We Interrupt The Blog To Bring You A Brief Announcement:

Remission.

Yep, as of a PET scan on Wednesday the 21st, the doctor says that I'm "officially in remission." I'll still be going through radiation as a precaution, but the signs are encouraging and the news is pretty good.

Yesterday, the 24th, I turned 41. Not a bad present, if I do say so myself.

It's Just A Cold . . . Right?

Every year, I get at least one nasty cold. You know how it goes. Kleenex become an endangered species in your house, you're achier than a 1990's Billy Ray Cyrus song, and then there's that nagging cough that always seems to hang out a lot longer than any other symptom. To me, the coughing has always been the worst part of it. It's embarrassing. A nuisance. A pain in the patoot. But eventually, inevitably, it fades away.

Plus, I think as I've grown older, I've started to develop a few allergies. In years past, when I earned my keep by slinging around horse manure and such, I lived in a world of dusty hay mows and heavily shedding ponies without so much as a twitch. These days, I can barely drive past a particularly green field without pausing for a sneeze and a blow.

Then there was the flood. On June 7th of 2008, my slice of Wisconsin was hit with a deluge of rain that backed up the storm drain in the alley behind my house, filled up my garage, totaled my car, rolled up the back yard and made itself comfy in my basement. It was a disaster beyond anything I'd ever imagined. I don't even live in a flood plain! As the water kept coming, my daughter and I salvaged what we could from the basement until I noticed that one of the electrical outlets was doing a terrific imitation of a kitchen faucet. After that, we went upstairs, stood out on the deck and watched kids in a canoe paddling down the alley. The damage to the area was catastrophic enough that in less than 48 hours, FEMA crews were out and about. It was referred to as "the hundred year flood," something that you only see once in a lifetime, if that.

Five days later, it happened again.

That time, secure in the knowledge that my kids were on high ground at the ex's house and that anything that I cared about in the basement that could be destroyed had already been destroyed, I played my guitar, goofed around on the computer, hung out with the dog, occasionally wandered down the basement steps to rescue anything that might be floating by and waited for the walls to collapse. (Luckily they didn't.) The next morning, I discovered that there were sections of my four foot tall chain link fence that were completely submerged. It took about three days for the water to be pumped out and away by city workers. (We won't even discuss the broken sump pump that I had to hit with a broom every ten or fifteen minutes day and night, or the endless squeegee-thons.) The clean up is still ongoing and my basement still looks like it was hit by a bomb.

So, of course when I started coughing in late June or early July, it had to be from mold in the drenched basement. If it wasn't that, it was a cold. Or maybe allergies. Nothing serious. And if I felt a little run down, well hey, wouldn't you?!

But then, I started having these breathless moments. Climbing stairs took on a new level of difficulty. Lifting cases of soda at work took a lot more effort than they should have, given that the clean up should have added muscle, not taken it away. Strangest of all, my right arm started to hurt when I let it hang down naturally. I mean, really hurt. A web search of my list of symptoms made me laugh out loud. It indicated lung cancer. How silly is that? I don't smoke!

Well, I don't!

On August 1st, I'd had enough. After all, if I had fungus growing in my lungs or something, maybe it was worth checking out. To illustrate how un-sickly a person I am, my call to the doctor's office involved a data bank search and the news that my doctor had left the firm three years ago. However, they got me in pretty quickly to see a physician's assistant.

She was nice. Asked a few questions. Agreed that on a scale of 1-10 my cough was a 78.4. Bronchitis, she guessed, or maybe pneumonia. It's not like I had a fever or anything. It's not like I was really sick. I was still going to work every day, right? No fever, right? So, she gave me a five day course of heavy-duty antibiotics, an inhaler, some pills for the cough and sent me on my way.

I cannot remember if she ever listened to my chest. I know that she never ordered an x-ray. It never even came up in conversation.

On August 8th, on the verge of a long planned vacation, I called back to the doctor's office and talked to their "Triage Nurse." I explained, between coughs, that I'd taken the antibiotics but I was feeling worse. Could I, I wondered, still make the trip to Pennsylvania or . . .

"Oh yes, go," she told me. "You have to give the drugs time to work. It's only been a few days, so go and enjoy yourself."

So, I did. Coughing all the way and probably scaring a few close friends and family members with my spectacular hack-a-thons. My folks offered to send me to their doctor, but I declined, for no good reason. Looking back, I can admit that I was literally dying on my feet, but y'know, I didn't want to be a bother or anything.

On the way back, I blacked out briefly while driving through Chicago. Not optimal. But, I had to work the next day, so I soldiered on, made it home, wheezed through a long night, went to work as planned, and immediately afterward drove myself to the local Urgent Care Clinic, coughing and breathless and wobbling apologetically. "I can't get any air," I wheezed by way of introduction. Urgent Care upgraded me to the Emergency Room. Stat.

The doctor on duty was a nice guy, short cropped hair and professionally courteous without being stodgy. He listened to me huff out my history and hauled out his stethoscope. Deep breaths, he said, listening to my back. I did my best. Then he moved around to the front. Deep breaths, he said again. Again, I did my best.

After a moment, he took the stethoscope away with a puzzled look, disassembled it, reassembled it and tried again. Deep breaths.

"I think we need an x-ray," he finally mumbled. Twenty minutes later, we were standing in front of a computer screen looking at the results. Where my right lung was supposed to be, there was a white expanse of . . . stuff. The left lung, clear of debris, waved to me cheerily from the monitor. Of my heart, we could see maybe half.

In a state of shock not dissimilar to my own, the doctor admitted that he'd guessed I had a touch of pneumonia right up until he tried to listen to the right hand side of my chest and . . . heard absolutely nothing.

Nothing at all.

Blood(thinners), Sweat and Tears

This post isn't exactly about cancer, but since you can trace the causes directly back to it, I reckon it's fair game.

Here's the deal. I have this tumor in my chest. (Anterior mediastinal mass, for the lymphoma-fluent among us.) It's pretty well reduced as I type, but at its peak, it was big enough to substantially interfere with little things like . . .oh, breathing. And circulation.

Somewhere between the discovery of the tumor and its eventual identification, I came down with, quite literally, a massive pain in the neck.

During the first days of my hospitalization, I remember sitting on a gurney and wincing as a technician ran an ultrasound probe over the ouchiest area on the left side of my throat.

"See anything?" I asked innocently.

"Oh yeah," she answered. "You've got a really big blood clot in your jugular vein."

Oh. Dear.

"Sooo," I tried to be nonchalant. "Stroke? Heart attack?"

"Oh, don't worry about anything like that," she reassured me. "It's not an artery. It's a vein."

"Really? That's goo--"

"If it moves, it'll just go into your lungs," she said brightly.

"Oh, okay. Whew." Wait. What?!

Thus began my relationship with blood thinners; the better to let the clot dissipate, my dear. Initially, "Fragmin" (dalteparin) was the treatment du jour. It's a dandy little drug, with only two disadvantages for yours truly. First of all, it's an injection. In your gut. A nuisance in the hospital, but even less fun when you're the lucky person on both ends of the syringe. Twice a day. You could play connect the dots on the bruises, trust me.

Secondly, there was a teensy financial issue. When a drug is going to cost seven hundred dollars a month after insurance pays their share, and you're not currently working for your living, it's time to seek out alternatives. And so, after groveling to my nice doctor, I was switched to warfarin pills. Warfarin is a much cheaper alternative, but taking it necessitates trundling to the local hospital every few weeks for lab work and dosage adjustments.

Problem: Warfarin makes me feel cold. Really cold. It's not an uncommon side effect and I daresay if we were smack dab in the good old summertime, I wouldn't mind. When I woke up last Friday morning, it was -19 outside. Farenheit. Sheesh. I'm not a thermostat freak, but the warmest it ever gets in the house is 68 degrees. 64 at night. To my diluted O-positive, that's downright frosty.



Solution: Dress more warmly, you say, and indeed I do. I believe in the power of layers. I have a large collection of hoodies and I always keep a warm hat nearby. Despite that, I still get the shakes periodically and have to run for a hot shower before hypothermia sets in.

Problem: There's another little condition that cropped up after a few chemo treatments.

It's called menopause.

As my doctor sympathetically explained, my body is so discombobulated from the chemotherapy that not even my ovaries know what they're supposed to be doing. I am now the proud owner of raging hot flashes. Oh, the joy!

Now a hot flash, for the uninitiated, is like being broadsided by a riptide of unbearable equatorial rainforest-type heat that instantly wrenches sweat out of every single pore in your body. It lasts for a duration of perhaps a few minutes and then it goes away, leaving you drenched and, in some cases, with your face jammed into the inner recesses of your refrigerator. I personally experience hot flashes at least a few times every hour. Sometimes, it's five or six times an hour. (And then the children can huddle around me for warmth.)

You'd think that my shivery warfarin chills and my inferno-esque flashes would cancel each other out, wouldn't you? In a just world, I should be able to exist in the not-too-hot and not-too-cold internal temperature equivalent of Baby Bear's porridge bowl. Ha.

Imagine, if you will, the experience of trying to sleep by huddling your pathetic frozen carcass under two blankets, a comforter and snuggled up next to a convenient greyhound. Gradually you start to feel marginally comfy and drift off to blissful sleep . . . only to wake up to a clanging internal alarm that indicates that steam is coming out of your ears, and makes a convincing argument at two in the morning that spontaneous combustion might be more than just an urban legend.



Instantly, you kick out from under the blankets and shove the dog off the bed*, but it's too late. You're soaked. I mean, soaked. Not just you, but everything you happen to be wearing. Also the pillowcase. And the sheets. Yuck. And just as soon as you notice how disgustingly damp you are, the flash is gone and you have leaped from Amazon humidity into Arctic permafrost.

The experienced sufferer will keep, at minimum, two fresh changes of jammies and a towel within arm's reach. Pillowcases are optional, but only because there is probably not a linen closet in the world that can keep up with a night's worth of flash 'n freeze.

It's enough to make me downright grumpy.

Oh, and according to the doctor, there's a 50/50 chance that with the cessation of chemo, I'll leave the land of menopause and resume the traditional lifestyle, as it were. If so, guess what I can look forward to in about ten years? Well, maybe I won't be on the warfarin by then.

But I bet it'll be in July.

*No greyhounds were harmed during the writing of this blog. And no, I didn't actually shove one off the bed. They're far too heavy.

The Wall

I've got to be honest. The last round of chemotherapy I had was the toughest of them all. It wasn't that driving snowy-icy roads in the dark for over an hour to get to the hospital on time had me frazzled. (Although they did. The car even tried to break down on the way home!) It wasn't that not getting enough to eat that morning caused some nausea issues, which in turn led to my first mouth sore since treatment #1. It wasn't that I felt sicker and more tired afterward than any other post-chemo experience. It wasn't even that it was two days before Christmas and I hadn't wrapped the presents yet.

I just . . . didn't want to do this anymore.

I don't want to do this anymore.

I mentioned it to my best friend Janet, and she said simply, "You've hit the Wall."

You see, Janet has another friend with cancer; a friend who has had more difficulties than I have. It was that friend who told her about the wall and warned that I would be running into it sooner or later. Janet, bless her heart, was on the alert and her advice came straight from a veteran on the front lines of another battle.

I'm not paraphrasing by much when I quote:

"You've hit the Wall. You want to quit. You can't."

It seems like a no-brainer. It really does. If there is any cancer patient in the world who undergoes a chemo treatment and says, "Thank you sir, may I have another?" that, my friends, is a cancer patient residing in a psych ward somewhere. Of course, you still go to the next treatment, and the next. You have the surgery, undergo radiation, learn how to pop pills as though you are solely responsible for keeping the kids of pharmaceutical company employees from starving. You hold your arm obediently out for every needle stick. You learn how to style a wig. You do what you need to do. Of course you do.

Except for the times when you don't.

It's when you hit the Wall that treatments and regimens and indignities you took for granted as necessary evils on the road to remission become . . . negotiable. The shallower part of your survival instinct points out that not only is chemo not fun, it's actively bad for you. Maybe . . . just maybe, you've had enough. Maybe the worst won't happen. And even if it does, you whisper to yourself, it can't be worse than this. Can it?

Part of my problem is that there are always a few wonderful days between chemo treatments when I feel very good. At the tail end of those few weeks of respite between chemo sessions, there's no queasiness, no exhaustion, no lingering unwellness, just the sweet solace of normality. Those are the days when I've developed a resistance to the idea of submitting myself to the next episode of feeling like something best scraped off the bottom of a shoe. I like normality. Intellectually, I know that those good days might just represent the eye of the hurricane, but by golly, it is soooo very tempting to consider that they might, in fact, represent happily ever after, if only I stopped right here.

A few months ago, after my last CT Scan showed marked improvement, my doctor and I discussed the probability of my moving on to radiation sooner rather than later. I thought it was curious when she commented that radiation was an option that I could refuse if I wished, but that having come so far, it would be hard to understand if I decided against it. At the time, I thought it would be hard to understand too!

But now, as I lean against the Wall and consider climbing over it and slogging ever-onward, I can see the other side of the equation. I can see why some people just up and quit, sometimes only changing their minds when it's too late, sometimes never changing their minds at all. I can see the attraction of quitting. I know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that if my next scan indicates a need for more chemotherapy, I will be absolutely crushed.

My only advantage is that despite my increasing antipathy, I have people in my support group who aren't going to take my "no more" for an answer. I might want to quit, I might even try to quit, but I have friends and family who will, without hesitation or remorse, boost me up and over the Wall despite my kicking and screaming. At gunpoint if necessary. Some of the equestrian types even own whips!

I can't promise not to resent the heck out of them. I can't promise a cooperative sunny attitude or a can-do philosophy where none might exist. Just because I seldom exhibit a bad attitude doesn't mean I'm incapable of one. To the contrary, I can be just as ugly tempered as the last shark to a feeding frenzy. I give fair warning.

But, I know this:

If chemotherapy is still in my future, or the inevitable radiation yanks the rug out from under me and I hit the Wall again and want to quit . . .

I can't.

So, thanks in advance.

Odor Ordeal

I don't smell like me anymore.

Now let me be clear about this. I am a reasonably hygienic individual. I shower daily. I use deodorant, brush my teeth and try to ensure that noses do not automatically wrinkle in my presence. But everyone has their own specific scent. Not to be indelicate, but even when you toot, you know darned well it's you. You can fool your family and blame it on the dog, but it's still you. Your own personal aroma, for foul or fair.

Not anymore.

When your veins are loaded with the chemotherapy concoction, things change. You taste it in your mouth. You burp it. You fart it. It's as though someone else has moved into your body and you'd really like to issue them some mouthwash, bubble bath and a loofa because obviously they have no clue.

You offend yourself.

At least, I offend myself. I'm reasonably sure I occasionally offend my children, although they're too polite to say so. Geeze, even the dog looks at me in a funny way. Periodically, he wanders over to be introduced.

So in a weird way, I am constantly trying to compensate. I have become obsessed with things that smell good.

My hot water bill is undoubtedly skyrocketing, as I lather and rinse and re-lather with body wash and shampoo. (Yes, I still use shampoo.) I tend to favor homey smells like almond or vanilla, nothing too floral and definitely nothing in a citrus vein. I don't just bathe in the stuff. I marinate. I want it to soak into my pores and force out the nastiness. (This is admittedly ridiculous. I know chemo is my friend in the white hat I just wish he smelled better!)

Some nights I make a cup of hot cocoa and spend more time inhaling the velvety chocolate steam than actually drinking it. Coffee holds a similar attraction, especially the fancy-pants gourmet stuff. Highlander Grogg is a personal favorite in the scent department.

I go into gift shops just to whiff the potpourri. I make liberal use of my Glade brand Apples/Cinnamon room freshening spray at home. One of the best Christmas gifts I received this year? An amber scented candle. It sits on my desk and makes me happy, even unlit.

There's talk, certainly hope, that I've had my last round of chemo. That six treatments might have been enough. I really hope that's the case, because the longer it goes, the more I don't like me. It's nothing personal. I just stink.