Chemo style pics

Since I never did get around to writing about these, I'm just going to post a bunch of the different wig/hat/scarf looks I had fun with while I was bald. Mostly on weekends I just went bald, but I didn't really like that look for the office, so here's what I did.

Still alive, October and stuff

I'm a terrible blogger. But here's an awesome link.


The other things...there are a few, actually. I had another bilateral mammogram today. The tech was just going to do the left, but I could have sworn the plan was another bilateral to confirm that the calcifications that showed up on the right side last time were still looking benign and stable. So I spoke up (Do that! You are your best advocate!) and it turns out I was right, so I got a little extra flattened on the right side (5 images) and moderately flattened on the left (3 images). Everything looked good.

Which brings me to the next point, which is actually the earlier point only I neglected to bring it up when it was current. That point is FEAR. I'm still working out how to live with the fear of recurrence, what to take seriously and what to let go. In late June I discovered a new back pain, and I couldn't place anything I could have done to injure myself, but it wasn't going away. It isn't severe by any means, and really it only hurts when I bend my spine in a way I rarely do - so I kind of have to try to make it hurt. But the fact that it wasn't resolving and I didn't know what caused it threw me into a giant funk. I tried not to think about it too much, tried to give it time to heal, because there are SO many things that can happen with your back, and most of them take time to resolve. But I couldn't do it. I was really depressed and afraid and I just couldn't shake the notion that I might have bone mets. I read up on treatment options, I imagined what I would do, how long I would be able to work, how long I would need to be NOT working while still feeling well enough to go through all my things so my husband wouldn't have to do it after I was gone, who I wanted to have my bellydance costumes and my fabric, how I would tell my parents...I mean the whole sick fantasy. I was in it, and I didn't know how to get out of it without a real answer. I needed to hear it: "I don't know what's causing your back pain, but it isn't cancer - I know because I checked."

So I kept calling my oncologist when the pain didn't go away. (It has lessened now, but it is still there if I look for it. I guess it's part of my normal now.) She had me give it a couple of weeks to resolve, but when it didn't she took my concerns seriously even though I think she was pretty sure they were unfounded - so she ordered a bone scan. The tech scared me a little - he kept asking if I'd had recent head injuries and said there were dark spots on my skull. If I'd been feeling more like myself I would have told him "Oh, that's just the evil." But I was busy planning my tragic death.

So yeah, the scan came up clear. The nurse said there were "normal degenerative changes", medical code for YOU'RE GETTING OLD. No cancer. More recently, I felt a little like coughing after taking some deep breaths, and naturally that was lung mets. I did manage to talk myself down from that one. But only because it went away. What happens the next time I get bronchitis or something?

Am I part of the problem? Am I making medical care more expensive for everyone by getting unnecessary tests?

Still Kicking

Working, dancing, cooking, and treating myself like a spoiled princess so nobody else has to.

Oh, and I was in a commercial for Stampede For The Cure, a local organization that provides mammograms for low-income women.

I only have about a week left to be 40. But really, let's face it, 40 was not a great year. I can't say I'm that sorry to see it go.

Another haircut

I got my third post-chemo haircut yesterday. The first two were a little emotional, but this was just no big deal. It's a bit sad, really. Well, maybe not specifically that, but in general it makes me wonder if I'm taking it all for granted again - being alive, being healthy. It's been almost a year since my diagnosis, and about six months since I finished chemo. Radiation is three months behind me. It's all kind of a big blur. Did all of that happen? Did I really have cancer? There are scars, there's evidence, but it all seems so surreal.

Something I'm noticing the last couple of days: I feel distinctly lousy if I don't exercise often enough. I've slacked off quite a bit in the last couple of weeks, blowing off most of my Bar Method workouts, and I'm feeling more and more of the joint stiffness and achiness that hit at the end of chemo. This morning (for the first time in months) I woke up with that old familiar ache in the middle of my upper back. I've decided to consider this a good thing, because it's extra motivation to exercise. Exercise always increases my general sense of well-being, but I've never had such a direct and profound correlation between exercise and feeling better. It makes continuing to miss a lot of workouts pretty unthinkable.

Cancer Free? Awesome if true.

Yesterday at my post-post-radiation-mammogram-followup, my Rad Onc told me she was putting "Cancer-Free" in my chart. I felt a little weird about that. It sounds great, of course! But I tend to lean toward the more conservative "no evidence of disease". Cancer-free (as far as we know). No (detectable) cancer. Because really, that's as much as we can say for sure right now. It's a great thing, it's a lot and I feel very, very lucky and relieved; but how many other women have had this declaration of a clean slate and ended up recurring? At least some. I hope I will not be one of them.

Am I being too picky over details? Should I just embrace the cancer-free label? I'm in a positive frame of mind overall, and I tend to think of cancer as something I had last year. I'm not dwelling on it, and I don't have much scanxiety (or last Wednesday's mammo with repeated callbacks for closer pics of the "other" breast would have completely freaked me out) - I just have a stubbornly realistic streak. I hear "cancer-free" and I think it sounds like a promise nobody can make. It's probably true, and I intend to live happily assuming that it is until and unless there's evidence otherwise. But as they say, the only way you know for sure you've beaten cancer is when you die of something else.

Negligence! and Rads

I can't believe I didn't put up a single post about radiation. My last treatment was on February 11. It went pretty smoothly - I'll summarize:

Treatment started on the first Monday in January. I set my appointments up for 8:30 a.m., the earliest I could get. I was usually a few minutes early, and they were almost always ready for me as soon as I got there. I remember being horrified when I first found out that radiation treatment is done daily (well every weekday anyway) - but it hardly takes any time at all. The first 5 weeks they zapped the whole breast and much of the armpit for 30 seconds each from 2 different directions; the last week just hit the surgical incision area. Once a week I'd see my doctor right after the treatment, but that was always pretty quick too, just a check-in, how's your skin doing, any other problems, and so on.

So how's my skin? It held up pretty well. It got darker, but that was the only sign for the first 5 weeks. At that point I did finally have some peeling, and it was more like blister peeling than sunburn peeling - the skin underneath was not ready to be exposed! It hurt, and it was weepy. The wound care nurse was a lot of help. That lasted for a little over a week after the treatment was over. Since then it's been peeling like a sunburn. It's still dark, and I still don't have any hair growth in the treatment field. But there's no tenderness at all anymore.

It's a little strange not being in active treatment anymore. But that's a post for another day.

Hair again.

I've been meaning to respond to yet another thought-provoking post over at Nancy's Point about the chemo look, how it makes you feel, and how long afterward you still have to wear it around even though you're done with chemo. Great post, great comments, go read it if you haven't.

As I say, I've been meaning to post a comment there, but I guess now that I think about it I felt awkward because I couldn't really commiserate much. My hair started growing back during the last few weeks of my Taxol treatments, but it was pale and fuzzy and I still looked bald. After that I did go through a really ugly phase where the sides came in thicker than the top, and I hated that. I still wore it out in public because by that time I couldn't stand having anything on my head for long, but it did not look good, and at that point I was definitely feeling what Nancy is talking about. (For Trek-loving nerds like me, I went from Lt. Ilia to Captain Picard - which looks great on Patrick Stewart, but on a woman not so much.)

But other than those few weeks I have liked the way I looked all through this process. I wouldn't have believed it, but it's true. I liked the way I looked bald. I didn't like it when my eyebrows and eyelashes finally went, and it's true I never went out of the house without drawing them back in, but I didn't mind looking at myself without them. It was oddly fascinating, actually. I still liked that girl in the mirror even when she looked like an alien.

Now my hair is growing back in pretty fast. I've gone from having hair to having a hairstyle. And I like it short so much I plan to keep it this way for awhile. It's a HUGE difference from last May, when I was mourning the anticipated loss of my hip-length red hair. I guess my assumption was something like this: I have big features, big curves, I need big hair to balance it all out; but once that hair was gone I found I didn't need it after all, and it actually hid more than it should have.

Chemo hair loss showed me my face and I found out that I like it.

Taxol #12

This is it. This is the last one. Hopefully my last chemotherapy treatment EVER. Wow.

Unbelievable

TSA groper requires breast cancer survivor (a flight attendant trying to get to work, no less) to hand over her prosthetic for inspection.

To the lady who approached me at the Meridian Winco this afternoon to tell me I looked pretty

...because you have been through chemo yourself and recognized me as someone who's going through it now - Thank you. It threw me at first that you knew why I was wearing this stylish hat and had cosmetically darkened eyebrows and carefully drawn eyeliner. I kept wondering whether you were a distant Facebook connection I was just failing to recognize. By the time I realized you were just a very nice complete stranger who's been where I am and was offering some encouragement, we had already parted ways. I know I did thank you, but it seems too shallow a thank you in retrospect. I was thanking you like someone accepting a nice easy compliment; "You look nice today" without the added subtext that it can be a pretty significant effort to look nice while going through chemo. You were offering the subtext and thus a much deeper level of compliment and encouragement, and I wish I had had the presence of mind to realize it quickly enough to thank you better. So, really. Thank you.

To anyone else who might be reading this blog - sorry I've been such a slacker. I'll be back, I promise.

I have hair.

At first I thought I might be imagining that my hair is growing back. There has been a very sparse little bit of invisibly pale prickly stubble this whole time, and within the last couple of weeks I noticed it felt softer and maybe more densely populated, but I wasn't sure...and it just seemed too soon. I was only halfway through the Taxol. But people commented on it, and now it's unmistakeable. I have hair. It isn't even invisibly pale anymore - this week it's darkening up a little, so I'm guessing it's going to come back as my previous natural mousy brown (though I hadn't seen that color in years, having been a boxed redhead since college).

I guess I'm supposed to be excited about this, but I'm not really sure how I feel about it. I've gotten used to being bald, and this fuzz sticking out of my head is not particularly flattering right now. But as soon as it's long enough that my scalp is not visible through it I plan to stop wearing headcoverings to work, and that will be awfully nice. I love my wigs and I do have a lot of fun coming up with creative scarf wraps, but by the end of the day I can hardly stand that feeling of something on my head.

Truth is, it probably isn't about the hair at all. I find the bald look kinda striking & sexy, but the super-short pixie will be, too. What feels weird is that this signals the ending of this phase of my treatment. It's a good thing, but it's also scary. Going to chemo every week is doing something, and I have a lot of lovely people looking out for my health in a very tangible way. I'll still have a couple of follow-up appointments in December (including the dreaded MRI, yech), and then I'll move on to radiation next year (5 days a week for 6 weeks), but after that my appointments will get less and less frequent. That's a good thing, right? Yet there's something so comforting about the chemo routine. It's as if the cancer can't come back because I go to the hospital every week.

Bummer

It's awfully silly of me, I know, because my chances of ever getting into space have pretty much always been zero. But glancing at this article today, it occurred to me that I could never be a candidate for space travel/colonization now - I'm a lousy health risk. It made me sad. Space travel is on the VERY short list of things I'd gladly risk my life for.

(not) dancing through chemo

I was one of three dancers who were supposed to perform at a local restaurant last night, but the owners cancelled just after we arrived. This is not okay, by any means, but I have to admit I wasn't sorry. I hate it that I would rather sit at home streaming episodes of Monk on the Xbox than dance, but that's where I am right now. Dancing would feel great and I know it, but I can hardly bring myself to make the effort beyond my one drill class a week. Am I just physically tired? Depressed? Either way I know I'd feel better dancing more often - practicing a lot more often, and performing sometimes too.

Chemo Style

All right, it's time to just start talking about this. If I wait until I have everything organized and lined up and perfect I will never do it, so I'm just going to start where I am and (hopefully) get better from here.

First, a "before" pic. This was a couple of weeks after my second surgery, about a week before my donation haircut.

And here I am shortly after the initial shave - still sporting the G.I. Jane stubble, but pretty bald:

Which brings me to my first chemo style tip:

Do not be afraid to rock the big earrings.

The bigger and danglier the better. Whether you wear a scarf, a hat, or a short wig (and it seems many of us do end up more comfortable in short wigs rather than longer ones), or go around bald, there will never be a better time to show off huge, fun earrings.

Taxol #5

I'm in a private room today. I've had a cold all week, and I'm in here to avoid spreading it around to other patients. It's definitely less fun in here. Chemo nurses are a very special breed, and I can hear them chatting and laughing out there in the fun zone while I sit in a bed in this quiet little room. Oh, well, it still beats having to wear a surgical mask over my nose and mouth. I'm not especially claustrophobic, but I can't stand the feel of my own hot exhalations crammed up against my face.

I am theoretically going to be filmed today for a video being made for future patients. My nurse asked me - the video is mainly about her, because she went through all of this as a patient before becoming a chemo nurse. They want to film her interacting with some patients and I have no problem with that. I hope it helps someone feel a little less scared and overwhelmed. Kinda makes me want to check my makeup though.

One more thing

My beloved Steelers are pinking it up for October.

Taxol #4

So far, so good. Taxol #4 was last Thursday. My hands are a little tingly, definitely heat-sensitive, but it comes and goes. I'm waking up at least once or twice a night with a sweat-soaked pillow, my skin is drying out a little (but that could be partly seasonal), and I'm definitely more emotional; but it still beats the Adriamycin/Cytoxan combo that had me achy and exhausted every other weekend and developing aversions to various smells, tastes, and even the thought of certain smells and tastes.

I've been meaning to write about all kinds of things, and as usual, now that I'm here I can't think of any. Well, not that I'm prepared to get into right now, anyway. My boss has been suggesting I blog about my scarf stylings, but that obviously calls for photos. I'll do that soon though.

I didn't get to blog during my last chemo session because I forgot to hibernate my netbook in the morning, so by the time I got to the chemo suite the battery was dead. It was a good day for that to happen though - my dad came by and I really enjoyed chatting with him.

Big hair in the chemo chair

I wore my big red drag queen wig to work today. I don't bring it out often, but it looked cute with my outfit and it's really pretty comfortable. The plan was to take it off on the way to chemo, but when I did I realized it had left a deep indentation across my forehead - not pretty. I know, how much does "pretty" really matter when you're at the hospital having toxic chemicals pumped into your body? Well, it does, a little bit.

Still, I felt a bit ostentatious in the waiting area, sitting there with my huge flaming hair - "Peggy Bundy with class" is how one friend described it. The nurses & the pharmacist like it though.

So this is Taxol number 3 (of 12). It's the first one I'm trying without any Benadryl. If it goes well I won't have to be sleepy on Thursday afternoons anymore, so I'm really hoping I don't have a reaction to the Taxol. I just finished the 30 minutes of pre-meds and am currently being flushed with saline again, so I guess I'll know soon!

Saturday after Taxol #2 - now with TMI

Today should be the bad day. So far though, I don't hurt at all. My hands occasionally feel a little hot and prickly, and that's pretty much it. Except that my bladder is irritated. I noticed the same thing last week, drank a lot of cranberry juice and water, and it was pretty much back to normal by yesterday - but now it's back. UTI? Or some kind of weird side effect I haven't read about yet?

Regardless, it's great to be feeling so good. I even got excited about cooking, for the first time in months. I've been reading about gelatin and making stock with chicken feet, so I just had to try it. I threw a few feet in with some celery, carrots & onion, the wings and carcass of a chicken I cooked in the rotisserie a couple of days ago, and a lot of water. It's been bubbling in the slow cooker for about 16 hours so far, and I think I'll let it keep going all day to get as much calcium out of the bones as possible. I love homemade chicken stock, the way it thickens up in the fridge so that even after you skim all the fat off, what's left still has a really rich, luxurious mouthfeel and so much flavor. I didn't know that gelatin was so good for you though. Bonus!

Ebay listing

I've been meaning to sell this bellydance costume for awhile now, but now that I have lots of bills I'm finally getting off my butt and doing it.