’s not something worth risking your very life over as one of my oncologists, now retired, once told me. He had just come from another appointment, a patient with advanced bladder cancer who was refusing chemo. The patient was not going to lose their hair and to me the shocking part was that it was a male patient. All I could think was, men’s hair looks perfectly normal after just a few months regrowth. But this guy was willing to die to keep his hair and according to my oncologist, he was certainly going to die, without chemo he was definitely terminal. Instead of being sad, the whole thing just made me angry. I am sure this guy had a family, friends, loved ones yet vanity kept him from fighting for them and his life. The thing is, cancer is a fight club nobody wants to join but you have to, you simply have no choice unless you want to end up like that poor deluded D-list celebrity who is risking so much more than her hair.

Scorched Earth

2011-12-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

I am beyond fed up to here with Hollywood bimbos and their erroneous spreading of frankly dangerous, false medical information. It’s bad enough that the American public actually has, from time to time, elected these under educated and not terribly bright people to public office but when they start spouting really dangerous medical stats – stats that are completely and dangerously false – that’s where I draw the line.

Another Hollywood type has dramatically announced that she has breast cancer which I’m sorry about, truly. Should not happen to anyone much less a woman in her late 30s trying to get pregnant but there you go, life is inherently unfair. Fast forward to after her first round of surgery and now she’s making the media rounds claiming (and hold me back because this just makes me want to scream) that even though her cancer has clearly spread (no clean margins generally means it’s spread folks) she is claiming that if she has a double mastectomy the chances of the cancer returning are…(wait for it) ‘less than one percent’.

Just the cursory, preliminary research I did puts this woman’s odds for a relapse much higher, 22-25 percent. So, it begs the question, is this bimbo really that deep in denial or is her doctor really that incompetent? I know of NO ONE who didn’t get clean margins who didn’t do chemo. Thus, a double mastectomy would only be the beginning folks. She needs chemo and radiation (likely under the arm). Did I mention that she is also forgoing the all-important five year stretch of meds? Really? Clearly, we are not talking early Stage IA generic breast cancer here, we are talking vanity and denial at the ferocity of her cancer having spread AND simply at having a much more aggressive form of cancer. If she’s so afraid of chemo and the meds (both which age you horrendously, I’ll admit) then she had better throw in the towel now. She needs to bank her eggs, get a surrogate like all the rat-thin, terrified of gaining an ounce Hollywood bims and face up to the brutality chemo. I know of no one with her cancer profile who actually didn’t do at least EIGHT rounds of chemo, mastectomy or not. Even with the meds, her odds are much lower than some of us got, certainly not the 92 to 95 percent I got.

So, that being said, she can do what she wants, it’s her life to play Body Roulette with after all. I am not disputing that. What infuriates me is the gloss and party shine they are trying to put on this in order to save her brand and make no mistake, celebrities are simply brands with big therapist bills and loads of plastic surgery. I completely resent the fact that she’s out there, making all the boo-hoo, media rounds, claiming her odds of getting cancer again are less than one percent. Five seconds into my cancer diagnosis I knew better than that. Heck, I was thrilled to get the 92-95 percent odds I got but then again, I did everything possible, chemo a brutally short week after my third surgery; chemo even when I went into anaphylactic shock not once but twice. Still reeling and nauseating full time from my final round of chemo, I started radiation a scant week later. You could say that I earned my odds. I did the chemo, had radiation and still take my meds faithfully every single day. I know all this aged me and I hope to feel up to the rigors of having some self-esteem enhancing (minor) nip/tucks soon but meanwhile, I’ll take being alive and cancer free over pretending that I’ve got incredible odds without serious, evasive medical treatment. Clearly, the facts say otherwise. New research also suggests that even Stage I breast cancer patients may benefit, in terms of long term survival, from doing chemo, so really people? Seriously? Do the absolute minimum and then compound that very questionable decision by pretending that you have odds of less than one percent for relapsing.

Clearly, some of us take exception to celebrity vacationing on the island of denial. I know I sure do. It is an affront to every single brave soul I know who bravely faced down the dragon that is chemo. All the beautiful women who lost their looks from the ravages of chemo when they were not worried about losing hair or not being able to maintain a frankly fake tan the way this D-list celebrity seems to be. These heroines were determined to survive and did not go around telling everyone a double mastectomy gave them 99 percent odds.

One time, when waiting for a radiation appointment, some woman told me she was doing radiation for Stage IIB breast cancer. I marveled at her long lush hair and she smiled saying she didn’t do chemo because it, ‘would not improve her odds’. The radiation nurse had to drag me away, nearly kicking and screaming. “Don’t you EVER tell any breast cancer patient that chemo doesn’t improve their odds!” I shrieked at her. I was beyond livid, especially when she got defensive and said she wasn't about to lose her hair to chemo, the REAL REASON she didn't peruse the most aggressive form of treatment: vanity. The poor nurse patted my (good) arm and commented that all the treatments I had been through sure can make one testy. Uh, ok, let’s go with that. As I left that day I marched by Miss Denial and looked her in the eye and commented that her odds were now around 70 percent now, not 92. “Enjoy your long hair,” I snapped. “I hope it was worth it.”

I figured Miss Hair was an anomaly but now I’m not so sure. Are there really that many women out there fresh from a scary diagnosis that persist in such life threatening denial all in the name of vanity? Heed some advice from someone who has made it (unless you count skin cancer) two years, two months, seven days and change cancer free: Consider the scorched earth approach to medical treatment, people. Scorched earth. You may not be pretty when it's all over but you will still be alive which is probably more than I can say for celebrity bimbos in denial.

One Of Those Days

2011-12-01T16:54:00.000-08:00

I know it is going to be one of those trips when I show up at the airport in Newport News, VA and all six kiosks for checking in with United are crammed with people who have clearly never used said kiosks. God help me but I am not the nicest person when I see things like this. I just know it is going to be one of those trips whrein I end up muttering under my breath about the world needing a weekly, “Family Fly Day” which of course, would never be schuled on a day I happen to be flying.

Still this trip was more entertaining than usual, at least for the TSA folks who (gently) patted me down and found me to be wrapped underneath my clothing like an 11^th century Chinese concubine. Or a terrorist strapped with a bomb. Judging from their initial reaction when I tried to tell them, IN ADVANCE, that I was wearing some wrapping to thwart lymphedema, they were not nearly as entertained as I was. They totally freaked out. The poor girl who stammered that she needed me to step inside a nearby room for privacy clearly was not very relaxed though I calmly kept repeating myself until I was able to flash her an inch of extra skin and wrapping. Only then did she visibly relax.

What? Some middle aged American woman was going to blow up a couple of TSA agents in VA? Did not seem very practical or likely even if I knew how terrorists went about their business which I don’t.

After she resumed breathing, the TSA agent actually asked me why I was wrapped up and she wanted to know what lymphedema was. I told her, as concisely as possible, because I had to get moving and to my gate. “Does it hurt?” she asked, young and native, charmingly innocent now that she was convinced I had nothing more lethal strapped to my chest than an expensive bra from Victoria’s Secret. I told her it often did hurt and then I shrugged. What are you gonna do, is my latest mantra/point of view. Very east coast, or at least wry. I am going for wry with a side dish of ironic these days. It seems to get me through publically uncomfortable situations wherein I believe people are basically well meaning and thoughtful. All those horror stories about TSA agents demanding people all but strip in public or getting patted down in humiliating ways are honestly rare. The people who patted me down were just doing their jobs and the girl actually kept asking if she was being gentle enough. Yes, yes she was.

So while I am not giving up on my quest for a National Family Traveling Day wherein people with screaming children and old people in wheelchairs are given nearly exclusive rights to travel for 18 hours a week, I am resigned to more pat downs and searches. And then there are amazing moments when I run into people like Jason, a young man who I encountered while boarding a plane. He was wearing a pink band and we both instinctively lifted a wrist and our eyes met with instant understanding. “You a survivor?” he asked. Two plus years I told him and then the inevitable, “Are you wearing this for your mom?”

He nodded and I knew instantly. “She died four years ago on Nov. 28^th,” he said, the pain in his voice as fresh as the day he lost her, I was certain. I then did something I never do ─ I reached over and touched a perfect stranger; patted his massive bicep, doing what his mother could no longer do. “I’m so sorry,” I stammered. “For your loss and for losing your mother.” He nodded and I nodded back. This hugely muscled man, as big as a defensive tackle and I wanted to wrap him in my little skinny arms and hug him because his mother no longer could. I could not protect him from the loss of his mother any more than I could from the harsh reality that cancer claims more than just the person inflicted, cancer takes so much more than that from the wives, husbands, daughters, sons, ─ everyone who loves the patient, they are victims too, cancer robbed them not only of a loved one but of ever feeling safe again.

I wonder then, about my own family. Will Claudia The Baby grow up feeling safe? Will my battles with cancer, while she was in vitro and then again so young, will the nightmares that were fighting cancer stay muted, fading deep in the past or will she simply grow up with the havoc and uncertainly that cancer causes being part of the fabric of her daily life? I hope the fear and uncertainty fades and she only grows up with me vibrant and full of life and cancer free. I don’t ever want to see the look of pain and regret that I saw in that young man’s eyes in little Claudia’s beautiful face. I want her to be free of the damage that cancer has done to my psyche and what it has likely done to my daughter and loved ones. If I get anything moving forward out of surviving cancer, I want it to be that someone who loves me is free of the specter that was my cancer.

All Quiet On The Southern Front

2011-11-26T16:11:00.000-08:00

It’s really quiet in Poquoson, Virginia. So quiet in fact, that I can actually hear our beloved Staffordshire bull terrier Shea Tallulah gently snoring during puppy nap time all the way down the hall, with the television on no less. That’s pretty darn quiet. The thing about so much quiet is that when I am alone with my thoughts for prolonged periods of time, it can get pretty darn crowded in my head. This is why I end up doing things like organizing the pantry in my beau’s kitchen and alphabetizing all the canned goods. Not because he expects anything like that (he often comes in the door and proceeds with caution, wondering what I’ve gone and organized this time) but because I just seem to need order in my life. Since his place is orderly and tidy to begin with, it has become a bit of a challenge to find things that require my organizing expertise. The pantry was one of the last frontiers of disarray. No longer though I was a tad bit miffed when my beau asked if the canned goods had also been sorted by their ‘use by’ date as well as alphabetically.

Canned goods have a use by date?

I have time to ponder such philosophical questions while in Poquoson. In-between catching up on work emails and making runs to the Williamsburg outlet malls, I’ve got some time to spare, a luxury to be sure.

I have always been in a hurry. Even before cancer, I have always been pushed, rushed, bullied and stretched beyond the confines of time. As a child, I had to run an entire household for an often mentally unstable and frankly lazy (when rational) mother. I had to rush my way through college because I was paying for it and another semester wasn’t in the budget, I had to support myself by working at three jobs. Because of this, I so envy kids these days, five whole years to get a degree? Seriously? I never had that option, there was no finding myself or exploring options. As if. I had to take classes and get skills that would land me a job, period. I still wonder what my life would have been like had I even one choice or chance to take an elective that didn’t go directly to fulfilling my major. Home economics? Could have been Martha Stewart before she crafted an empire out of muffin recipes and decoupage. Anthropology? Could be digging on the Giza plane where all the mummies are still waiting to be found. Law? Could be giving local judges a writ of time. Instead, I allowed my fear and insecurities, along with a frankly dysfunctional upbringing, to rule my choices and rushed, with a 3.8 grade point average no less, my way through what should have been the best time in my life.

But it wasn’t. What is coming will be the best time in my life. My daughter and her family have found a house. They are frantically going through the loan process and will soon, first week of January, be on their own. I’ll have my house back and I’ll be sad to see them go, mostly Baby Claudia who is a 28-pound miniature human wrecking ball charmingly clad in baby designer duds. What that baby can do to a spotless room is impressive, trust me. In spite of this, I am going to miss them. I am going to miss how Baby CJ gave half of her breakfast to two intrepid dogs and I’m going to miss how she would watch Jeopardy with me, clapping her tiny hands each time she heard the audience clap on television. I’m going to miss watching my daughter mess up my entire kitchen with her impressive baking projects and how my dog, Sophie, likes to lay right on top of my son-in-law like he’s a giant pillow.

One can hear Sophie snore at these times too. Complete contentment which I hope she experiences when she gets to bunk with me again. Right after the cats move, right along with my daughter and her family.

Yup, she’s taking the cats, two of three of those stuck-up freeloaders, at least. After all, they are her cats and her responsibility.

I am reflecting, here in the whispering backwoods of Poquoson, Virginia, of how proud I am of my daughter. How responsible she is, how she took on the daunting task of finding her family a home, doing all the (endless) paperwork, taking countless calls with bank loan officers, her lovely real estate agent Debbie and loan broker…all the while keeping me in the loop ─ and always with Baby Claudia balanced perfectly on one hip. Baby Claudia riding shotgun in the mist of home buying insanity and my daughter doing the math, getting the paperwork completed, charming people I could sooner perform the Vulcan Death Grip on. My kid is, simply put, amazing.

I know better than to take any credit for this. My daughter crashed her life back around age 20 and then single-handedly rebuilt her entire world back from the ashes. This makes hers completely and entirely responsible for the amazing person, the incredible mother, she has become and the life she’s built. And I would not have it any other way.

So I get my life back, in just a few short weeks when the kids move in to their own home but in reality, I had it all the time. Messier, more cluttered and completely without the streamline organization and structure I crave, but I still had my life the whole time. I had my life the second I beat cancer. I had it all the time.

In Loving Memory

2011-11-20T10:29:00.000-08:00

One would think I would get better at this whole death thing. After all, I’ve faced down death more than once in my life, most recently by fighting off cancer not once but if you count skin cancer, twice in just two years. Thus, one would think I would be more gifted at what to say and how to best to comfort the people I love when they lose a loved one.

My BFF is an incredibly kind, loyal and giving person. She stood by me during chemo and watched over me post-infusions, knitting away in my bedroom while I lay flat on my back in bed, unable to move from the overwhelming exhaustion that is the aftermath of chemo. She kept an anxious watch over me while she knitted all my adorable hats, rapidly and selflessly making hat after hat so my wig would look much more natural (it fooled a lot of folks with the addition of all those cute hats) and so I would have a variety of styles to choose from every day. She stood by me and is easily the person in addition to my daughter and grand baby that I would happily take a bullet for, no questions asked.

So, when she texted me last Friday to tell me her elderly mother was back in the hospital, it was nothing new. Save that this time, with no prior warning, it would turn out to be the last. Her beloved mother had a pulmonary embolism and the emergency room doctor bravely and honestly told my BFF that her mother likely had less than 24 hours to live. I called my daughter, she arranged to get off work that night as early as humanly possible and I got on map quest to make sure I could navigate to the hospital in record time. In a matter of minutes, we had it all planned out.

But life, and now death, had other plans because less than 30 minutes later my BFF’s beloved mother was gone. After everything she had been through physically over the years, she ended up slipping from this mortal coil with a whisper and a sigh.

And after all my BFF has done for me? I could do nothing. I didn’t even make it to the hospital in time to fetch tissues and tea, or hold her hand or anything. Worse, when she called me while I was en route to home and told me her mother was gone, I did something entirely uncharacteristic, I promptly burst into tears, rendering myself totally useless just when she needed me the most. Good one Julie. It was entirely acceptable for me to get cancer, lose my hair, suffer in pain every single day and fight for my very life but I subscribe to the double standard of life experiences: I cannot stand for the people I love to be in pain of any kind, emotional or physical. Worse, I was now powerless to ease her pain because after having lost my own mother so suddenly, I was intimately acquainted with the grieving process. I know, up close and personal, that grief is a solitary emotion, not one easily shared.

Upon arriving home, I was still wreathed in tears so my daughter knew instantly what had transpired. My adult child is extremely intuitive, deeply compassionate and very tuned in to those she is closest to. Me, I just cried and blubbered like an idiot and this when it wasn’t even my mom. In fact, truth be told, I cried far more when Jill lost her mom than I did when I lost my own mother. With my own, I had to be strong, help my daughter through the loss. This time around I just let ‘er rip and cried my eyes out. I loved and cherished her mom but I love my BFF above all. Knowing the depth of this loss broke my heart so I cried not only for her passing but for my BFF.

Just an hour before all this transpired, my BFF’s husband had called to tell me about a rocking chair Jill’s mom had. They had planned on moving her to a new care facility, one that they had hoped would better be able to address her mother’s considerable medical needs and physical limitations. At this new facility, there would have been no room for the rocking chair. Jill’s mom loved Baby Claudia, she had held tiny Baby CJ for hours last Christmas and talked about her all the time. Jill’s mom was a true mom to the end, she loved babies, her daughter Jill most of all. It just seemed fitting that the rocking chair go to my daughter to rock Baby Claudia in.

So, eventually, after all the trauma of coroners and doctors and paperwork were over and done with, Jill’s devoted husband delivered the rocking chair. It was a sturdy thing, well made, of light blond solid wood. We put it in my already overcrowded living room to admire the craftsmanship and to remember Jill’s mom. Then something a little bit astonishing occurred. Baby Claudia, with her impossibly tiny little legs, insisted on climbing up in the grown up rocking chair. An assist, a discrete lift up at the pampies and she was up and sitting and smiling in Fran’s rocking chair. I reached over to rock her gently, her tiny chubby little legs sticking out straight in front of her, her little feet flutter kicking in excitement. Then, if that were not enough, Baby Claudia turned her smiling face away from me and began babbling into thin air. She was having an actual conversation with something or perhaps someone that none of us could see. Her expression was thoughtful and peaceful as she babbled away to someone or something that only she could see.

Not everyone believes in an afterlife or spirits or guardian angels and I’ve always been more of a science geek than a New Age Child myself but if anyone were to ask me whom or what Baby Claudia was speaking to, I would bet on it being the soul or spirit of Jill’s mother, her newly self anointed Baby Guardian Angel. Later that night, as I snuggled the baby, rocking her to sleep, I spoke to Claudia matter-of-factly. I softly told her that Grammie Jill’s mom had gone to heaven. I also told her that Great-Grandma Fran would be watching over her. And I promised that someday, far into the future, when I went to heaven that I too would always be with her. I promised. And then, right as she nodded off to sleep, totally secure in my loving arms, Baby Claudia sleepily reached out with a tiny, perfect pudgy hand into the darkness of the room. But not for me. As she reached into the shadows, she was trying to grasp at something that only she could see.

And as she drifted off, Baby Claudia smiled.

The Usual Suspects

2011-11-15T11:15:00.000-08:00

I am pretty sure my local newspaper delivery person has it in for me. Ditto the local garbage collectors who typically show up pre-dawn, well before any local noise ordinance allows. I know this because vendors don’t mess with my BFF who lives a short, five minute drive from me in the same town. She therefore has the same garbage men or at least garbage pick-up service and she has the same delivery service for her newspaper. Maybe not the very same newspaper delivery person but certainly both carriers work for the San Jose Mercury News, which is owned by the MediaNews Group. Despite having this in common, BFF does not get her daily newspaper soaking wet because her delivery guy didn’t bother to sheath it plastic wrap on rainy days. She also doesn't get woken up at the crack of dawn by noisy garbage men either.

I am officially convinced that these people hate me. Perhaps I should reconsider my annual tip philosophy wherein I start with the premise that nobody tips me for doing my job, even though I like to think I do it really well. I may be eligible for a bonus (in good years, economically speaking) but generally speaking, the economy being what it is, my paycheck is it. If people go above and beyond, then I tip. I am always generous with restaurant servers because I worked my way, three jobs at a time, through college so I know that servers literally make rent off of tips. I also generously tip my hairdresser because she actually lets me come to her house for the odd appointment, in the evening, when my schedule is jammed. She always goes above and beyond.

The local garbage collectors, on the other hand, scatter trash all over the street, always it seems when it is perfectly, according to spec, presented for pick up, not overflowing or in the wrong bins. Like I said, they favor showing up well before 5 a.m., far earlier than they are legally allowed to come rumbling down my otherwise peaceful street at 90 decibels waking up the entire neighborhood. This causes irate neighbors to Spring Into Action by calling the happy folks down at city hall who then proceed to do absolutely nothing about these repeat noise violations. Trust me, garbage trucks are really noisy. Thus, the garbage folks appear to be doing the absolute minimum and all at their convenience, not mine. For these reasons, I don’t think they deserve a tip come the holidays, especially after that last used kitty litter fiasco. Same goes for the newspaper guy who must be hoarding the plastic sleeves that he is supposed to place my paper in, come wet or damp weather. Is he braiding all that plastic into a decorative art piece or what? Perhaps he just knows that I am not one to spend my time calling up the newspaper hot line to demand another paper since all they are going to do is credit me a day and this when I have no clue when the next bill is exactly due ─ only that I pay it quarterly. And yes, I persist in leaving the field on the invoice for a, ‘tip’ conspicuously blank.

When I get a winter’s worth of dry newspapers, I will seriously consider giving this guy a tip. Meanwhile, I’m going to wait him out and start using earplugs every Monday night. That’s because the garbage men come before dawn, every Tuesday morning. And after they wake me up, I get to listen to the melodic, dulcet tones of angry neighbors stomping out of their homes, fairly yelling in the pre-dawn hours.

This morning was garbage day but with a twist. After 7 a.m., I awoke knowing instantly that something in my reality was amiss. Why had I not been awoken pre-dawn like on every other garbage day? My super girl heroine senses were 'a-tingling. Something was definitely wrong with my world but I decided that garbage day got switched and I missed the memo. Like the universe expanding and string theory, there was simply no other logical explanation. What I did hear was Baby Claudia, in a foul baby mood, stomping about downstairs. Oh boy, was her mom ever in for one of those days. I tippy toed downstairs, got my coffee, fed the cats and got ready for work. In a hurry. I then slipped out the garage door, knowing, as I said, my daughter was in for one heck of a day. Once in a blue moon the baby wakes up in the worst possible mood and we call these her, ‘Claudzilla’ days.

On such days, I am secretly thankful I have a job and career to run away to because although I love this child with all my heart and soul, her occasional foul baby moods can be seriously daunting. My daughter was an irrepressibly cheerful child, she never had mood swings or even the occasional bad day like temperamental Claudia does. Well, at least not until she hit puberty. To be fair, my daughter also never had the terrible teething issues poor Baby Claudia suffers from so I suspect the bad moods and teething issues go hand in hand. Still, just to be sure, I keep promising the baby I am going to get her into pee-wee powder puff baby hockey as soon as her tiny feet can fit into ice skates. This is one kid who will have no problems dropping the baby gloves.

Meanwhile, I fairly flew out of the house, feeling a tad bit guilty. I decided I would make dinner tonight, to make up for my cowardice. That’s when the garbage men came roaring down the street. Really? I decided to view their timing with a jaundiced eye. They were messing with me. Still, it was nice to have them show up at a civilized hour. For once.

Feeling optimistic, I picked up my newspaper. It was absolutely soaking wet. Again. It was in that moment I realized that my day was going to be as normal as it gets. I had not, as theoretical physics might hope, fallen into another dimension or Universe. Nope, everything was exactly as it should be. As a cancer survivor, I realized how much I thrive on normalcy. How much I need the expected, the mundane, the usual, right down to my sopping wet newspaper. So much so that I might consider tipping come this holiday season after all.

Skin Deep

2011-11-07T17:36:00.000-08:00

I spend way too much time hanging out with doctors these days. I know if they are having a good day, if they are stressed and when they got back from vacation and even more scary, where they went and what they did on holiday. I even know what kind of holiday excursions they generally favor.

All this I find nearly as pathetic as when the customs agents at SFO greet me like an old friend. (That generally means I have been traveling way too much.)

It can only get worse if stewards and stewardesses remember you from past flights; that’s an even lower low in my mind.

So, clearly, I need to get a bit more of a life. One that doesn’t include weekly doctor visits would be nice. My dermatologist just returned from an apparently restful respite in Hawaii (where he sensibly stayed in the shade and out of the blazing skin cancer-creating sun). He was in a fine mood. He spent enough time with me to teach me a few things about skin cancer, the most interesting being that while most of us have heard tell about ‘pre-cancerous’ lesions our entire lives, apparently, in the medical profession, at least according to Dr. Imhotep, there is really no such thing. Pre-cancerous is like being a little pregnant; you either are or you aren’t. Certain lesions, however, lend themselves to developing into skin cancer. Meaning some types of lesions are more likely to develop into skin cancer that say, the average freckle. Apparently, though, the insurance companies like the term, ‘pre-cancerous’.

I don’t blame them, for an insurance company, burning/freezing something off that is likely/maybe/could evolve into skin cancer has got to be far more cost efficient than treating full blown skin cancer later on. Not all skin cancers are cured by cutting them out the way my first lesion apparently was.

Still, nice to sit there, watch actual tiny wisps of smoke waft off my porcelain white skin, while the liquid nitrogen did its magic and froze off each offending bit of skin. In truth, this procedure only stings, a discomfort far more tolerable than an actual biopsy. So, I chatted away while the doctor froze off three spots ─ only one of which he said was extremely likely to evolve into skin cancer. The doc indulged me on the other two which is the key when dealing with me. I am betting that smart doctor that he is, he figured out I was much more likely to go away for months at a time if he indulges me.

It’s true, take away anything that smacks of cancer and the doctor won’t see me forever if I can get away with it.

I don’t get that option any more in my life, avoiding doctors forever I mean, but I try to limit visits to real needs and being proactive, like with the skin cancer thing. My oncologist, alas, has a very long memory. He will just not forget the time I was going through chemo and my BFF and I, gauging that I was feeling up to it, went to a Sharks hockey game. We were in traffic, at a standstill with all the other cars and some young 20-something girl chatting merrily away on her mobile phone, proceeded to plow into my BFF’s rear bumper. She actually hit us pretty hard though my BFF has a tank of a vehicle and the damage was minimal, at least to the car. My BFF has awful joint issues and a bad back and neck. She is on intimate terms with any number of cracker jack chiropractors who actually do a lot of good for her. We both knew nearly instantly that her neck and back had been thrown out of whack. As for me, my head jolted. Hard. I could literally feel my brain jar inside my skull and for the record, it's not something you want to feel.

My BFF immediately ordered me to call my oncologist because she was scared. I wasn’t in pain mind you, but I was going through chemo. So, I did as told and called, leaving his answering service a message. Then, I got to watch my BFF, who had been very nice to the girl who hit us up to that point, lose it. The girl had been driving her father’s car and was in her early 20s so do the math and figure that this young lady just knew she was going to lose car privileges. She kept trying to talk to me, find out if I was hurt and this while I kept trying to leave a message for my doctor with the answering service folks. She was young and pushy and then had the questionable judgment to demand to know why I was calling a doctor for a simple fender bender. My usually mild mannered BFF verbally knocked her block off, yelling that I was going through chemo and to SHUT THE HELL UP so I could talk to my oncologist. She quietly went back to her father’s dented car and my BFF watched in her rear view mirror with some satisfaction while the young lady sat in the front seat and proceeded to totally freak out. I am certain she thought I was going to sue her for all her daddy's worth.

I never so much as thought about making a claim. I figure this was the wisest course of (non) action on account of actually not being hurt and generally being as honest as the day is long by nature. The ending of this story is that a few minutes later, my oncologist called me back and did his job by asking all sorts of questions about how I felt with respect to possible symptoms. We were at the Shark tank by this time and the most festive part of the conversation went like this:

“Wait a minute, Julie, what’s that noise?”

“Noise? Uhhhh….that would be people, Dr. C.”

“People? Around your car, wait, where are you?”

“No, we parked the car, it was drivable. We parked it in the parking lot.”

“The parking lot, I see…Julie, can you tell me what parking lot and why it’s so noisy?”

“Oh sure. The parking lot is where the car is, not us, we are inside. The car is in the Sharks parking lot. Did I mention we were en route to a hockey game?”

“Wait a second, are you telling me that just a few short days after chemo and after getting in a car accident you actually went to the hockey game and that that’s where you are right now? AT A HOCKEY GAME?”

Silence.

“Julie?”

“Ok, ok, but I can explain!”

“Oh for this, I cannot wait, please, enlighten me.”

“Calgary is in town. Mikka Kiprusoff is in net. We hate Iginla. He’s the worst.”

“I see. Of course he is.”

“I’m glad you understand doc, say, it’s OK to stay, right? I mean its Calgary so it’s OK, right?”

At this point in the conversation, I could almost see his face, his eyes closing in pain, wondering why he spent all those years in medical school only to end up dealing with crazy patients like me.

“I am sure it will be fine but call me if you experience any of the symptoms we talked about OK?”

“Sure doc and thanks! Go Sharks!”

I thought that was the end of it and that I’d won but turns out, my doctor remembers this incident to the point that every time I see him, he gets a real kick out of reminding me about it.

“Been to any hockey games recently?” he will ask and before I can answer he’ll chime in with. “Because if you get into another car accident, you cannot go to a hockey game, OK?”

Yeah, yeah, ok, ok, sheesh but some people can get so testy.

I’m spending too much time with doctors.

Mental Indigestion

2011-11-02T14:32:00.000-07:00

Maybe it was inevitable, me and cancer. I never had the normal sniffles and flu as a child. I never had an ear infection until I was 13 and then it was so bad, both ears, inner and outer, that I landed in the emergency room and could not stand without falling over for weeks thereafter. Going further back, I had a genuine bleeding ulcer at the age of five that put me in the hospital and front and center with astonished doctors. Then, a scant year later, I spent months in isolation in a hospital in Hong Kong battling the most deadly strain of Typhoid Fever. The nuns, doctors and a singular Chatty Cathy doll my only company. Say what you will but I had medical drama down pat before I learned my times tables.

It was a lonely, frightening time for a little six year old American girl who spoke only bits of Cantonese. But there was a very old Chinese man who used to take his afternoon tea with me. He wore no mask and I think he was on the board of directors or one of the founders. Every day, without fail, he would smuggle in cookies with his tea, ostensibly to divert me from the daily round of needle pokes.

He had never seen such green eyes in his life. And I was a tiny, delicate thing, pale as porcelain and sweetly passive by nature. He told me I was special and he treated me with reverence and respect, a big thing for a sickly six year old whose world had dwindled down to the confines of a stark and sterile hospital room. He listened. He was the first adult who ever listened to anything I had to say.

Not sure what happened to my nature but for decades after, whenever I’d meet a new physician (and I did my best to avoid the medical profession whenever possible), they would invariably ask me if I’d had cancer as a child or some other life threatening illness. My personality, they observed, supported this kind of childhood trauma.

Seriously?

And I just thought I was atypically cynical.

But no, apparently there are personality traits indicative of survivors.

So I was different even back then.

There is also a doctor’s theory on personality traits of those he believe are most susceptible to cancer. I did not even want to know how many of those traits I possessed (hint, it was probably seven out of seven). And yes, I also had a traumatic event shortly before my diagnosis.

The article even has a table with the organ or type of cancer and what emotional issue/conflict that may have caused it. For breast cancer:

Breast (Left)

Conflict Concerning Child, Home, or Mother

So, this yaboo of a doctor is actually blaming my child or my mother? A mother who, had she not died so suddenly and for my family, traumatically, precisely one year before I got cancer, I would have been happy to blame myself.

My favorite is actually skin cancer which the doctor says is because of, get this, ‘loss of integrity’.

Funny, I seem to recall having loads of integrity, by the bucketsful, when I got skin cancer. In fact, I am careful not to even associate with people whom I suspect of even moderate lapses in integrity so I don’t think I could have caught skin cancer from slime balls. Is there such a thing as second hand cancer any way? And there I was, thinking that it well might have had something to do with being pale as death and there being no sunscreen in Southern California when I was a little kid while getting all those sunburns; something I can blame my careless olive-skinned mother for actually.

That and living outside and in the Olympic sized family swimming pool until I was 13. The medical profession may disagree of course, this doctor believes that I somehow lacked ‘integrity’ as the reason I got skin cancer. I prefer to think of it as the combination of sun, no sun factor protection and really pale skin. I may have gotten skin cancer but you should see my backstroke. And I swim like a dolphin. Spackled with water proof SFP 85 now of course, but I still can out swim most aquatic creatures. Just ask the killer sharks I managed to calmly swim away from off the shores of Molokai.

I keep staring table above, the so-called conflict theory/conflict issues behind getting breast cancer. Really? And I thought it was an over abundance of estrogen in my 50s when most women are past menopause. I don’t want my beautiful daughter thinking for one nanosecond that her frankly challenging childhood and adolescence caused her mother’s cancer. She already blames herself for stressing me out.

I think the easiest way to debunk this theory is how the doctor lists prostate cancer as being the result of, and I quote, “Ugly Conflict with Sexual Connections or Connotations’. Since one man in six will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime, it begs the question; would these million of potential pervs be better off giving up with weekly visits to their local hookers? Or maybe they just need to stop surfing for free porn while their partners do laundry.

I myself should start worrying about my intestines because the doctor who did the study says that, “An indigestible chunk of anger’ may well lead to cancer in that area.

Somebody pass the Tums because I sure am having trouble digesting something.

The New Normal

2011-11-01T17:57:00.000-07:00

I always look forward to the inevitable post Halloween shake down. For kids, it’s all about too much candy and being wired/crashing for days. For me, it’s all about staying up way too late, putting away all the spooky food and stuff we served up to friends who dropped by and then going over what everyone has been up to. This year, we even had to do the unthinkable, turn on the porch lights for several groups of trick or treaters who came by. The little ones were terrified but with the porch light on, they could see that everything was simply, ‘pretend and for fun’. Several even bravely touched the scary rubber masks that my daughter had so creatively back lit for maximum youngster scare effect.

Having fought cancer, it amazes me what I used to be afraid of. The dark, vampires, monsters that go bump in the night. Now? Not so much. I’ve navigated completely black stairs during a 12 hour power outage (thank you, PG&E) and literally shrugged when I found out I had skin cancer not once, but from the looks of the teeny, tiny red splotch on my right arm that now refuses to heal, likely twice.

There are worse things to deal with in this life.

For me, the scariest place on earth is still the chemo room. Along with an abusive ex, I occasionally still experience nightmares of being trapped in either the chemo room or with a frankly horrific person from my past. I am still not sure which is worse but the chemo room probably wins by a hair (or lack thereof), so to speak, because you can divorce abusive men but you can’t file for reconcilable differences from cancer. With one, at least, there is a choice to stop the madness. You just need to find a lawyer, file the papers and blow up your life.

Cancer, it turns out, is far more efficient. Cancer blows up your life without the need for signatures and initials on every page and nothing in triplicate. No court dates either. Cancer is entirely efficient in its ability to completely take over your world. And when/if you emerge from the other side, cancer free, you are still never the same. You never get to, ‘go back’ and have the life you had before. Particularly if you’ve fought breast cancer, your quality of life, post cancer, is often significantly to severely compromised. I confess that I never understood what my BFF was talking about, being in pain from joint issues all the time. I never got that until I fought cancer and spent the new two years without a pain free day always battling lymphedema and other forms of pain.

My oncologist calls this phenomenon, ‘the new normal’. Then one day it hit me, I was in pain every single day and it was not easy to manage and it made me…different. Pain breaks you down mentally and beats you up in ways that only people in chronic pain can understand. I think I might have even formally apologized to my BFF, after it dawned on me that I had not been particularly sympathetic about her plight. Pain, it seems, is the great equalizer. At least it was for me. I am now more sympathetic, more patient; more laid back, when somebody tells me it hurts.

So, as I head into the holiday season (and the end of Halloween mentally kicks off the holidays for me), I realize my experiences can be what they once were, only they will also be more. More poignant, more profound, more exhausting and frankly just more.

But at least I will still will have them, experiences that is.

Scare Tactics

2011-10-27T17:27:00.000-07:00

I am ramping up for All Hallows Eve like never before. Two years ago, I had just come out of my third surgery and my first round of chemo not trick or treat. I had not even told most friends that the cancer had spread ─ thus necessitating the additional surgery. They took my lymph nodes, probably way more than was necessary, and I would not be told for a few more days that only two lymph nodes had been compromised with cancer but I already knew I was going to need chemo. Two out of the sixteen lymph nodes were removed and the onslaught of chemo crashed down on me a short week later. I was swathed in gauze two years ago Halloween, and not the mummy/zombie kind. I had tubes coming out of me all over the place which compromised my mobility and the chemo had started working its toxic mojo. I dug out large, flowy tops from the back of my closet and wore them to work. Yes, I was working; any executive armed with minimal survival skills working in Silicon Valley would know better than to stay home unless on one’s death bed and probably not even then. The tubes coming in and out of me were a new thing according to my surgeon. They delivered about five days’ worth of topical numbing medicine to my horrific wound/incision which kept me on my feet after two surgeries to the very same location in less than a week. I actually felt very little until my surgeon pulled the needle out of my healing skin. That I totally felt. Oh yes, and I let him know it.

So, this Halloween is different but really the same. We decorate the front of our home in a cheesy, scary theme worthy of early Dark Shadows ─ remember when you could see the strings holding up the totally fake bat that Barnabas Collins had evilly morphed into? I don’t know about you, but I was terrified. So, I get why little kids are totally freaked out at the site of my front porch, all swathed in creepy gray curtains, with cheesy, scary Halloween music and a fog machine.

Doesn’t take much to scare little kids as it turns out and I should know. But the ‘scare nothing in a toddler-sized pink tutu or panda costume’ still holds. I prefer the kids who are a few scant years from getting their driver’s permits. They deserve to have the crap scared out of them. I know this because I spend a good hour post-Halloween every year clearing the egg goo from my abused garage door.

I think this is because of my daughter. Back in high school she and a few friends, fresh from drama class, staged a vampire killing in the middle of our street. It was well done, a glorious fake death replete with fake blood and campy plastic fangs. It was a performance worthy of some vapid, pale faced guy named Edward who, unlike every other male I’ve ever known, talks about his feelings and emotions and sulks like a 13 year old girl. It was, in retrospect, completely hilarious. At least we all deep into a couple of bottles of vino sure thought so. The nine year old boy who happened by en route to Trick or Treating, did not think so. He ended up completely hysterical, convinced vampires had taken over the neighborhood and he actually called 911. After the cops arrived, he stood quaking in his super hero costumer on my doorstep, in tears no less, with a local officer in tow. The bemused officer, who had one heck of a time keeping a straight fact throughout, insisted on officially interviewing the guilty fang bangers and, after checking to make sure everyone was indeed not among the undead, he assured the young man that nobody in my home was a card-carrying member of the undead because, being undead was, of course, totally against the law. To wit, everyone had a pulse.

That kid soon moved out of the neighborhood but not before his parents (and where were they Halloween night I still wonder) gave me dark and dirty looks every time they happen to see me en route to the duck pond or getting into my car. Sorry about that. I had no idea your kid was such a head case and a wuss.

Still, scares like that don’t come along every Halloween so you have to take what you can get. The neighborhood kids know that I can terrify with the best of them and we’ve actually had groups of kids return, not for the candy, but for a second and third scare. That’s like the ultimate when you are an adult (by age) and looking to celebrate the holiday in style.

My only regret is that I may not be dressing up this year. I was totally feeling the rocker chick zombie thing but I think the make-up might frighten Baby Claudia and because she’s doing her Tinkerbelle thing, I can’t risk messing with her baby holiday.

The other kids, the ones I’m not related to, well, they better brace themselves.

Half Way To Normal

2011-10-25T12:08:00.000-07:00

I am getting beat all to heck these days. Grandbaby Claudia, a.k.a. Baby Claudzilla, lacks that learned, tender touch. It’s not her fault though, it took fully two years, just last week, before I had finally experienced a completely pain-free day. So I would deem me fairly fragile to say the least. Two…..long…years.

Reporting this astounding milestone news to my BFF presented an opportunity for her to wax philosophic about surgeries in general. It took just as long, she assured me, for full recovery from her latest hip replacement. Her bones are surprisingly good but her joints fail her at every turn. She had to have two full hip replacements well before she hit the big 6 - 0. And this was after she blew out her shoulder when her exuberant Welsh Springer Spaniel Jazzy dragged her half way across a local dog park. What can I say, the dog is a squirrel magnet and every good hunting breed knows that squirrels are evil canine terrorists; Puppy Enemy Number One. And my BFF still has pain in her shoulder from time to time, to say nothing of how her hips can bother her.

So, I try not to complain, at least not too much. It does no good anyway. I remain quietly proud that I take no pain meds and solider on through most days. And trust me, I am no martyr, in fact, far from it. I spend a good deal of time loftily reminding my boyfriend that I need more sleep and to that end, his dogs need not sleep right on top of me. As if a dance, I move an inch, they move an inch, I roll over, the dogs scoot in tandem. Contact, it seems, must be maintained at all times. Bob likes to claim that this is all part of the ‘security detail’ they provide but I suspect they are simply pack animals and enjoy the warmth. Particularly, it seems, during loud thunderstorms. And while this is not always painful, sometimes with the lymphedema, any movement hurts.

I need to remind cancer survivors out there that recovery is all about the half. Half a percent that is. I estimate that we all feel about a half of one percent better every week into recovery.

Seriously. That means it takes a whole year to feel just 26 percent better and two long years to get half way to normal. If my math holds, that means I should be feeling a hundred percent in another two years.

Keep in mind that my oncologist, when he asks how I am feeling, he generally means in the context of the ‘new, post cancer’ me. Pain, exhaustion, fatigue, neuropathy...the menu that makes up daily annoyances in my life. And the special of the week? A restless, near sleepless night. Yum, yum.

Mega hot flashes constitute the sometimes dessert that I surely would prefer to skip.

But this is the new normal and I’m fairly excepting of my lot. It is a whole lot better than the alternative which is why those of us with decreased quality of life are so accepting. We know what our lot could be. We could well go the way of the late Steven Jobs who reportedly, after learning that he had cancer, delayed surgery for nine long months. This was likely the one decision could have well cost him his life. Wow, for such a smart guy, did he not know that herbal cleansings simply don’t work?

If they did a whole bunch of wonderful oncology specialists would be out of a job.

Perspective From The Cretaceous Era

2011-10-19T11:51:00.000-07:00

I am a sometimes expert on perspective so when I found out that the tiny red lesion on my leg was actually the beginnings of skin cancer, I actually didn’t so much as blink. When you are the color of an anemic vampire and half of your relatives have had numerous bits of skin removed, you actually grow up not so terrified of generic, eminently curable skin cancer.

So, I asked the dermatologist whose dry, acerbic wit oddly matches my own, when do we operate? It was the very next day, today, and the whole thing went so fast that I wasn’t even tardy for work. The whole procedure took less time than I spend checking voice messages in the morning; with the longest time being waiting precisely 173 seconds for the shot to numb up the spot on my leg. Bandaged up, I departed the doctor’s office some ten minutes later utterly underwhelmed and wholly unimpressed with myself.

I am still so not special. This is because skin cancer runs in, out and through the fairer skinned members of my family. Like Gamma rays only less deadly. Having grown up in the Cretaceous Era of no sunscreen in Southern California and possessing skin the pallid shade of an exhumed corpse, what did I expect? And I say no sunscreen because back in Ancient Times, sunscreen had not yet been invented.

I did handle the cancer news better than the last time with the sum total of my initial reaction being, “Uh, oh, ok, when how soon can I get this taken care of?” My oncologist would not have known it was me, seriously. I was oddly proud of that, the calmness of it all. It is so unlike me that I felt I had achieved a Zen state with respect to cancer. And the dermatologist even gave me a bunch of cool samples for super sunscreen, SPF 85 no less. Lovely parting gifts, along with the giant band aid on my leg of course.

Maybe I’m cool after all, I mused while stuck in traffic driving back into work, my leg still slightly numb but not a concern for the first time in weeks. I’ve grown rather fond of that leg, I thought, I am glad that like my breasts, I’m going to be able to keep it.

When I got to work, my work BFF happen to be in the hallway. “Everything ok?” she asked anxiously. Lord knows, I’ve put the good woman through enough.

“When do we do our lunchtime walk?” I replied.

Apparently, my ho-hum perspective was not going to include slacking off on the daily exercise routine we’d created.

Still, I think my daughter may not appreciate my darker side, the one that views having been diagnosed with cancer, twice and two different types, in just two brief years, as just part of the gloom and dank that drips all over my Karma these days.

“You have to be really nice to me,” I announced dramatically as I walked in the door last night. “On account of me having cancer until tomorrow.”

My pity party didn’t last very long, however. Just a few minutes ago my daughter called me at work to check on me. “Did they get it mom, all the cancer?” she asked.

“Yes of course sweetie! It’s all gone and I’m just fine. Awe, you were worried about me, weren’t you?”

“I was actually wondering how much longer I needed to be nice to you. Now that you are cured, you know what that means.”

Yes, I know what that means. It means that I’m back to being extraordinarily ordinary all over again.

The D List

2011-10-18T16:56:00.000-07:00

I am pretty sick of D-list celebrities using the Big C to further their agenda which is always all about self promotion and staying in the public eye. This happens every month, it seems, and always ends with some extremely cosmetically altered wannabe on the cover of some tacky magazine blazing with some melodramatic headline of a sob fest, “Smacky Kandi’s Heroic Battle With Toe Cancer”.

Seriously?

I find there is nothing brave about using a horrific disease to further a private agenda, one’s career in Hollywood. Worse, if readers take the bait and buy these rags, one normally finds out that the so-called ‘tragic battle’ was little more than a new boob job and maybe some radiation, hardly the life and death battle such as the iconic Steven Jobs fought and tragically lost. One will note that the fiercely private Jobs rarely discussed his disease, preferring to keep the details private. Since so little of Jobs’ life was private, I totally get that.

If a public figure, with public clout, is going to come forward about a disease they are battling, for pity’s sake, let it be to further educate the public or to inform and raise awareness. Let it be to commiserate with fellow cancer survivors, not to grab self-promoting headlines.

The last thing I wanted when I first found out about my cancer was to talk about it, even with my own family. I was so trapped with fear in my own head that I was useless to everyone around me for quite some time. When I finally came out of it, well into my recovery, it occurred to me to help others, to pay it forward and blog about my experiences. I just wanted to give someone that, ‘ah ha’ moment so they would not feel so alone. This is because cancer truly is the one battle you fight utterly by yourself, no matter how many loved ones rally to support you.

I realize that I may be singular in my public and all-encompassing distain for celebrities. I’ve never even seen a reality television show and I don’t even know who Snookie/ Ookie/Pookie is. I have no idea what the Kardashians do and the only real housewife I sort of know is my next door neighbor who juggles three little kids at home. I never hear that woman raise her voice. That woman is a saint.

Everyone I hang out with has a career like me so that’s who I relate to; women like me. Still, I frustrate my BFF because she likes to call me up with conversations that start:

“Are you watching?

“Watching what?”

“Dancing with the Stars.”

“No, the Flyers are beating the crap out of the Penguins, it’s a massacre on ice….why?”

“Just turn it on, ok?”

“Really? Jody Shelley is back from his latest suspension and he’s about to drop the gloves with…what were you asking me?”

“Julie, please focus. Turn on Dancing with the Stars, its total drama, I want to ask you something about the tango, ok?”

“What channel?”

“Really?

“Ok, Ok, hang on. Shelley better not fight while I’m doing this.”

“OK, you there?”

“Yeah, yeah, so what did you want to know?”

“Are you watching the play back?”

“Uh huh, yeah, no, it’s not an actual tango move, that funny guy with the English accent is right, they broke the rules.”

“How do you know this stuff anyway?

“I was an uncoordinated kid, my mother was embarrassed so she made me take dance lessons. Next time ask me about the jive, I know lots about the jive. Say, while I have you on the phone, let me ask you something, ok?”

“Sure, shoot.”

“The show is called Dancing with the Stars, right? So, who are all these people anyway?”

“Really? Are we going to do this again?”

“I kid you not, who ARE these people? I mean, aside from Chaz Bono whom you have to admire for putting himself out this way.”

“You really don’t know any of those people?”

“No I do not and so seriously, what is this show all about? Is it a contest?”

“You are completely hopeless….”

And so it goes on and on until my BFF basically grows tired of me wanting to get back to hockey and she gives up.

This is my general (low) opinion of celebrities and I live by that belief by not giving any of them space in my head or my attention. The glamour days of real movie stars ended when both Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor passed away anyway. You never heard tell of Newman talking about his lung cancer publicly and even the headline grabbing Taylor didn’t go the talk show circuit to wax poetic about her congestive heart condition.

Just sayin’.

And even if they had talked about their health issues in public, it would have been to raise awareness or to help others. Taylor’s AIDS charity work was legendary and Newman’s altruistic endeavors no less compelling. Bottom line, they used their celebrity status to make a difference.

So, to that point, it is still October (a.k.a, Breast Cancer Awareness month) folks, so get those mammograms! There are many programs in the Bay Area where I hail from, so you can get a very low cost or even free mammogram. So make sure you do that, get that mammo and stay healthy. Make a difference with your own family.

The Magic Word

2011-10-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

I spent an afternoon recently learning to breathe again. This was after a week of scary medical tests, inconclusive findings and….more tests.

Then came down from the medical heavens the magic word: Negative.

After never crying about having gotten cancer or even losing my hair, I decided that the doctor’s office was going to be my home base, like that magical place little kids tag and say ‘free’ where they are safe and can’t be tagged out. In my doctor’s office, I can cry, get upset and basically do not have to act brave for one single second. This is now where I get it all out.

This safety net mindset did not, however, keep the doctor’s assistant’s eyes from rolling in the back of her head when she initially took my blood pressure.

“Ummm, let’s try this again after you talk to the doctor,” she said, clearly astonished that I had not stroked out yet.

The doctor was kind, positive and encouraging. “This is a whole lot of…nothing,” she announced cheerfully after reading the MIR results. MY BP promptly plunged out of the stratosphere and back into Normal Range. Not only did the MRI not reveal anything to worry about, but it also showed perfectly normal ovaries, lymph nodes and various assorted perfectly cancer free body parts of the female pelvic region. At least in the south forty, my parts were workin’ fine.

I teared up for only a few seconds, the deeply sick feeling in the pit of my stomach finally starting to wane for the first time in days. The doctor told me they wanted a comparative MRI, in three months from now just to keep an eye on things which was I had already prayed to The Lord for. That had been my ‘best case’ scenario. And I got it.

Having already mentally prepared myself for the worst, I was a little more than astonished to get much more hopeful news. It wasn’t even ‘inconclusive’. It was negative. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

Nothing could have made me happier. I was even able to call my daughter as I tottered − none too steady on my feet − into the parking lot. I’m ok, I managed to say, my voice as wobbly as my gait but it was enough. I left a couple of text messages for people I love and then I sat in my car, willing the sick feeling in my gut to fade faster.

Food, I realized, might be a good thing since I could not recall the last time I ate. And then perhaps a strollered up walk with Baby Claudia would be really fun. The doctor talked to me about my slightly porous bones, assuring me that the guilty party had been the chemo and how weight bearing exercise and a calcium-rich diet were the key. This I already knew. The good news was, the damage was far less than usual in these cases and somewhat reversible. I checked the sticky note she had given me for calcium and Vitamin D and realized I was still going to be able to watch my grand-daughter grow up.

My fear de jour had been that Baby Claudia would grow up with sad, scary dim memories of her Nana, me, dying. Bald, sickly, painfully thin, and wasting away in front of her youthful baby eyes. I could not bear it. I had to be and to stay healthy. I wanted her to think back on her Nana with pretty hair, great shoes, incredible chic and absolute, above all else, cool. The cool, above everything else. I didn’t want her seeing me cry or in constant pain or her mother sobbing at the thought of losing Nana so young to cancer. I wanted what we all want, time but time with quality.

And this latest journey in the Zone of Fear brought it all back into sharp relief: I was still here, I was still cancer free and I had many years ahead of me.

The Drill

2011-10-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

I hate not knowing. I hate everything about uncertainty. And I hate waiting most of all.

Unfortunately, waiting is what battling cancer is mostly about. Waiting to see the doctor, waiting to hear test results, waiting to find out if those test results will result in a biopsy, waiting to find out if the biopsy is cancerous….the wait just never ends.

One would think that battling cancer would have taught me patience but in reality, all it has taught me is The Drill.

I know The Drill. Whatever medical test you are doing is precautionary, test comes back with questions or ‘concerns’. Somebody doesn’t call you to reassure you that it’s probably nothing, even the doctor who read the initial test said so but you don’t know this or hear this. Instead, you get a call out of the blue, a disembodied voice from an unknown and ominous sounding testing facility. The voice is saying you need to schedule an appointment for yet another, more complicated test. For a second, you go blank and you mentally free fall. Oh boy, do you know this feeling. This is precisely how you felt when you first heard you had cancer, wasn't it? This is followed, in short order, by a flurry of frantic phone calls, usually to the oncologist office wherein you try and get answers that nobody has.

Then?

More waiting. Finally somebody gets on the phone and forces out words of patience and caution. Don’t worry, the voice says, it’s probably nothing. The voice tells you to wait and see.

So, then more waiting. Waiting for the next appointment. Smiling politely when the technicians all tell you not to worry, the more complicated test is strictly precautionary, etc. God, but you have heard this before. Still, you try and listen when they tell you that nobody gets both uterine and breast cancer, in a two year period. It’s so very likely a fibroid, you repeat to yourself, it actually becomes your mantra. It will turn out to be nothing, nothing at all.

And yet, in your head, in the face of all that tsunami of logic and reason, all you can hear is that little voice saying back to you, “Yes, that’s what they said about me getting breast cancer in the first place.”

Cancer taught you that anything is possible, odds mean nothing.

So, you do the next test, you suck it up. You even get all the veins in your ‘good arm’ blown out by some well meaning doctor who clearly hasn’t stuck someone with a needle in 30 years. Your arm looks like somebody chased − and caught you − with a hammer. Black and blue up and down the length of your arm and you think, wow, my arm never looked this bad during chemo and I never even had a shunt.

Then it hits you, the ‘good arm’ is blown and if the test results come back with bad news, you don’t even have a ‘good arm’ for the surely necessary surgery IV. Crap, you think, how long will I have to wait for all this to heal? Tick, tick, tick, in your head the clock is already ticking and the cancer already spreading.

Or will they just ram an incredibly painful needle into some deep tissue vein in my leg and cut me open anyway? You try and shut down the screaming panic, the rabid fear inside your head. If only for a moment.

Then, because you have so much free time on your hands what with all the waiting and panic is supremely exhausting so you give in, you digress. You realize, if only for a second, that you are being morbid and totally paranoid and you take a prudent mental step back. Worse case, you think, a fibroid biopsy won’t require being put out and therefore you won’t need an IV, they can biopsy you anytime while that poor, beat up arm heals.

Because you think like that when you have fought cancer, you really do. Your body becomes nothing more than a flesh and blood map, muscle and skin, tissue and organ strategy for getting rid of what you are totally convinced is more cancer.

And this even after you have combed all the cancer survivor web sites and blogs and survivor postings and you know, you truly do, that all the bulletin postings of cancer survivors who have gone through the very same ordeal, they all seem to have come out of similar situations cancer free.

Oh sure, one or two had a D&C, a couple of others had their meds changed up, one woman with long term ‘plumbing issues’ even had a hysterectomy but still…overall, you cannot find one single posting of somebody who suffered what you are sure you are going to suffer, another form of cancer.

In the middle of this extended wait-panic-panic-some-more period, you find a crusty red spot on one of your legs and know, JUST KNOW, that it’s skin cancer. You rush to the dermatologist who tries to assure you that it is likely not skin cancer. Yeah right, you think. You don’t care how it looks, you ask, three times, for a biopsy but only because you don’t yet know how painful that particular procedure is. The doctor is nice, however so he does the biopsy. Then he tells you with humor, not to be so paranoid, that you have nothing to worry about with respect to the little crusty red mark on your leg and asks you to call him next Monday so he can tell you if the little crusty patch, now bleeding profusely, needs to be burned off.

Apparently, the ‘cure’ for ordinary skin cancer is quicker and less painful that the actual biopsy. You truly wish you had known that before you demanded the biopsy. And you honestly wonder why he didn’t just burn the dang thing off on the first visit. Your leg is now wrapped in layers of gauze and cotton. You had no idea one tiny spot, about the circumference of the average drinking straw on your leg could actually bleed so much. The needle must have been the diameter of a canon you think, as you fish out your black tights from the bottom of your sock and hosiery drawer.

Meanwhile, you are right back where you started from, this familiar caught in the middle of your non-life, on the verge of panic, trying not to freak out, trying more than anything else, to remain rational and calm and reasonable and all because?

You are back to waiting.

The Rabbit Hole

2011-10-10T12:48:00.000-07:00

I wax poetic a great deal about the metaphorical rabbit hole and how we cancer survivors stand on the brink and have to be ready to launch, head first, back into that terrifying round of tests, biopsy, surgery, radiation, chemo, more tests. The fear just never ends. So, when I got a call to schedule a MRI that I knew nothing about, I knew the drill: find out what the heck is going on, who ordered the test and why. This came on the heels of a perfectly clean (negative) mammogram so I was foolishly thinking it had to be some mistake.

Alas not. Seems the so-called routine scan on my pelvis may have found a possible fibroid but if there is good news, better on the uterus than the ovary. At least that’s what they are saying it is, ‘probably’, a fibroid. Probably. So they say. Maybe. Should be. We think.

Even when I 'worse case' this news in my head (and I always do), I logically know that uterine cancer is slow growing, that they would have caught it early, etc., etc., etc.

Does not help one bit since I don’t know what I am truly dealing with yet. And even though the test results say, ‘likely a fibroid’ my heart does not buy that for one single minute. I likely didn’t have breast cancer either and what was when I wasn’t considered high risk which is what I am considered now.

High risk. The very sound of it is ominous. That’s because the meds I take to stave off a recurrence of the breast cancer come with a slight increased risk for uterine cancer. And this when I already know that three out of four women get uterine fibroids at some point in their lives, they just don’t know about them because they tend to come and go, I could have had this for decades, blah, blah, blah.

God, but the fun never ends.

But news like this is where I excel. I have, as they say, A PLAN. Of course, it’s not a very good plan, certainly not rooted in logic or clearly thought out, but it’s a plan nonetheless.

My plan is basically this; when in doubt, take it out. I will have everything removed that can be removed. Sounds drastic, I know, but after what I’ve been through with chemo and surgeries, I’ll go under the knife again before I will knowingly risk chemo and cancer. I’ll go balls to the wall as we say in the cancer survivor business.

This scorched earth medical approach to my health is reflective of my panic-but-do-something personality. I have calls into my surgeon and every other doctor on my team, just in case I need to jump on this.

So while even though I know, logically, it is likely the fibroid they say it is, I am poised and ready.

Move over white rabbit, Alice may need to tumble down the hole and come for another visit.

Where is that smack talking, hookah toting caterpillar when you need him the most?

Chemo Rides Again..and Again

2011-10-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

I always appreciate someone who has a way with words. So, when my OB/GYN office called and left me a message, the caller was incredibly careful to say that the test results they wanted to discuss were of a ‘non-urgent’ nature. Meaning, I suppose, they remembered me and knew me quite capable of melting time and bending space over various quark-type universes if I didn’t get an answer. And this when I already could easily deduce that the call was simply to go over bone density baseline scan results. Meaning, I already knew the call was not directly related to cancer.

That being said, it’s a funny thing about chemo, turns out, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. And giving and giving. Always when you wish it wouldn’t. This is worse than your Great Aunt Tillie’s annual holiday fruitcake on crack. Post chemo, my dentist warned me my teeth and dental health could suffer long-term damage though he happily reported after an exam that this did not seem to be the case. Incredibly lucky was how he put it. Come to think on it, post chemo every other doctor I have met with has warned me that chemo could cause a virtual bolide of medical problems from now until death and we are still not so sure about after that.

Thus, some two years post-cancer, as I got scanned for my bone density baseline, I was annoyed to hear from the otherwise charming technician that yes, chemo can pretty much suck the very marrow from your bones and this before it ever blows all your chances of procreation. Really? What part of me doesn’t chemo ruin?? I wondered stormily at the time. It messes with your fertility, nuro pathways, energy level, blood, short term memory, teeth, immune system…

Am I missing anything?

This being National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, every women’s magazine I subscribe to is currently featuring some brave soul. A survivor story wherein the some woman has bravely confronted and beat breast cancer.

The beat cancer part always works for me but in that I am as brave as your average garden gnome, I am never that pleased to read about the astounding courage of my pink warrior sisters out there. Anyway, one of these women, who has valor written all over her, wrote about chemo and how she got chicken pox or as we adults tend to call it, shingles. Having never had so much as a sniffle during chemo, I silently counted myself lucky. The woman in the article I read ended up in the hospital and not just one time. Me, I crawled under the covers in my bed and suffered, as I am wont to do, mostly in silence. Plus, it was simply too exhausting to complain out loud, seriously.

I did feel like a connection with a certain television journalist who said that post chemo, she forgot everything and wondered if it was being in her 50s or the fallout from chemo. Trust me, girlfriend, it’s from the chemo. And I had to smile when she said that leg pains convinced her that she had bone cancer.

Its neuropathy or maybe even generic leg cramps from the tamoxafin trust me, I would know. I am a virtual buffet of what ifs and brace yourself, medically speaking. And turns out, everything is within normal save for L1-L4 which could use a bit of, no surprise, calcium. The femurs are at risk but most of the spine is within normal range yes, despite the ravaging effects of chemo. My BFF, who has GREAT bones (though her joints totally suck), said despite the fact that I don’t like my weight right now, I still have teeny, tiny bones. OK, I am small boned and that combined with my maternal history of broken hips, puts me at risk genetically, chemo notwithstanding.

So, another gift from chemo, more health-related issues on my daily to-do list which pretty much, since vanquishing cancer, has gone like this:

1. Get Up

2. Go to work

3. Be nice to everyone

4. Lose some weight

5. Don’t get cancer again

And come to think on it, not a bad list after all.

Farewell To Genius

2011-10-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

I am not sure what to say that thousands have not already said about iconic Steven Jobs. A modern day Da Vinci, a visionary, perfectionist, icon, genius.

But he was also a father, a husband, a brother, a friend.

And yet, the press in their frantic quest to disseminate the news may forget that.

I met Jobs once, in the line at the Whole Foods in Palo Alto, some ten years ago. He had eggs, which the star struck cashier promptly dropped, spattering broken egg shells all over the counter. Jobs smiled shyly at me, self consciously, and asked if I would hold his place in line while he got another dozen eggs.

Would I? I nearly fainted, the guy was so cute and frankly, hot. And while the poor star-struck cashier hastily mopped up bits of broken yolk and shell, Jobs apologetically smiled again and bought his eggs while we shared a few comments. He remarked that his wife also liked the spa around the corner that I was spending the day at; we both smiled knowingly at the nervous grocery store clerk whom I was fairly certain was going to faint dead away and finally, he said thanks to me − though I’m not sure what for, and with that he was gone.

The icon had left the building.

So for me, Jobs was also a regular guy, and all just because of that one chance encounter. A dad picking up eggs on his way home for the wife and kids. I liked that image of him and once I knew that both he and I had fought cancer, I felt a certain kindred spirit with the man. I had no clue what it would be like to be mercilessly hounded by the press and Apple fanatics on a worldwide basis, but I knew what it was to fight cancer. So, on some very deep and abiding level, I am pretty sure I got Jobs, that I got what drove him.

The job, the amazing career, the revolutionizing the electronics industry, all great accomplishments he achieved, I know that Jobs would trade it all, as would I in his place for something that none of us, no matter how profound our impact on the world or our genius, can have more of: time.

Negative, That’s A Beautiful, Perfect Negative

2011-10-05T12:29:00.000-07:00

Post cancer, I’m no day at the beach when it comes to doctor appointments or even the most mundane, standard medical tests. In fact, I feel sorry for anyone who has to deal with me. I’m usually so distracted and wound up and edgy thinking of the (bad) news I might receive that I morph into this entirely different person. This is why I actually decided to take an entire day off for all my medical appointments. I can only wedge three or four into one day but it’s also enough that I get my mammogram, right on schedule.

Mammograms are only briefly uncomfortable, you feel a sort of pinch when the machine clamps down on tender breast tissue for about ten seconds but nothing else. It takes only a short amount of time to complete too. This is why I was so surprised to meet the director of the breast cancer center where they have always taken such good care of me. That’s where my go-to man Andrew works too. He's the amazing young man who displays such compassion and professionalism under such pressure. And trust me, when you need answers and something is wrong, that's a lot of pressure but Andrew handles it with such grace and care that I have to thank his mom who must have raised him right. You can tell when someone is special, has that gift with people the way Andrew does.

So back to my mammo. There I was, garbed in that bathrobe-y thing you wear for your mammo, trying to relearn to breathe in the changing room when somebody knocked on the door and introduced herself as the director of the center.

What, I thought, with characteristic humor, have I done now?

But it turns out, I'd actually done nothing wrong. For once I mean.

The director had simply heard I was coming in and wanted to make sure I was ok.

Huh?

It was my blog folks, she’d read it. And I had written, months ago, an entry about my original (horrific) experience of learning I had cancer. What was not clear, however, was that the incident in question took place at an entirely different facility. Meaning, the great folks at this particular place, had absolutely nothing to do with my first, initial terrible experience. I hope I was able to convey to the lovely director that much, I am sure I wasn’t being very cohesive in my conversation because when it comes to mammograms, I have trouble breathing, much less thinking.

What I never was able to say to her, at least not in the way that I really wanted to, was that The Breast Care Center is where I go to feel safe. I do not like having tests and sometimes I’m frankly terrified of the impending results but I do feel safe when I am there. They know I’m a cancer survivor, they know how we survivors roll, one day at a time, forever on the edge of having to go back down the rabbit hole at a moment’s notice. They get it. They are gentle, professional, imminently kind and thorough. I could not ask for a better place to get my testing done nor a more compassionate staff of professionals.

This is all very good for the likes of me who has been known to scour the Internet to find out if my odds of long-term survival have changed in any way. Thus I know that if you get past certain years; two, five, nine, your odds go up. The inspiring Elizabeth Edwards never made it past two years (post treatment) before her cancer returned with a vengeance.

We miss you Elizabeth.

So, I knew better than most how important that two year milestone was going to be. I mentally prepared myself to wait for the inevitable (treasured more than gold) pink letter detailing the ‘all clear’ in the mail. Takes about three to four days usually.

But the fates were on my side on the day of my mammogram because that kind woman who’d read my blog actually got the doctor to read my film the very same day so I knew.

I knew because she actually took a few minutes from her impossibly busy schedule to call me and tell me the results. I missed the call but not the news and then?

I wept.

I wept for the most beautiful word in the world to me, ‘negative’ and I wept for the kindness of a near stranger who understood the fear and the pain we cancer survivors live with every single day.

And I wept at the vision that had come to me the instant I heard the word 'negative' on the message. As I heard the good news, I saw, in a flash, my granddaughter Baby Claudia, at around the age of 7 wearing a frothy pink tutu, power pink ballet slippers slung casually over her tiny shoulder and her funny pink legwarmers lopsided and endearing because I already know that's the way Baby CJ would wear them. In this vision, I was holding her tiny hand and greeting a little boy, about five. He was clad head to toe in hockey goalie gear, stick in hand, nearly completely round in his padding and gear. He had not even changed out of his tiny skates.

My God, I thought, as I took a deep breath willing the vision to continue, that’s my future grandson. And the image of the two of them, with me picking them up from hockey and ballet practice was so real I could actually feel the hard plastic of the hockey helmet my not-yet-conceived grandson was wearing and I bent down to kiss his head in greeting and he, already totally cool at five, tapped me lightly on the thigh with his stick in a return standard-hockey issue greeting. Clearly, my future grandson had been watching some major hockey with his parents. I felt the shape and feel of Baby Claudia’s hand none better because she has my hands, her Nana's hands.

My God, I realized, I am going to have that moment.

I’m still going to be here.

Now That’s A Wrap

2011-09-30T16:03:00.000-07:00

Staying healthy. It is more important than ever, post cancer. I was eating well and exercising before cancer but now, eating right has become a bit of an obsession. Organic, healthy, fresh, antioxidants….the mind boggles as the kitchen heats up.

I cannot afford to not pay attention to my health and what goes in my body these days. I spend time at the local farmer’s market in Milpitas, CA; ensuring that my fruit and vegetables are straight from the field and tree and organic. I am therefore often left to ponder what to do with leftover vegetables — this happens a great deal as it turns out — vegetables tend to take up residence in my refrigerator crisper and refuse to leave, like unwanted relatives during the holidays. This means that I have to be inventive. My new favorite tip for getting rid of vegetables that have seen better days and main dish leftovers that are close to taking a header into the trash, is to wrap a spoonful of leftovers in large spring roll wraps and then bake, not fry. I sometimes use frozen/thawed puff pastry, especially for leftover fruit. Both disguise mundane leftovers elegantly. I buy my frozen puff pastry and frozen wraps from an Indian market about a 20 minute drive from my house. I only get there about once a month (the location is kitty corner to my beloved hair dresser) so that’s when I stock up. Those kinds of ingredients are just half the price I pay at my local grocery store and very handy to keep in my freezer. That particular ethnic market caters to the tastes and budgets of locals who have relocated from India so the prices are frankly amazing. I have no idea what most of the spices are used for but I can still find a lot of what I use regularly in my kitchen and always at a steep discount. As to the wraps, I just sprinkle with a bit of cheese, wrap, bake for 20 minutes in a 350ºF oven and voila, an elegant appetizer.

Oh, and a nice way to trick yourself into eating more vegetables. It’s hard, this whole eat more vegetables thing because nobody else in my life seems to want to tag along. My beau the fire captain is horrified by what he calls my, ‘weeds and sticks’. My daughter and her husband politely push them around the plate unless I’ve smothered the offending side dish in my signature cheese sauce. Baby CJ eats vegetables alright but hers tend to frankly be mush. My BFF hardly eats veggies, she loathes mushrooms, broccoli (the root of all evil if you ask Jill) and many others. On the other hand, she can outgrow me in the vegetable garden department any day of the week without so much as chipping a finely manicured nail. At the height of summer, her tomatoes knock on my door all by themselves. I won’t even tell you how her criminally minded squash behaves, it’s appalling really. You would think her vegetables were raised in a barn when in reality, they were nurtured lovingly on her back patio in containers and carefully shielded from the antics of her two rambunctious Welsh Springer Spaniels. Her vegetables ae the equivalent of toddlers and tiaras, or maybe prep school kids who need a serious dose of reality working at the Golden Arches. Those plants just don't know how good they have it.

I am of the belief that how you eat all depends on how you grew up and what you ate during your formative years. All my friends and colleagues from Asia bemoan the lack of veggies every time they visit and we are talking California, people, a.k.a, Planet Veggie. Even I will admit to a sort of inverse reaction every time I travel to Asia. By the time I return home, I’m pretty darn sick of stir fried veggies, no matter how well prepared.

In-between feeling smug about saving money at the Indian and farmer’s markets, I can blow a huge amount of cash at Whole Foods, the other end of the food cost spectrum. First, I get all Baby Claudia’s organic juice and snacks there and then I reward myself with a cruise through the deli and bread sections. Their cheese selection is frankly amazing and I’ve been known to wrap oncology check-ups around a lunch time visit to the nearby Whole Foods. I convinced myself I am making up for whatever gastronomic excess crime I willingly commit by paying homage to the bulk goods bin aisle where one can purchase everything from grains to nuts in bulk. I sometimes even spring for something shamefully dulcet from the bakery for my daughter because I’m not personally huge on sweets. Just give me carbs and I am happy. But this doesn’t wipe out my culinary crimes, I know.

Still, I keep trying. I nibble blueberries at work and grill vegetable layered cheese sandwiches that everyone loves. I watch my carb intake and I don’t eat meat though shellfish is a not-so-secret favorite. For some unfathomable reason that I am sure has to do with my many character flaws, the outrage I express at the cruelty of slaughtering mammals doesn’t quite extend to the phylum Mollusca, the class Crustacea (phylum Arthropoda), or the phylum Echinodermata. Though I would never personally plunge a live lobster into a pot of boiling water (horrors!), my own personal flavor of hypocrisy never seems to prevent me from enjoying lobster, shrimp, crab and oysters on a semi-regular basis. I adore shellfish but am clearly too lazy to actively prepare these delicacies for myself. So when out on business or at a restaurant, I’ve been known to send a Crustacea down the gullet with nary a twinge of remorse.

Like I said, it must have something to do with flaws in my character.

And right after a serious discussion with a plate of lobster ravioli, I’m going to get right to work on that.

Trust and Believe

2011-09-29T16:45:00.000-07:00

Perfection. It is in the eye of the beholder and no more so than someone who has fought the Big C. Two days ago, I had just such an evening, not even a moment, an entire evening and all because I willed it to be so.

My son-in-law, grand baby and daughter were all home for the evening, unusual to say the least. The place was a mess, very usual, and they were bar-be-quing.

Another mess, served up medium rare, in this case. Yet it was a perfect evening. I made pasta (because I know Baby Claudia and pasta is her favorite thing in the entire universe next to the Sprout Channel), my daughter made salad and a side dish. We bumped elbows in the kitchen, took turns picking up the baby who has developed a fascination with something inside the pantry. We shooed the dogs out of the way, tried to unload and reload the dishwasher (my least favorite chore of all time). Somebody took out the garbage without being asked. My son-in-law happily charred animal flesh on the grill on the back deck. The dogs ran in and out of the house, alternating barking idiotically with play fighting as if their puppy lives depended upon it. When my daughter put a cooing Baby Claudia in her highchair, I blurted out in a whisper, “I am so happy, I'm afraid to trust it.”

“Me too,” Brittany confessed.

But I say trust the happiness. Trust in those perfect moments of babies eating pasta with their tiny, pudgy hands, smearing it in their hair. Trust two mangy dogs that nibble the fallen leftovers off chubby baby legs while baby giggles because it tickles. Trust those moments of perfection because they are there, they really are.

Trust the baby who dances to music flowing from the Sprout Channel and the dog who snoozes; snoring soundly atop your son-in-law’s reclining head as it if were a pillow. Trust the golden glow from a fading sunset and the preseason hockey game where your favorite players aren’t even on the ice. It’s going to be fine; the coach is just weeding out the line up. Yes, yes of course your team has a shot at the Stanley Cup this season; trust and believe.

Trust and believe that there will be many, many more moments of perfection and happiness, wrought of ordinary times, mundane events, the very fabric that makes up a life worth living. You might not even mind unloading the dishwasher, if only you leave yourself open to absolute perfection.

You have only to allow yourself the gift of being completely and utterly in the moment.

A Helping Hand

2011-09-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

I should be more mindful of people’s feelings. It’s nearly October, which is Halloween season in my family and this when I have a rather macabre sense of humor on the best of days. This is probably why it never occurred to me to remove the dollar store find from my desk top, a plastic, bloody hand. One of my favorite people in the company is coming from the U.K. and he has a bent sense of humor. I thought ‘extending a hand’ was sort of a funny greeting so I left the hand on my desk.

I totally forgot about everyone else who comes into my office. My work BFF Nina never flinched, nor did the people who report to me. Most are used to my silent pranks by now. The nice man who brings lunch over from the company cafeteria, however, was not amused. I had ordered my usual, a tuna fish on whole wheat, and right on schedule, he arrived to deliver it, along with a few dozen other employee’s noon time meals. But instead of chatting me up and collecting his $4.25, he backed out of my office flinging his arms and wearing a horrified look on his face before he realized the bloody hand was fake.

Cut the guy some slack, he works with food all day, ok?

Still, I felt kind of bad, I usually like to stalk my victims, fine tuning my jokes mercilessly and delivering the goods with precise, dry timing. Deadpan if you get my drift. I never meant to nearly give the nice delivery guy a heart attack.

That sort of mindset must be saved for abusive ex husbands and cheating ex-boyfriends.

I felt so bad about this inadvertent prank (in-between snickering under my breath of course) that I stuck a bunch of fake blood splatters, gel like splotches, on my office window so at least if somebody tries to enter my office, they won’t be caught completely unaware. How festive. Though they probably won’t not even notice if they are a VP or something. But at least it’s a warning of sorts.

Meanwhile, it occurs to me that I could use a good laugh, I know all the research on staying healthy says a good laugh (if not a glass of wine) will improve your spirits. And being that this isn’t Italy, I can’t toast with vino at work so I’ll have to stick to silly pranks for now.

Back to the dollar store, I think I saw a packet of severed plastic fingers there with my name on them….

Survivor’s Circle

2011-09-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

I am coated in calamine lotion as we speak. At least my forearms are. I am not sure if this is poison oak , I didn’t even know if those things grow at Quarry Lake in Fremont, CA, but I’m itching and coated in a pinkish powdery film. Some hikers web site, post-itch, says that the area has a lot of poison oak though I never touched any foliage. This probably wouldn’t have mattered. I have a sibling so violently allergic to poison oak and poison ivy that she can get it just from breathing near the stuff and end up in the hospital with a swollen throat. So, maybe I’m more sensitive than I know.
But even with all the itching, I’ve never been better, thanks. I participated in the HERs Breast Cancer Foundation fundraiser this past weekend. An event that necessitated me getting there around 6 a.m.
Yes, 6 a.m.
Generally speaking, the only thing that gets me up that early is a stranger, usually a pilot employed by United Airlines; specifically, a flight to somewhere that is leaving at 6 a.m. But it was worth it, despite lying in bed at 4:45 a.m., awake, and wondering what insanity I had wrought with this decision.
It was a beautiful day and if you live in the Bay Area, you know that September is always mixed bag, weather wise. It can dawn fair and mild or it can be sizzle into the triple digits by 10 a.m. You can also get an annoying rainy drizzle which is what happened on Sunday but as this event was held on Saturday, we were blessed with great weather. The park was humming with activity by the time I arrived though the sky was still a smudge of midnight blue; the sun wasn’t even up. My company was also a corporate sponsor so I wanted to set up our booth before we did the 5K walk. I was tagged to participate in the survivor’s circle, something I had mixed feelings about. So many who could not be there with us, it was going to be hard and surprisingly, I don’t like the limelight. I prefer to move quietly behind the scenes to make things happen.
Plus, after being in that chemo room with so many heroic people, I honestly don’t think of myself as special in any way.
Still, there was something reassuring about wearing the pink tee shirt HERs gives to survivors. We seek each other out; after all, we all speak the same language. We know cancer shorthand, can ask about treatment, years/months clean, prognosis, hair growing back, you name it, all in a heartbeat and without pussy footing around. It’s calming somehow, to talk to a survivor of triple negative (a most aggressive form of breast cancer) who is sliding past year nine of being cancer free. One woman in the survivor’s circle had 35 years cancer free. That’s what I want, I thought to myself when they announced it.
I want to be cancer free 35 years from now, enjoying Baby Claudia with her children, my future great grandchildren.
Speaking of Baby CJ, as usual, when it is a big event, Claudia does not disappoint. She held court for hours, getting her cheeks pinched, strangers trying to cuddle her, play with her, talk to her, and she had not even one melt down. In fact, she didn’t even fuss, not even on the long walk. She smiled, cooed, waved and yes, participated. In fact, she kicked her feet happily during the walk as if to urge us on to a faster pace. Go! Go! Go! I could almost hear her baby thoughts as we walked the 3 miles around the lake:

We should totally do the 10K next year, Claudia was thinking. Look at all the other babies in their strollers with their moms and nanas, this is just so great….why is mom talking to that lady about a double stroller? Is there something going on that I don’t know about???
Not yet CJ, but your mom would dearly love to give you a baby brother in the next couple of years.
The day started out emotionally difficult for my daughter, as I knew it would be. After all, reminders that she’d nearly lost me surrounded her. She arrived with CJ wreathed in smiles and her own face damp with tears.
I know honey, it’s hard to remember what we all went through.
But being that it was my amazing daughter, she pasted a smile on her face, took a deep breath and plunged into the festivities of the day. There were dogs to pet, booths to explore, food (lots of that thankfully as CJ is seriously not a morning baby and feeding her is a full-time job most days), pre-walk/run warm up, ceremonies, cheering on the runners (and there were some serious runners participating in the 10K), it was a full day.
I did fine during the survivor’s ceremony though I dithered in my head about what to say when they put the microphone in front of me. Next month I’ll be cancer free two years but for today, I decided it was one year, eleven months. Best not to tempt fate, I decided.
There was a moment when we in the survivors circle were handed small picnic baskets that I instantly realized something was moving inside of them. The survivors next to me explained that they were actually homing doves and we released them into the air, they flew around in graceful circles overhead a few times before returning to their owner who generously supplied them for the event every year.
Our dove was absolutely huge and Ninja like so I kept a tentative finger on the edge of the basket (my version of being supportive) and watched the nice lady next to me release our frantic feathered friend into the skies beyond. Clearly, our dove had descended directly from pterodactyls straight out of the Jurassic period. I did ponder, albeit briefly, how my beloved Staffie Sophia Eleanora would have cherished this moment and made a mental note not to bring her to the event next year no matter how well trained she was. Raw bird is one of her favorite things in the world or so one would think by the way she stalks them. I know CJ would want Sophie to come and walk with all the other cool, well trained dogs, but I knew that it wasn’t in the cards. I made another mental note to explain the concept of ‘prey instinct’ to CJ when she got older.
Three miles and many other participants takes a bit of walking so my daughter and I actually had some time to talk. And not about baby teething or bottles or pampie changes. It was about life. She was struggling over the age-old notion of being a stay at home mom versus having a career. Kids, I reassured her, are more important than anything, so if you and your husband decide you should stay home for a few more years, go for it. I never had that choice, my ex (her father) forced me back to work with his threats and rages and endless demands for money, something I figured she was old enough to know about. Sadly, she wasn’t surprised. Other than that, the conversation was positive and life affirming.
“Maybe I’ll be pregnant again this time next year,” Brittany remarked thoughtfully as we trudged along, CJ’s feet kicking with excitement as we neared the finish line. Faster mom and Nana, FASTER!!!
Which led into my silent question, pregnant or no, would she want to do this again? As we pulled CJ out of her stroller for a much needed bottle, pampie change and snack, I dearly wanted reassurances that we could make this an annual mother-daughter-granddaughter event. It had meant that much to me, the connection I shared not only with my family but all the other survivors.
“CJ is going to need a cool new outfit for this event next year,” Brittany said out of the blue as she changed her in the shady grass behind our booth.
“And you might need a maternity top,” I added.
We both smiled.

Walking Happy

2011-09-23T13:04:00.000-07:00

I got asked this week to give a motivational speech in the weekly executive meeting. This in itself is not unusual though most directors where I work seem to avoid doing it. But I like it, generally speaking, especially if I can add value to anyone’s life. This week’s topic is about happiness and how to get it.

Happy, as it turns out, is an elusive creature, stalked, hunted, dreamt of, hoped for, but more often than not, not worked on. Turns out, after a whole bunch of research, happy is a state of mind and like anything worth having, you actually have to work at it. It doesn’t get handed to you, not even if you win the lottery. Especially if you win the lottery. You don’t suddenly ‘get happier’ because your money troubles have gone away.

Yup, money doesn’t make you happier. Money makes you more comfortable and you probably won’t worry about money like you used to, pre-lottery win, but overall, you won’t be any happier.

That being said, most people would still prefer to find this out on their own, you know, by actually winning the lottery anyway.

But back to the pursuit of happy. I was shocked to read in research that good health was down on the list of things that make one happy. Meaning, sick people can be happy and healthy people can be miserable, it’s all what you choose to believe, the level of optimism in your head. I suppose that’s true, I’ve met a lot of people fighting cancer and while they were physically ill and feeling pretty awful from the ravaging effects of chemo, I would not call them collectively unhappy. Many were just thrilled to be alive. Mad like me about getting cancer, yes, but not unhappy.

Cancer will give you a perspective on happiness like none other. If you win the battle against cancer then you know what it is to fight for your very life. And nothing, trust me, nothing else matters. Not winning the lottery, not even feeling horrible most of the time. Once you distill your entire world down to surviving, you find yourself pretty easy to please and it doesn’t take much to make you happy.

I have friends, people I dearly love even, who are not happy by nature. Everything is a trial, negative, a chore, a bother. It seems to be their nature. I grew up in a very negative, critical environment so I know precisely how they feel. But when I find myself getting that way — and old habits are deeply ingrained, I snap myself right out of it by reminding myself that I’m still here.

I am here, pain and all, incredible fatigue and all, fear and all, I’m still here. I started grumbling about having to get up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday and then it hit me, hey, I’m LUCKY. I get to walk in an amazing breast cancer fundraiser for the HERs Breast Cancer Foundation, the survivor’s lap even, and not everyone who has been through what I’ve endured, can do it. They are either, well dead, too sick or too infirm but I’m not, I can do it. I have the gift of being able to be absolutely present in all aspects of my life.

It is no longer a gift I take for granted.

For more information about the HERs fundraiser, go to: http://hersbreastcancerfoundation.org/keep-abreast-walk/