35 Blessings

Borrowed this idea from a friend who shares my birthday, which occurred during the month of September.

Since I am 30 35 today, I’ve decided to celebrate by counting to 30 35 via my many blessings. I figure this is the best way to focus on all I HAVE (the trivial and the important) instead of all I don’t.

1. I have a very loving husband who, when I was at my lowest during chemo as my hair was falling out and I cried that I would be bald, shaved his own head to let the world know how proud he was of me.
2. I have two of the sweetest, smartest, most loving and lovable sons I could ever have dreamt of — I didn’t even know they were what I wanted but I was lucky enough to get them
3. Caring friends and family. This is really huge.
4. I live in a two TiVo household. Talk about blessed!
5. My not working is not driving the family to financial ruin.
6. My having had cancer has not driven the family to financial ruin.
7. 18 months since diagnosis and still going.
8. Cupcakes! Hot fudge cake sundae from Sonic! Takeout sushi for birthday dinner! Fountain diet Dr. Pepper with vanilla added! Mmm.
9. I’ve got what I to be consider the prettiest bionic boobs in the state of Mississippi. Really, you aren’t going to find a prettier pair of reconstructed breasts.
10. I have four incredible doctors (oncologist, breast surgeon, gynecologic surgeon, plastic surgeon) all actively working to keep me healthy, happy, and feeling pretty.
11. The size 10s are fitting again with almost no muffintop!
12. Friends gave me The Office (both seasons) on DVD and Tom gave me season 2 of Lost on DVD for my birthday. Fun!
13. I just put the Rent soundtrack on my iPod. LOVE IT.
14. I found my lump early enough that it wasn’t in my lymph nodes yet.
15. When I told my husband that I wanted to shelve my editing career and go back to school to become a nurse, he didn’t complain about the money for school, but he did immediately say “if that’s what you want to do, baby, then I think you should do it.”
16. I was able to spend a fantastic weekend earlier this summer with some old and dear friends. No kids, no cancer, just wine and laughter and a delightful time.
17. I got to see the Red Sox win the World Series, and, furthermore, I have it on DVD.
18. Thanks to my father, I was able to attend a private liberal arts college and graduate without student loans.
19. Thanks to my husband’s health insurance, we have not had to pay most of the $250,000+ costs associated with my cancer, chemo, and reconstruction. Okay, we have had to pay about $500 of it, but that seems pretty minimal in comparision to what we could’ve had to pay if the insurance wasn’t halfway decent.
20. Thanks to my grandparents, we were able to hire a nanny to care for the children while I was going through my surgeries and chemo. She was more than a nanny to the children, she took care of me and Tom as well, and loves the boys like her own.
21. I had breast cancer in 2005, and because of the incredible advances made in medicine, my chances of survival are through the roof compared with my grandmother and great-grandmother, who had their breast cancers in 1963 and 1940, respectively.
22. My blood clotting disorder that caused me to have multiple miscarriages was only “discovered” in the 1980s. Women with the same disorder prior to then didn’t have a solution for the problem, and I feel very blessed that I did. As will, I hope, the boys’ future wives.
23. My hair is growing back and I haven’t looked like a Cancer Patient in months and months.
24. When we went on vacation to the beach over the summer and I realized the day before the last day of vacation that I hadn’t thought about cancer one bit the entire time.
25. The dwarf gardenia bushes in our back yard are blooming and smell divine.
26. The crazy rosebushes in our front yard that absolutely thrive on neglect? Still blooming. Lovely!
27. The fun magazine subscriptions I was given as gifts when I was going through chemo, because, really, when you are a hurtin’ buckeroo right after a round of chemo, it’s a really great treat to open your mailbox and find that People magazine is sitting there waiting for you.
28. Halloween is coming and Tom and I are already bickering over who gets to take the boys trick-or-treating because it is SO much fun with them.
29. Wireless internet and my widescreen laptop. Ahhhhh!
30. Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches. How can they be so not fattening and so good??
31. The running hasn’t killed me yet.
32. Internet shopping rocks.
33. WalMart has incredibly cheap organic milk.
34. Crayola’s website has a section with useful and effective stain removal tips.
35. Two family weddings coming up in the next six months; opportunities to see many people (friends and family alike) I haven’t seen since my own wedding. I’m very excited.

The Pitfalls of Watching TV After Diagnosis

One of the unexpected ways that a cancer diagnosis has changed my life is it’s sometimes dangerous territory to watch movies or television shows (and, to a lesser degree, read books) because they have this unnerving tendency to suddenly fling a cancer or breast cancer angle at me.

For instance, I put on silly old Queer Eye for the Straight Guy tonight, just to kill some time while I picked up the kids’ toys and generally tidied up. But the Straight Guy for this particular episode was a widower, a man who lost his wife to breast cancer just two years ago. The Fab Five were helping him “move past” his wife’s loss, to help him be a better father to his motherless kids (oh right, did I mention there were three kids involved, aged 6, 11, and 13? yeah that didn’t punch me in the gut).

I cried buckets watching the show. They would periodically show the wife’s photos and tell stories about how wonderful she was and play poignant piano music in the background, and I was just bawling. I wanted to know MORE. I wanted to know what stage was her cancer? When they said she died three years after her diagnosis, did that mean she had a recurrence? Was it in her lymph nodes? Did it metastacize? Did she have a mastectomy? Did she turn out to have either BRCA1 or BRCA2, and if so, does her family worry that the children will also be positive for the mutation? The Fab 5 were blithely ignoring my questions about her cancer and told me nothing more than she had cancer and died, but she was brave.

In the absence of facts, I immediately began picturing Tom and my boys in a me-less future, because that is what I doooooo. And then I cried more, because the thought of not growing old with Tom or seeing the boys grow up is beyond unbearable. I’m still all puffy and red-nosed now, and I might just have to dig out some Ativan if I ever want to get some sleep tonight.

Do I even need to mention that I didn’t get very far with the toy tidying?

The Cookie Has Spoken

Today marks eighteen months since my diagnosis, and eighteen months and a few days since I last had cancer in my body (nutshell for those just joining in:  turns out that the Surgeon I Strongly Dislike did get clear margins the first go-around, and my lymph nodes were squeaky clean).

In light of that, I really rather liked the fortune I got in my fortune cookie today:

You will have much to be thankful for in the coming year.

Although, I think it could’ve rocked a bit more if it said “50 years” instead of “year.”  No matter, I’ll make it so.

Running, Post-Cancer and -Chemo

The subject line is misleading because it implies that I’ve noticed running after cancer and chemo to be different from running prior to the big C&C combo, but, no, actually, I’ve only ever run post-cancer and chemo.

Still. I have valid observations to make!  so observe I shall.

• The first two times I ran, I hurt like mad. My shins, that is.  My shins hurt so bad.  I was doing that walking-slowly-and-gingerly thing for a couple of days last week, and kept thinking “oh my God, I’m breaking my own legs with this running crap!”  (because of my low bone density — damn you chemo and heparin!)  However, cooler heads prevailed and convinced me to try new running shoes.  And the shin ouchiness went away.  Am pleased that I am not in fact breaking my own legs by running.
• It’s not easy, but it’s not killing me, either.  In a lot of ways, it’s kind of like my chemo experience.  It doesn’t make my body feel particularly good while I’m doing it (or afterwards, either), but boy does it make me feel like I’m winning over…something.  I’m accomplishing something.  I like that feeling.
• I’ve been doing my Race for the Cure training for a week now, and it’s getting a bit less-impossible, but at the same time, I don’t know that I’m going to be able to manage to run the entire 5K. However, I think if I manage to run even part of the Race next month, that’ll still count as an accomplishment, and I won’t have anything to be ashamed of.  That does take some of the pressure off.
• Found a podcast for each week of the Couch to 5K plan (the training plan I’m following for the 5K) that helps a whole lot.  Just search on iTunes for “Couch to 5K” and you’ll find it.
• I am certain that the very sight of me allegedly running would send y’all into fits of hysterical laughter.  I am SO not fast.  I look even more awkward than speed-walkers look — and that’s sayin’ something.

That’s all I’ve got tonight. Seacrest out.

Three and a Half Years to Go

I can apply for life insurance again in March 2010, but to be safe, maybe I’ll wait until June. Or September.

After the boys were born, Tom and I decided to act like grown-ups and decided to officially apply for a big deal life insurance policy. We were told when we signed the application that it was pretty much a shoo-in that we’d get approved, and that they’d consider the policy effective as of the date that we signed the application (mid-February 2005). I’d found the lump by that point, but hadn’t yet had the ultrasound that showed it had irregular borders, so I didn’t feel guilty about applying. Plus I was completely honest and disclosed my August 2002 lumpectomy (benign calcifications).

But the insurance agent kept calling back, to get more details. Some deets he wanted weren’t even related to the lump (and some were hilarious, like the time he asked what a Bennigan calcification was…I eventually realized he was mispronouncing benign), but since I got my diagnosis within 3 weeks of signing the application, I wondered what would happen. Tom kept saying “oh, the diagnosis didn’t happen until after we signed the application; don’t worry!” It wasn’t until after my bilateral mastectomy and partial oopherectomy (but before starting chemo) that the insurance agent called, all apologetic, to say that they were sorry, but they were unable to provide me with a policy.

Later on, when we got the official rejection letter from the Very Large and Old Life Insurance Company, they said they were officially unable to provide me with the policy we applied for due to my “history of breast cancer.” Assuming they did what they said they’d do, based our application solely on our medical histories prior to the date of the policy application, that means my one benign calcification now is a “history.”

Oh, and by the way, they thought they might be able to provide me with a different (lower) level policy, at a hugely increased premium. Like quadruple the original policy premium for an eighteenth of the original policy value. They also jacked up my husband’s premium, $500/annually over the original quote.

Apparently, however, I am “welcome” to reapply when I am five years with NED. Technically, that would be March 9, 2010, but I suspect that they’ll say I’m not NED until after my five-year anniversary of completing chemo (September 14, 2010).

My New Challenge

I have signed up to do the Tupelo Race for the Cure in October.  I’ve walked in several Race for the Cures (and similar events) in the past, but I’ve decided that this, my first official Race as a survivor, I’m going to RUN.

For those of you who don’t know me, I don’t run.  I’ve never run anything, at least beyond those awful run-around-the-field-five-times nightmares they’d make us do in junior high gym class.  I had exertional asthma when I was younger…I don’t think I have it anymore, but having had it when I was younger meant that I generally associate physical exercise with pain and discomfort, so I avoid it.

So it is pretty major to me, for me, to be running something, even “just” a 3K event.  I might be one of those people who doesn’t cross the finish line until dusk, long after the officials have gone home, but I really want to do this. I really want to mark the occasion of my first year after completing chemo by doing something challenging, by doing something I haven’t done before.

Please wish me luck.