Friday March 9th marked my 2-year anniversary of being cancer free. In three more years, I will be considered cured, instead of simply in remission, which is my current status. Also, in three years I will come off the array of medications that keep me in artificial menopause, and in theory I will return to a state of normalcy for a then-32-year old woman. Which is to say, I'll exit menopause and get my period again, I wont be subjected to monthly doctor's visits and bi-annual scans and searches and prods and pokes, AND I'll get to stop taking all these damn drugs. And hopefully, my health will return to normal. Because at the moment, it ain't.
I remember thinking during my chemo treatments that all I had to do was "get through it" - that one day, the treatments would end, the surgery would be over, the radiation will have finished, and the cancer would be GONE - my life would be back to normal. I don't know if it was naïveté or self-preservation that led me to believe that. I think a bit of both. If I had known then that my life would probably never be the same after my diagnosis, I think i would have been a lot more distraught and perhaps not such a determined fighter...or at any rate, a lot more pissed off!
My first realization that this wouldn't be as smooth and complete a recovery as I had anticipated came after my surgery, when 8 weeks later I still couldn't lift my arm above the level of my shoulder. I have a distinct memory of the surgeon telling me that I'd be "back to normal" in 6 weeks. To me, "back to normal" means doing all of the things I NORMALLY did before the damn surgery - I think what she meant was I'd be able to brush my teeth with my right hand again. (Although, I should call that woman and ask her what her definition of "normal" is, because here it is two years later and...) After many weeks of physical therapy, including a few fun sessions of the previously chronicled lymph-strand ripping at the hands of the wee nurses, I slowly regained full use of the arm, but it took over a year of not sleeping on my right side, jogging with my arm tucked tight against my chest, always lugging my purse & grocery bags on my left shoulder, etc.
Before I had even begun to fight Southpaw again, I developed lymphedema in that arm. This is something that had always been mentioned to me as a potential result of the lymph-node removal, but more in that way that they mention all those horrible side effects in a really fast, hushed voice at the end of drug commercials - possible, but not really something to be worried about. Something older, heavier, more out-of-shape women should worry about, but not me. Of course, now I AM one of those older, more out-of-shape women - or at least my body thinks I am. So I developed lymphedema, which I will have to manage for the rest of my life (or until they invent easily-insertable artificial lymph nodes). Thanks, cancer, for exposing me to the joys of spandex support sleeves.
And of course, there's menopause - for the first few months I didn't really mind the hot flashes and night sweats. Anything was a blessing after the horrors of chemo. But after a couple of years, let me say - it's getting effing old. The hot flashes are more of a nuisance than anything else - resulting in me constantly pulling off sweaters, mopping my brow, fanning myself frantically in restaurants, holding glasses of ice water against my neck. The night sweats, however, are a bummer - they wake me up two or three times a night and take about 20-30 minutes to pass, leaving me sweaty and clammy and tossing and turning and awake. And let's not even go into all the other lovely side-effects that I shouldn't have to deal with til I'm 50 and have had a few more decades of youthful vigor. Thanks, cancer, for deepening my empathy for middle-aged women everywhere.
As I read back over my last posting, in September, I realize I've gone downhill a bit since then. My biggest struggle recently has been an unidentifiable "sickness" that seems to strike randomly and fiercely, regardless of my attempts to thwart it - something akin to a really bad hangover, but lasting up to two or three days. It's been happening off and on for almost a year now, increasing in ferocity over the past 6 months. After seeing two nutritionists, an acupuncturist, and two GI docs, and eliminating sugar, alcohol, fruit, and gluten from my diet, the most recent guess at a diagnosis was a migraine-syndrome. After a month-long wait to get an appointment with a recommended neurologist/headache specialist at Cornell (seriously, how can doctors expect sick people to wait a MONTH for treatment??), I saw her Monday, and she confirmed that migraines are indeed the culprit. I've never had migraines before - they've apparently been brought on by my chemically-induced menopause. They're often related to hormonal shifts (which I've certainly experienced plenty of in the past couple years). So, the treatment choices: do I start taking more medication to try to fight the migraines, adding more drugs to my system and risk more unpleasant side effects, or do I try cutting out one of the medications that are suppressing my estrogen and risk increasing my chances of recurrence? I opted to try more drugs. Thanks, cancer, for continuing to broaden my pharmaceutical horizons.
I'm also going to have an MRI of my brain next week to be sure that there's nothing lurking about in there that shouldn't be. This is something I would have never worried about before cancer, but now nothing seems impossible.
For example, normally I wouldn't have worried about a small red rash that popped up on my arm earlier this week, because before cancer it would've meant that I scratched it in my sleep, or I was wearing cheap cashmere. But, this small red rash was on my right arm (you know, the one with lymphedema as a result of the removal of the lymph nodes in my armpit as a result of them being infested with cancer), and as it turned out it was caused by a bacterial infection called cellulitis, which had invaded the vulnerable tissue in my fattened arm and was marching its way through my bloodstream (pic below). When I woke up the next morning and the welts had spread down my forearm to my wrist, I called the doctor and was put on antibiotics for a week, with the strongly-worded warning that if I developed a fever I should come into the ER immediately for IV drugs. Thanks, cancer, for keeping things interesting.
That's all the excitement for the moment. I'll try to blog more frequently and keep you all updated on the continuing joys of cancer, the gift that keeps on giving.
I remember thinking during my chemo treatments that all I had to do was "get through it" - that one day, the treatments would end, the surgery would be over, the radiation will have finished, and the cancer would be GONE - my life would be back to normal. I don't know if it was naïveté or self-preservation that led me to believe that. I think a bit of both. If I had known then that my life would probably never be the same after my diagnosis, I think i would have been a lot more distraught and perhaps not such a determined fighter...or at any rate, a lot more pissed off!
My first realization that this wouldn't be as smooth and complete a recovery as I had anticipated came after my surgery, when 8 weeks later I still couldn't lift my arm above the level of my shoulder. I have a distinct memory of the surgeon telling me that I'd be "back to normal" in 6 weeks. To me, "back to normal" means doing all of the things I NORMALLY did before the damn surgery - I think what she meant was I'd be able to brush my teeth with my right hand again. (Although, I should call that woman and ask her what her definition of "normal" is, because here it is two years later and...) After many weeks of physical therapy, including a few fun sessions of the previously chronicled lymph-strand ripping at the hands of the wee nurses, I slowly regained full use of the arm, but it took over a year of not sleeping on my right side, jogging with my arm tucked tight against my chest, always lugging my purse & grocery bags on my left shoulder, etc.
Before I had even begun to fight Southpaw again, I developed lymphedema in that arm. This is something that had always been mentioned to me as a potential result of the lymph-node removal, but more in that way that they mention all those horrible side effects in a really fast, hushed voice at the end of drug commercials - possible, but not really something to be worried about. Something older, heavier, more out-of-shape women should worry about, but not me. Of course, now I AM one of those older, more out-of-shape women - or at least my body thinks I am. So I developed lymphedema, which I will have to manage for the rest of my life (or until they invent easily-insertable artificial lymph nodes). Thanks, cancer, for exposing me to the joys of spandex support sleeves.
And of course, there's menopause - for the first few months I didn't really mind the hot flashes and night sweats. Anything was a blessing after the horrors of chemo. But after a couple of years, let me say - it's getting effing old. The hot flashes are more of a nuisance than anything else - resulting in me constantly pulling off sweaters, mopping my brow, fanning myself frantically in restaurants, holding glasses of ice water against my neck. The night sweats, however, are a bummer - they wake me up two or three times a night and take about 20-30 minutes to pass, leaving me sweaty and clammy and tossing and turning and awake. And let's not even go into all the other lovely side-effects that I shouldn't have to deal with til I'm 50 and have had a few more decades of youthful vigor. Thanks, cancer, for deepening my empathy for middle-aged women everywhere.
As I read back over my last posting, in September, I realize I've gone downhill a bit since then. My biggest struggle recently has been an unidentifiable "sickness" that seems to strike randomly and fiercely, regardless of my attempts to thwart it - something akin to a really bad hangover, but lasting up to two or three days. It's been happening off and on for almost a year now, increasing in ferocity over the past 6 months. After seeing two nutritionists, an acupuncturist, and two GI docs, and eliminating sugar, alcohol, fruit, and gluten from my diet, the most recent guess at a diagnosis was a migraine-syndrome. After a month-long wait to get an appointment with a recommended neurologist/headache specialist at Cornell (seriously, how can doctors expect sick people to wait a MONTH for treatment??), I saw her Monday, and she confirmed that migraines are indeed the culprit. I've never had migraines before - they've apparently been brought on by my chemically-induced menopause. They're often related to hormonal shifts (which I've certainly experienced plenty of in the past couple years). So, the treatment choices: do I start taking more medication to try to fight the migraines, adding more drugs to my system and risk more unpleasant side effects, or do I try cutting out one of the medications that are suppressing my estrogen and risk increasing my chances of recurrence? I opted to try more drugs. Thanks, cancer, for continuing to broaden my pharmaceutical horizons.
I'm also going to have an MRI of my brain next week to be sure that there's nothing lurking about in there that shouldn't be. This is something I would have never worried about before cancer, but now nothing seems impossible.
For example, normally I wouldn't have worried about a small red rash that popped up on my arm earlier this week, because before cancer it would've meant that I scratched it in my sleep, or I was wearing cheap cashmere. But, this small red rash was on my right arm (you know, the one with lymphedema as a result of the removal of the lymph nodes in my armpit as a result of them being infested with cancer), and as it turned out it was caused by a bacterial infection called cellulitis, which had invaded the vulnerable tissue in my fattened arm and was marching its way through my bloodstream (pic below). When I woke up the next morning and the welts had spread down my forearm to my wrist, I called the doctor and was put on antibiotics for a week, with the strongly-worded warning that if I developed a fever I should come into the ER immediately for IV drugs. Thanks, cancer, for keeping things interesting.
That's all the excitement for the moment. I'll try to blog more frequently and keep you all updated on the continuing joys of cancer, the gift that keeps on giving.