Worst Case Scenario

Back when I first starting having pain in the upper outer quadrant of my left breast, I figured, "It can't possibly cancer."

I mean, that would be the worst case scenario, right?

Then, when the doctor felt the thickening and sent me for an ultrasound I still thought there was no way it was cancer. Other people get cancer, but not me and those closest to me.

The day of the ultrasound, they found the mass. They did a biopsy that day. Still, it couldn't be cancer. I mean, I have two kids who need me. I have parents who would be devastated to lose me. Yes, I'm just like every other woman in the world who has loved ones but still, it couldn't be cancer. Heck, even the doctor who talked to me on the phone the day of the ultrasound and biopsy told me the chances of it being cancer were very small.

The weekend after the ultrasound/biopsy, I told my mom often that the chances of my mass being cancer were very small. I was just sure it was nothing.

It was something. When I saw that I had a missed call from my doctor on Sunday afternoon, I knew. I mean...doctors don't call on a Sunday with good news. I had time to brace myself for the news. The worst case scenario news.

Except...even though it's triple negative cancer, it wasn't the worst case scenario. Sure, cancer is a hard word to hear but being told it's stage 1 helps. The mass was small, we'd caught it early.

Every step of the way from the day of diagnosis until now has worked out in a 'best-case-scenario' kind of way.

When I met with the oncologist and we discussed the plan of action for my treatment, he told me, "This chemo will make you lose your hair."

Okay.

I was okay with that. I told myself my hair was a small price to pay to buy decades of life and health with my family.

But deep down, the thought of being bald bothered me. Wouldn't it bother most people?

And get this...not all chemotherapy drugs make you lose your hair. Why did I have to have one of them that practically guarantees it? I didn't lament this long but I confess that I did think about it more than I wanted to.

But you know what? The worst case scenario of losing my hair hasn't been so bad. Now that it's gone, it's just...not a big deal. I look at myself every single day and it's not a big deal. It's just hair. It will probably grow back.

I'm living through a couple of worst case scenarios here. What I take away from that sentence is that I'm living. I'm here. I'm fighting for years with my girls, with my husband, who has been a champion caregiver. I'm getting years with my parents and my brothers. I'm alive and I'm still fighting. Cancer hasn't beaten me physically and baldness hasn't beaten me emotionally.

It's amazing when the worst case scenarios come true and you realize that they aren't nearly as scary as you thought they would be. You just keep on getting up each day and living your life. The worry before the diagnosis was worse than living day to day with the diagnosis.

Maybe I can take that forward with me into 2018. I'm definitely going to try.

Here I am...all bald and handling it just fine:

Figuring Things Out

I'm not sure how to do this. I mean, I've worked my entire life. I've had a job since I was sixteen, with a couple of months here and there where I didn't. So this is new. It helps that right now, it's Christmas break and the girls are home. But when they go back to school...things will be weird.

I have so much I want to do around the house, things that have been on the backburner basically since we moved in over seven years ago. Rooms need to be organized, closets need to be cleaned out.

And yet, there's still weekly chemo that I'll need to work around. So far my biggest complaint about this current chemo is the dry, red eyes I'm experiencing. I hope that's normal. Who knows? I guess I can ask the nurses when I go back on Wednesday.

But who am I if I'm not working? If I'm not a HR representative...who am I?

I'm Lyss's and Liv's mom. I'm Tom's wife. I'm Evelyn's daughter and Jason's and Mitchell's sister. But who am I besides those things?

I guess now is the time to figure that out. Am I the person who goes back to bed after the girls are on the bus? Will I stay up and actually accomplish things on a daily basis?

I admit to being inherently lazy. I do like my sleep. And bonus! I have the excuse of chemo for wanting needing more sleep. So I guess we'll see how much I use the chemo excuse now that I'm not working and can't use that as my reason for wanting a nap after lunch on a day when I rolled out of bed at 9am.

All I really know is that 2018 better bring nothing but awesomeness.

2017 has kind of sucked, if you want the truth. We'll be happy to say good riddance to 2017 and ring in 2018. 2018 is going to be the year for figuring it all out.

Cupcake?

I started the new chemo on Tuesday. There were lots of dire warnings about this chemo. It's Taxol. The nurses went on and on about allergic reactions. They talked about how they'd treat any reactions. They talked about how important it was to do the first treatment in Fort Wayne where there is plenty of staff to watch over me while the chemo was being administered because of the risk of a reaction.

Before they even started the actual chemo I was given three different meds that were supposed to stop any potential reactions before they started. The three medicines were a steroid, Benedryl, and Pepsid. All of these were given through my port.

Can I just say right here that getting Benedryl intravenously makes it take affect almost immediately. I could feel my mouth drying up, my speech started slur and the sleepiness kicked in before I even really realized it.

But, on the bright side, I didn't have any of the potential allergic reactions. I 'behaved' just as the nurses told me to.

As I dozed while the chemo was dripping into my port, I heard a volunteer a few chairs down from me. She was offering someone a cupcake.

I will confess right here that the offer of a cupcake woke me right up. It stopped that Benedryl drowsiness right in its tracks.

Who knew a cupcake could have such power?

By the way...that was a delicious cupcake.

End of an Era

Yesterday I finished up a 17 year run at my job. The plant where I worked is closing next Friday for good. Because of this, I decided to take long-term disability starting today.

Non-coincidentally, I start weekly chemo today. So there's that.

I enjoyed my work. I was lucky enough to work with people who were mostly kind, mostly hard-working. Sure, there were bumps in the road over the seventeen years but they were good years.

And now...I start my time off. I start my journey toward getting well, getting healthy, being strong for my family and for myself.

Here's to the new chapter.

Sudden Plans

As with most high school kids, Alyssa’s social life seems to have developed a life of its own lately. Which is great, right?

But wait. Alyssa also has a mom who is going through chemo and doesn’t always feel well and she has a dad, who, while wonderful and helpful and awesome before 7pm, tends to pass out on the couch by 7:10pm.

One of Lyss’s new friends is a junior. A junior who drives. Yay!

Yay?

Sure, great. New friend can take Lyss to the required basketball games at which the band must play and bust out the pep.

The problem comes when Alyssa’s mom wants to go to bed at 9:30 on a Friday night after she’s had chemo the previous Tuesday. And yet, she actually can’t because Alyssa is not home yet from the basketball game that started at 7:00pm and should have probably ended at 8:30 at the latest. And Alyssa is not answering her phone. Why does she even have a phone if she doesn’t answer the damned thing?

Alyssa’s mom doesn’t feel like she can go to bed until she knows where Alyssa is and when Alyssa will be home. I mean, Alyssa is still only fourteen even if she does have friends who have driver’s license and CARS for Pete Sakes!

When Alyssa finally texts her mom to say that two of her friends are ‘bored’ and want to hang out, her mom is annoyed. But she responds with, “Where? You need to call me.”

Alyssa finally calls her mom fifteen minutes later and they talk. The friends want to hang out at a friend’s house in town. The parents are home and are okay with these last-minute plans.

Alyssa’s mom wants to know when Lyss will be home. Lyss doesn’t know.

Her mom decides for her. “You can hang out until eleven. Then you need to be home. I’m tired and you’re fourteen.”

Alyssa, smart girl that she is, agrees to be home at 11:00.

Mom settles in, all achy and yuck, to wait until 11:00 to go to bed. She’s not thrilled about it but vaguely remembers being a teenager about a million years ago and wants her daughter to enjoy this time of her life.

But there will be a conversation when the teenager gets home that evening. Or maybe it will wait until morning when Mom feels a little better and is rested.

The conversation, when it happens, goes well and Alyssa understands. She gets why her mom needs to know where she is and needs some sort of idea of when she’ll be home. She remembers that she’s fourteen (sure, she’ll be fifteen in a month but still…)

Then…THEN!!! Sunday evening rolls around.

It’s 7:20. Alyssa asks if Funniest Home Videos is on that night.

I (I know I’m changing from third person to first person when referring to myself…I don’t care.) pause as I’m washing dishes to tell her that yes, it’s on right that very minute.

“What?” she exclaims. “I thought it started at 8:00.”

“It has been starting at 8:00 but tonight it went back to a start time of 7:00.”

“Why?” she demands to know, like I’m privy to the scheduling reasons of ABC.

I shrug and wash a plate.

She then said, rather hesitantly, “Well, I kind of wanted to know if Nina could come over and watch Funniest Home Videos.”

“Tonight?” I asked.

See, let me pause here in this narrative and mentioned that I consider myself an outgoing introvert. I can be social and friendly but I get absolutely no energy from other people. Other people, even my own beautiful, loving family, suck my energy dry and I NEED alone time to re-energize. So having people over saps me.

But I do realize that teenagers thrive on friends and spending time with said friends. And so…

Lyss sort of hung her head and appeared to almost wish she hadn’t asked the question but she didn’t take the question back. She nodded and waited for my answer.

I mentioned the sudden plans to Tom. He started to get loud. I told him that I thought we should allow it that night but going forward, Alyssa needed (she was in earshot, listening to this entire conversation) to give us more than twenty minutes’ notice if/when friends were coming over.

I informed her, as I said, she was RIGHT THERE, that we’d allow the visit from Nina that night but going forward, if she asked for such a thing in the future, the answer would be no. If she wants to have company, she needs to give us at least a few hours’ notice, preferably making such plans a day in advance if possible.

I know that teenagers are notorious for deciding at 6pm that they’re bored and deciding to hang with friends at 6:30 that same night.

But I am no longer a teenager and I don’t want to deal with such sudden plans. I don’t feel good enough these days to put up with those kinds of shenanigans.

And I will use the “You know, ordinarily it wouldn’t be a big deal but…chemo!” excuse with much liberty these days. I have to deal with all the side effects of chemo, I should get at least the smallest benefits (other than the, hopefully, never having cancer BIG main effect of it…)

Anyway, all this to say that teenagers and their sudden changes of plans might lead me straight to a padded cell yet.

Another Thing Olivia Said

I have some “Christmas” earrings that are penguins with red scarves.

I also have a scarf that has a gray background with some penguins in green and red sweaters and other penguins with green and red scarves around their necks and ice skates on their little webbed feet.

Olivia asked me last weekend, “So what, exactly, makes penguins Christmasy?”

The snark is strong with this one.

Some Truths

Now that the last BIG chemo is over, I feel like I can look back and make a decent report on how it went.

First of all, I guess I should say it wasn’t as horrible as I’d anticipated when I thought about CHEMO before it started. I mean, it wasn’t a dance in the rain but there was no puke and very little diarrhea, so there’s that.

But it wasn’t easy.

The first day of chemo is always the easiest. I mean, sitting there with a needle in your chest isn’t fun but there are no feelings of illness or nausea. No, that comes a couple of days later.

The day after chemo isn’t bad. It’s not necessarily good but mostly I just felt like I was coming down with something. Which I guess I sort of was, namely, the Chemo Aches.

I did wake up sweaty the night after chemo and that was always gross.

By the third day after chemo, though, life is hard. I ached from top to bottom. My very skin ached. I mostly just needed to be left alone to sleep. Nothing else helped.

The fourth day, ugh. The intestinal issues kicked in. It wasn’t so much diarrhea, though, which is what I feared. Stop reading here if you don’t want to read about poop talk. It’s okay. Really. But I’m all about being truthful about what this chemo trip has been like.

So yes, on the Fourth day after chemo (Saturdays for me) I would wake up and NOT have my usual morning poop. When I’m not having poison pumped into my very veins, I am a VERY regular pooper. But come the Saturday after chemo and my scheduled is MESSED UP. And I feel terrible all day until I finally do poop, which often took several tries and much straining on the stupid toilet. And stupid me, I never just stayed home and waited it out. No, I took the girls to town, had lunch, went to Walmart to buy groceries. So I found myself in the bathroom at Walmart on several Saturdays after chemo, straining to poop, wishing I could JUST poop because I would feel SO MUCH better once I’d pooped just once. It was as if that first poop on those Saturdays was stopping up the entire system and once it was out of the way, things were on their way to being back to normal. Not quite normal yet but on the way.

We are now over a week out from chemo and things are better. I have more energy. I feel pretty good.

But there are still remnants from chemo.

For one, my pee smells horrible. I figure this is just my bodies way of eliminated the poison of chemo and so of course it stinks. It’s just nasty.

I have a weird taste in my mouth still. Not metallic so much as just yuck. Gum helps and I drink a lot of water, which leads to more stinky pee.

My skin is dry but not extraordinarily dry. I mean, it could just be that it’s winter in the Midwest more so than having anything to do with chemo.

So that’s it. That my report on how chemo went for me. At least how the first four chemo infusions went, which were a combination of Adriamycin and Cytoxan. I was also given Neulasta, a weird patch thingy that injects medicine into your arm 24 hours after a chemotherapy infusion. It’s supposed to boost my immune system. I think it also made me feel a little crappy. But who really knows?

Next up…weekly chemo infusions in which the medicine is Taxol. I’ve been assured by all the of the chemo nurses I’ve encountered so far that taxol is not nearly as physically hard on a body at the Adriamycin and Cytoxan cocktail I’ve endured the past nine weeks.

We’ll see and you can rest assured I’ll be here to report on it as we make our way through the next twelve weeks.