So, more surgery. It's technically called an excision, since the previous biopsy didn't find cancer cells. But, as my surgeon says, the biopsy needle might have pulled normal tissue right next to cancer cells, so it's better to get all of it out.
Once they remove the lesion in my right breast, they're apparently going to test the crap out of every bit of it to make sure there's no cancer there. The lesion is atypical hyperplasia, which is considered pre-cancerous. If they find some cancer cells, I'll have radiation therapy on my right side in addition to my left side.
Frankly, I think the odds are pretty good that they'll find some cancer cells there. It's been that kind of a year.
Tiger has been in and out of the vet's office with some serious urinary tract blockage problems. The vet has put him under to unblock and catheterize him twice, and neither time worked. Right now, he's at the vet clinic, catheterized and in a cone, getting fluid by IV in hopes we can "flush" whatever keeps blocking him out. The vet isn't real hopeful. I spent most of Sunday night crying. Losing Mango is still so fresh, and now it just makes me so sad to come home to a house where there are no cats to greet. Vinnie, bless his goofy heart, greets us at the door every time - in fact, if we take too long getting out of the car, he'll bark like he's telling us to hurry up. But not too long ago, the cats, our sweet fuzzy brothers, would be right behind him, waiting to greet us, too.
I really hope that Tiger will be OK.
As I write this, I'm sitting under a blanket on the sofa, with Vinnie (covered up, of course) beside me. He's a doofus, and has been a good, huggy boy.
Which brings me to my big "exercise" plan.
I've spent a lot of time on the sofa over the summer. The first four rounds of chemotherapy made me dizzy and sick and tired, and the final four rounds made my fingers and toes feel numb/frozen/hot/tingly, and made my sense of balance even more precarious. (It's never been great.)
So I am OUT OF SHAPE. Taking the dog for a walk with Jeff has left me winded and exhausted.
My oncologist said that the steroids I took to lessen the side effects of chemotherapy are not like the steroids that athletes take - in fact, they break down muscle tissue and make you weaker.
So, now that chemotherapy (and steroid use, and side effects) is over, it's time to work myself back up to some sort of fitness.
We've had a pretty good concert year, but it has definitely been "lesser" than it was before cancer. Part of what I love about concerts is dancing and enjoying music you love with a bunch of people, and I really haven't been up to doing that. I've enjoyed the concerts we've gone to, but I've stood (or sat) still.
I want to be back out there, dancing and jumping up and down like I have when we've seen the Foo Fighters, or Matt and Kim, or Twentyone Pilots. There's something that just feels transcendent, when you're tired and old, but the song that's playing is so good you've got no choice but to jump up and down with the rest of the crowd. I want that again.
So I'm starting slow. Vinnie and I are taking 30-minute walks every day after I get home from work.
Not too long ago, on the same walk with Vinnie and Jeff, I literally was huffing and puffing, out of breath from walking a slight incline toward the end of our walk.
Today was the third day in a row Vinnie and I walked, and I was still tired at the end of the walk, but not winded. I'm getting stronger.
For now, that's going to have to be enough.
Tuesday, September 13, 2016
Saturday, September 3, 2016
September 3, 2016
I took Tom back to Cornell for his sophomore year today. He had two tennis teammates staying over Thursday, and they all went and picked up his roommate, Gabe, from the airport and to a Cubs game Friday, and then all stayed Friday night. The teammates left at 7 a.m. Saturday, and Tom, Gabe and I followed them at about 7:30.
Dropping Tom off as a freshman was a little emotional (but in a Winge, don't show any feelings way) - I didn't really get teary until I saw Tom walking with his classmates for a new student convocation (and even then, it was just me, so nobody saw me).
Dropping him off as a sophomore ... well, I'll miss him, of course, but it was so good to see people calling out to him, and see how happy he was to be back. It was a pretty quick drop-off - I waited up in the guys' room while they brought their stuff up, then Tom walked me back down to the car and hugged me goodbye. Then I had 2 and a half hours in the car by myself. I listened to a little First Wave '80s music and then switched to one of my favorite playlists on Spotify - the "Story of Us ... So Far" from Jeff. It's music from every band we've seen together, along with a few songs we've deemed classic. It was a good mix of my own Cornell-era songs and songs that bring back awesome concert memories.
(Oh, hey, this post isn't cancer-related, at least not directly. Just thoughts.)
One of the things I thought about on the drive was scars. Well, OK, I thought about my doctor's appointment next week, and the surgery that likely will follow, and how, after my first cancer surgery, Jeff and I went to Panama City Beach and sat on the beachfront for a week, drinking and reading. But it made me start thinking about the scars I have.
My first scar is really two - the marks from the C-sections that gave me Tom and Jen.
Next, there's an appendectomy scar, followed by a scar by my left collarbone from a car crash. Then the scars from my old football injury - I broke my ankle getting to a Vikings-Bears game. They had to reset it with a plate and screws, and later, had to go back in and get all that hardware out. After that, there's a scar from my gallbladder removal.
I've got an inch-and-a-half scar at the base of my throat from a hyperparathyroidectomy. I remember being really self-conscious about it, figuring I'd wear turtlenecks and scarves for the rest of my life, until that got too hot and I figured if my little throat-slash scared people, they could just look away.
Which brings me to the numerous scars I've accumulated this year. The biopsies didn't leave scars, but the lumpectomy and lymph node removal left two angry-looking welts under my left arm. The insertion (and the eventual taking out) of the chemotherapy pump will be another scar, and the location of the mass on my right side will leave a scar close to the middle of my chest.
I'm a mess. But I'm feeling pretty good. =)
Dropping Tom off as a freshman was a little emotional (but in a Winge, don't show any feelings way) - I didn't really get teary until I saw Tom walking with his classmates for a new student convocation (and even then, it was just me, so nobody saw me).
Dropping him off as a sophomore ... well, I'll miss him, of course, but it was so good to see people calling out to him, and see how happy he was to be back. It was a pretty quick drop-off - I waited up in the guys' room while they brought their stuff up, then Tom walked me back down to the car and hugged me goodbye. Then I had 2 and a half hours in the car by myself. I listened to a little First Wave '80s music and then switched to one of my favorite playlists on Spotify - the "Story of Us ... So Far" from Jeff. It's music from every band we've seen together, along with a few songs we've deemed classic. It was a good mix of my own Cornell-era songs and songs that bring back awesome concert memories.
(Oh, hey, this post isn't cancer-related, at least not directly. Just thoughts.)
One of the things I thought about on the drive was scars. Well, OK, I thought about my doctor's appointment next week, and the surgery that likely will follow, and how, after my first cancer surgery, Jeff and I went to Panama City Beach and sat on the beachfront for a week, drinking and reading. But it made me start thinking about the scars I have.
My first scar is really two - the marks from the C-sections that gave me Tom and Jen.
Next, there's an appendectomy scar, followed by a scar by my left collarbone from a car crash. Then the scars from my old football injury - I broke my ankle getting to a Vikings-Bears game. They had to reset it with a plate and screws, and later, had to go back in and get all that hardware out. After that, there's a scar from my gallbladder removal.
I've got an inch-and-a-half scar at the base of my throat from a hyperparathyroidectomy. I remember being really self-conscious about it, figuring I'd wear turtlenecks and scarves for the rest of my life, until that got too hot and I figured if my little throat-slash scared people, they could just look away.
Which brings me to the numerous scars I've accumulated this year. The biopsies didn't leave scars, but the lumpectomy and lymph node removal left two angry-looking welts under my left arm. The insertion (and the eventual taking out) of the chemotherapy pump will be another scar, and the location of the mass on my right side will leave a scar close to the middle of my chest.
I'm a mess. But I'm feeling pretty good. =)
Friday, September 2, 2016
September 2, 2016
Well, the summer is ending, and I am about a week and a half out from my last chemotherapy treatment. Whew.
I almost finished with chemotherapy before I knew it - at my appointment with my oncologist before treatment, he was concerned to hear that the pain in my fingers and toes had gotten a little bit worse, even though he had decreased the amount of the drug I'd gotten by 20 percent. He gave us the option of skipping the last treatment - in the long run, missing one chemotherapy treatment isn't that significant. It was tempting, but my first thought was What if it comes back, and you didn't do everything you could to stop it? I decided to get the last treatment (and was pleased to find out that Jeff felt the same way).
So the tingling and numbness and weird pain in my fingers has gotten a little bit worse, and has pretty much taken over my feet. My feet always feel freezing cold - like I've been outside for hours, standing in the snow, to the point of pain, cold. All of my fingertips are numb. (Before, it was just my thumbs and first two fingers.) Some - and possibly all - of this, my oncologist told me, will go away. It can take up to a year, though, so this is just how it is for now. It's better than cancer.
The cold feet thing is super weird. I keep wanting to warm them up - putting them under blankets or against Jeff's legs - but they really aren't cold at all. My feet were so cold a few nights ago that I got out of bed and found socks to wear.
It doesn't quite feel real that I'm done with chemotherapy (but then again, it has never really felt real that I have cancer in the first place). Jeff has joked that next Wednesday, we should go up to Madison and just do fun things. We will be heading up there next week - I have an appointment with my surgeon on Sept. 9. I'm ready to move on to the next step, which looks like it will be surgery to remove the mass in my right breast. Jeff is convinced there shouldn't be anything there - that the chemotherapy should have killed everything off - but we'll let the surgeon decide. I had a biopsy done on the mass at FHN before I had my first surgery, and the results came back negative, but my surgeon said - and I agree - that a biopsy is just a look at one part of the mass. There could be cancer cells right next to the ones that got biopsied. Also, the type of mass it is, according to my oncologist, is more likely (than normal cells) to turn cancerous. So, let's get it out.
After that, I'll have radiation treatments here in Freeport. I'm not sure how long that will last - it seems like 5 or 6 weeks is the standard. So I may not have this all wrapped up before the end of the year, but it'll be close.
I'm hoping that my hair will grow in quickly. (Before all this, my hair seemed to grow fast.) My head still looks stubbly and weird. I'm definitely going to need some nice warm hats this winter, and I won't have to worry about "hat head"!
I almost finished with chemotherapy before I knew it - at my appointment with my oncologist before treatment, he was concerned to hear that the pain in my fingers and toes had gotten a little bit worse, even though he had decreased the amount of the drug I'd gotten by 20 percent. He gave us the option of skipping the last treatment - in the long run, missing one chemotherapy treatment isn't that significant. It was tempting, but my first thought was What if it comes back, and you didn't do everything you could to stop it? I decided to get the last treatment (and was pleased to find out that Jeff felt the same way).
So the tingling and numbness and weird pain in my fingers has gotten a little bit worse, and has pretty much taken over my feet. My feet always feel freezing cold - like I've been outside for hours, standing in the snow, to the point of pain, cold. All of my fingertips are numb. (Before, it was just my thumbs and first two fingers.) Some - and possibly all - of this, my oncologist told me, will go away. It can take up to a year, though, so this is just how it is for now. It's better than cancer.
The cold feet thing is super weird. I keep wanting to warm them up - putting them under blankets or against Jeff's legs - but they really aren't cold at all. My feet were so cold a few nights ago that I got out of bed and found socks to wear.
It doesn't quite feel real that I'm done with chemotherapy (but then again, it has never really felt real that I have cancer in the first place). Jeff has joked that next Wednesday, we should go up to Madison and just do fun things. We will be heading up there next week - I have an appointment with my surgeon on Sept. 9. I'm ready to move on to the next step, which looks like it will be surgery to remove the mass in my right breast. Jeff is convinced there shouldn't be anything there - that the chemotherapy should have killed everything off - but we'll let the surgeon decide. I had a biopsy done on the mass at FHN before I had my first surgery, and the results came back negative, but my surgeon said - and I agree - that a biopsy is just a look at one part of the mass. There could be cancer cells right next to the ones that got biopsied. Also, the type of mass it is, according to my oncologist, is more likely (than normal cells) to turn cancerous. So, let's get it out.
After that, I'll have radiation treatments here in Freeport. I'm not sure how long that will last - it seems like 5 or 6 weeks is the standard. So I may not have this all wrapped up before the end of the year, but it'll be close.
I'm hoping that my hair will grow in quickly. (Before all this, my hair seemed to grow fast.) My head still looks stubbly and weird. I'm definitely going to need some nice warm hats this winter, and I won't have to worry about "hat head"!
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