As happens to me often, I really don’t even know where to start.

Physically, I’m doing well. I have some neuropathy in my feet, but it doesn’t HURT, just makes my toes and the balls of my feet feel a little numb.  My eyelids itch like crazy, since my eyelashes are desperately trying to come back in. Likely TMI, but my girl parts feel like the Sahara. And I just found out this week that a medication I’ve been on for years for headaches might be fighting the Tamoxifen, so I get to make some changes there.  Who knows what that will do to the side effects in the future.

I’ve started feeling like I should just wear a sign, “It was breast cancer, but I’m doing great now, thanks for not asking,” since I can see it in people’s eyes when I meet them that they WANT to ask, but aren’t sure how to do it.  I’m fine talking about whatever (in case you haven’t noticed) but I hate that uncomfortable silence where people are obviously confused about what they should or should not ask.

The funniest (I think that’s the word I want?) experience was this week.  I took my mom in to a doctor’s appointment for her, and the very nice young resident started talking to me like I was the patient.  After the first couple of things she said, I just interrupted, “I’m sorry, but just to clarify, I’m the daughter. Breast Cancer (pointing to myself), Colon Cancer (pointing to my mom).”

It was understandable- my eyebrows are pretty thin right now- and I’m the one in a head scarf so I look more like a cancer patient, but my mom IS 23 years older than I am, so it was a little bit of a blow to the ego.

Then again, she might have had a hard time processing that the person who was there to meet with a surgical oncologist to talk about new cancer tumors in her liver was the lady who looks healthy. It’s a lot to process to think that just as I am starting to be able to walk around without a scarf because I look like I might have made the fashion statement to shave my head, my mother, who beat her colon cancer two years ago, will be going back in and having half of her liver removed.

We will find out next week what the chemo plan for her will be, but considering she still has not completely recovered feeling in her hands and feet from the chemo that she finished two years ago last month, it’s a little bit scary.

My mom is who taught me how to fight this cancer business. She gets all mad that they make her take time off of work for surgery.  She worked all the way through her chemo, except for the days when she had to wear a pump for 48 hours to continue to receive treatment at home.  She didn’t even gather the world around her to cheer as I have.  She suffered through most of it as much by herself as we would let her.

So to the friends who have checked in this week to ask how I’m feeling, physically, I’m fine.

Mentally and emotionally, I’m preparing for another fight. And I’m planning for yet another win.

This week has actually been pretty crappy.

My twelve year old car died. Confirmed that my kid has more problems than just ADD that are making things hard for him at school.  Confirmed that the cancer I mentioned last week is indeed back. Not mine, so no new crap for me, but still breaks my heart.

I’ll talk about it more later, there’s still too much for me to wrap my head around.

I’ve also got some annoying physical stuff from the Tamoxifen- like the balls of my feet have been numb for no real reason, and I was not really able to enjoy a massage that I treated myself to, while trying to lay on the rocks in my chest.

But in the good news department, I’m almost to the point where it would look like I cut my hair so short on purpose:

Making Progress

Last week 1/18

And one week earlier, 1/10

I thought I was going to write this blog last night.

My work trip went pretty well, although I think I’ve started to have some minor hot flashes.  I still get cold at random times too, but there were a couple of times in New York where other people were talking about the weather being pleasant, and I’m fighting off a flop sweat.  However, other than that, the Tamoxifen still seems to be going OK.  I have noticed those moments when I can’t quite come up with a word… but that happens when I’m tired or working too many hours as well.

So I was going to write about my hair coming back, or the nice kid who bought me a drink when I decided to ditch the scarf on the last night and he overheard me say something about my cancer. His mom is a survivor.

But then I got a call last night from someone who is very important to me, and we thought beat cancer two years ago. Evidently there’s a new tumor. It’s back.

I don’t want to go into it because it’s not my story to tell, but really, fuck you cancer.  We’ve broken up, I’m moving on, cue Taylor Swift. This does not mean you get to go hook up with your ex to get back at me.

So today, I’ve been a little morose. And personifying cancer. So maybe the Tamoxifen IS making me lose my mind.

But I’m refusing to let the cancer get me down.  My person texted me this morning and said “maybe it is just a mistake,” which is not what I’m counting on here.  I’m counting on more ass kicking.

So here’s today’s updated pic of my hairy egg-like head:

Still easier to see in person, but it really is progress.

And an hour or so ago I got a letter from the Young Survival Coalition, saying my wonderful friend Mary Beth made a donation in my name. She said, “In honor of 2012 being the year you BEAT CANCER I’m making a donation in your name to help other young women in the Seattle area who are diagnosed with breast cancer. May your Ninja powers help others in their fight against cancer.”  I didn’t cry yesterday. Mary Beth made me cry.

So to Mary Beth, and the guy at the bar in NYC and to my person, the fight goes on.  Fuck you cancer!  We will fight, and we will win!

Still don’t really have time to update, but sometimes you have to MAKE the time, right?

I’ve got a trip to NYC for work next week which is what is taking so much of my time right now, but here’s a what is new in Ninja-land:

1. Tamoxifen: Been on it for 10 days now and seems to be going fine. I do feel like I am spacy sometimes, which my doc mentioned might happen, and since I didn’t get chemo brain, is kind of annoying.  No hot flashes lately. We’ll see if that changes.
2. Surgery: April 8 is the big day I get the new boobies. There will be a couple of surgeries after that, but I will get the rocks out of my chest, so that’s good stuff.  I’m still having soreness & to a lesser extent numbness issues because I have rocks in my chest, but still, hanging in there.
3. Hair: The thing I’ve obsessed over more than anything else is the re-growth of my hair.  It started coming in on my birthday, and it’s just getting fuzzier and fuzzier. It’s hard to get a good image of the changes (there really is a pic I took holding the camera above my head that looks like a hairy egg) but here’s the best I’ve got.

At least w/ an eyebrow and ear, you can kind of tell it’s a head.

I’m still wearing hats & scarves most of the time, but that’s in large part because BALD IS COLD!  It is soft to the touch, and seems to be coming in mainly as my natural color, but it’s too short to tell much yet.  Since I was BORN with more hair than I have right now, it’s interesting to see what happens.

OK- back to work!

Looking back, it’s hard to believe that this whole cancer experience so far has happened in less than six months.

I know I’ve been quiet the last few weeks, and I’ve blamed it on work, which is in part fair, but the last week or so I haven’t even been able to really buckle down and concentrate on work like I normally would.  You might think it’s the holidays, but really, I’ve had a hard time getting in to the holidays this year.  I still haven’t sent anything to my dad or baby brother. And I never even went shopping for all of the random little things that usually jump out at me and say that my co-workers need to own them.

My husband & mom are both mad at me that I didn’t give them much of a Christmas list.  The fact is, I just don’t WANT anything that I can think of to tell them to buy. (Hair. The sidekick said he’s got some on backorder for me, it may be a month or two)

And tomorrow I turn 39.

I don’t think the birthday is really why, but late at night when I can’t sleep and am completely honest with myself, I know I’m just a little bit depressed.

It’s the stupidest thing.  I got through the tough stuff by fighting through it. I’m really hoping that it’s just that I feel like I’m on pause. And once I start taking that little pill every day that means I’m fighting again, then I’ll get my head back in the game.

Christmas was fine, the little man was very happy with everything that he got. The sidekick’s gift to me is to let me buy whatever I want… so he couldn’t complain about his new DSLR that he mentioned maybe wanting in passing a couple of months ago… and may have told me not to buy.

Me, I got a new wallet that I wanted, a nice warm hat that does not scream chemo patient, and a pink ukulele, along with a book to teach myself how to play it. Of course, that lead to this:

Sidekick: We’ve been together 20 years, how did I not know you’ve “always” wanted to learn to play the ukulele. I totally could have beat your mom to buying you that.

Me: I like to remain a mystery.  And I did put it on my Amazon wish list.

We even bought a faux tree this year, which seems like a crime considering the sheer number of Christmas Trees grown per capita in the valley where we live, but everyone in the house has allergies, and this way we’ll recycle, right?

So basically, the update is that I’m fine.  I still have thin eyebrows & lashes, but I think my fuzzy hair is starting to fill in a little bit.  I may check several times per day.  The hardest part is the rocks that I have implanted in my chest (get it, hard, rocks?)… but I’m even doing a little better there… my fingers haven’t gone numb in the last couple of days, so that’s good, even if they do still cause some muscle pain.

And then there’s the waiting.

But tomorrow is not only another day, but a whole new year of my life.

I may not have known that there was cancer this time a year ago, but I can look forward to 39 and be pretty sure I’m cancer free.

So really, what more can I want?

So if I still had chemo, today would be my most miserable day. But as it is, it’s my very last fill of the tissue expanders!

I forget if I even updated after the last fill but I’m already a little bit bigger than my gummy bears will be, but as I have said several times to several people, you have to make the wrapping bigger than the package that’s going inside it, so they will be taking me up to 960 cc today, even though the biggest gummy bears that they’ve got are 800 cc.

So the last couple of weeks that I haven’t written, I’ve really just been working.  It feels great to immerse myself in work again, and to not think of myself as much as the chick who is fighting cancer, and more of the chick who gets shit done in the office.

It has been a little bit funny as I run in to people who are not on my team and they say “oh, you’re back!” and I’m like “dude, I never REALLY left” but I work on one end of the building and people just don’t always see me.  And I haven’t made a BIG effort to BE seen, since  I always  feel like I might flake out at any point when I don’t feel good… and I don’t expect that to happen any more.

The only other thought I’ll share today — life can be fleeting — as we were all reminded on Friday. As I’ve mentioned, I spent a long time in TV news, and Friday is one of those days I was glad I was not there. It’s hard to turn your emotions off and just work to get the facts to people. As I sat on a train from Portland back home to Seattle I was fighting tears any time I saw mentions come up on Twitter or Facebook. All I wanted to do was go hug my boys and remind them that I love them.

So here’s your reminder from me again.

It’s the holidays, and you can use that as an excuse, but there’s really no excuse NOT to reach out to the people you love and tell them that you love them.  We never know what this life can bring, and it’s SO easy to get caught up in our own existence and forget to reach out to the people we’re thinking of that we care about.

Every single morning, I get a chance to kiss my son goodbye and tell him that I love him as he heads to school.

Just one more reason I’m a lucky lady!

I told a couple of people today, sometimes I feel like I’m milking this cancer thing.

I try to remind myself that the chemo itself is supposed to last for three weeks while all of the little chemo bits swirl around my body and do their job, ninja-ing all of the stray cancer cells that might be lurking in my body, and it’s not just the day I get the treatment or the first few days where I’m exhausted, but the whole three weeks. So even though I have like 9 days left of the chemo, I’m back at work full time, hopefully this time for good!

But I get the feeling that people think that I’m lying on the bathroom floor while I wait to vomit again, so I thought it would be better for me to talk about my side effects that I do have, as I haven’t catalogued them lately.

I have not been interested in food, but I start to hurt worse when I don’t get enough protein, so I try to stay ahead of it and eat anyway.

I have not thrown up one single time, but I have had what I refer to as “intestinal distress,” I’ll let you figure that out.

My eyes spend several days tweaking out, and then water uncontrollably at random times.

I still have my eyebrows, eyelashes and some hair, but all three are very thin, the thinnest being the hair on my head.

Honestly, I could likely make a longer list of problems I have NOT had than the ones that I have.

The worst thing I’ve got going at the moment is the weird skin reaction that I’ve had each time, so if I was the type of person to get sleeved, I could have some lovely like vines or something that would show where I had each of my chemo treatments.

Here you can see treatment 1 by my elbow, the current owie from #4 above it, and then the leftovers of #2 past my elbow. (#3 was on the other side of my arm)

The tracks of my chemo

My finger is just kind of there in the picture, I am not pointing at anything.  I took the pic for my doctor, but he assures me that it’s really okay.

Anyhow, I realize sharing the lovely picture of what the kid calls my “icky arm” when he asks me not to use it to do things like open the door… which is hard since I call it my RIGHT arm, and I am right handed, ANYHOW, sharing that may not make it seem like I’m doing fine, but really, honestly, I’m fine.

And for those of you who have asked me if I watch “Parenthood,” nope, I don’t, but I did watch a bunch of it on demand this week.  And I think that some of the emotional stuff is what I’m going through, and the feelings of loss of control, but a lot of the rest is different.

I had more than one lump, so couldn’t have a lumpectomy.  There was no cancer in my lymph nodes, my chemo is because of how aggressive my main tumor was, but at this point, we think we’ve cut it all out. The woman on the show will likely need radiation. I do not.

As I mentioned, I have not thrown up. I have not smoked pot to do so.

My point with this is that each and every cancer treatment is different.  Every tumor is different, and the way that everyone’s body handles whatever treatment is appropriate for that tumor differently.

If you’re reading this to find out exactly what it’s like for someone else, I can’t tell you that. And it’s never going to be exactly like Samantha on Sex and the City or anything else you see on TV.

That’s especially true when it comes to side effects.

Sometimes it takes a little bit before I remember how incredibly lucky I am.

Today’s case in point actually came to my attention immediately after I posted my last blog, and I almost posted just links again so you could all giggle along with me, but having given it a day, I’m more Zen, and think I see a bigger picture.  (Sorry if this is a little discombobulated, I took my meds to go to sleep, and still can’t, so I thought I’d get all of these swirling words out of my head and see if that brings slumber.)

SO, I keep referring to my “gummi bears” and thinking that it’s just a slang term for new breast implants, since that’s what my plastic surgeon called them the first time I met her way back in August. Since I’ve tripped naïvely along this journey forgetting that not everyone goes to a world class cancer center and research hospital as the hospital their doctor just sends them to, I thought this was standard.

Evidently no.

So there are two pieces to the power of the Gummi Bear. The first is this realization that I obviously did something right in a past life for this to be going so smoothly and to have such amazing medical care like I do at SCCA and UWMC, but the second is a little bit of a giggle that brought me to this realization.

It’s easier to explain this as it happened in my head, so here goes.

Other day, hit send on blog, put note about blog on FB, start surfing to see what others are up to.  A former colleague, we’ll call him Manhole so that if he reads this he gets the reference shout out but is not personally and publically associated with my insanity, posted a link to Alicia Keys singing on Jimmy Fallon. Which is whatevs, until you realize what she is singing… a soulful rendition of the theme song to the late 80’s Disney cartoon, “The Adventures of the Gummi Bears.”

I know I’ve mentioned him, but I have a baby brother. I was 13 when he was born. And as a proper teenaged sister, I spent hours in front of a television with him, watching what I believed was appropriate programming for a toddler… including “The Disney Afternoon” pretty much every day when I came home from school from like 1988 until I left for college in 1992.  That included a lot of hearing the ACTUAL version of the theme song how it immediately started running through my head.

So if you clicked on that link you’re likely starting to get it… my readers are nothing if not link clickers who are bright, right? For those who missed the words that I’ve had stuck in my head:

• Gummi Bears!!
• Bouncing here and there and everywhere.
• High adventure that’s beyond compare.
• They are the Gummi Bears.

There are many other lyrical gems there if you think of them as boobs… but I kept thinking, how has the video for this song not gone viral with a bunch of bouncing silicone boobs.  I mean, once I have my gummi bears, I believe they WILL fight for what’s right in what ever they do!

So I went to see if I could find someone who has made my clever giggle connection when I got hit by the lucky part.

Evidently no one has made this connection because “gummi bear” boobs are relatively new in the US.  They are named for the popular gummy candy (which I am now craving BTW) because unlike the old school silicone which could be punctured and would then leak, these are made of high-density silicone, so like a gummi bear, if you cut into it or puncture it, it doesn’t leak. You can learn more here from people who advertise that they are one of the only clinics that does them in So Cal…

So maybe it’s just good marketing on that one page that makes them seem exclusive, but that ABC story calling them “new” is from May of this year, and I remember when I told my Pink Pal, Tina, that I was getting gummi bears, she was jealous because her plastics guy “couldn’t do them.”

And it hits me again.

All I did was go to my normal doctor who I’ve seen for like 15 years, and she sent me to SCCA for my mammogram. And they saw that something was wrong right away, on that first day at the mammogram appointment. Because they’re that good.

Other people have to shop around to get the right care, and there are people who fly here from all over the country to get treatment from my docs.  Hell, there are people who don’t have insurance and don’t necessarily have access to breast care at all.

I get cranky if there’s traffic, so then the drive takes me 45 min to get to this facility where my doc is reading the latest journals before they are published so that he always knows the latest findings in his field, and can take them into account for my care.

Lucky, lucky, lucky!

So if you know me in real life, you are likely not shocked that even though I never finished watching the final season, I am a HUGE fan of the West Wing. Great writing, mostly great acting, and other general awesomeness.

Although as I have learned this year, I’m willing to bet it’s as much easier to be the fake President on TV as it is to have breast cancer on TV.

But I digress.

On the West Wing, when Bartlett was done with something, he would say, “What’s Next?” This was best explained in the episode where Josh got shot by people shooting at Charlie, and blah blah blah, but the idea was, when he said “what’s next,” he was DONE with the current topic, and ready to move on.

So as I said to my doc when I saw him a week ago, “What’s Next?” for your friend the ninja.  Here’s how it looks:

• Dec. 3- I forget which number fill for tissue expanders (I’ve had cancer, no one said I had to do MATH TOO)
• Dec. 17- Last fill of the boobies.  Let them sit in their stiffness “high and proud” on my chest for 3+ months to get all acclimated.
• Dec. 25- Christmas. I’m really hoping for hair. (If anyone knows a place where I can donate or exchange in the butt that I currently have for the hair, I’m willing.)
• Dec 28. I turn 39.  Again, top of the wish list = Hair… since I’ll already be done with most of the work working on the boobies, right?
• Jan 1- Start the Tamoxifen.  Hot flashes and other early menopause symptoms to ensue. (I think they should call it woman-o-pause since they are pausing my women-ness, but my boss pointed out the whole “pausing menses” root and all that. Again, more thinking than I need to do today.  There is a good chance that this blog will document my decline into bat shit crazy. I’ll be interested to see how readership does as I lose my shit)
• Late March/Early April- Reconstructive surgery.  I get the hard, water-filled boobies replaced with some nice gummy bears.
• June 28- 16 year wedding anniversary. Likely when I will be ready to let the sidekick touch the new soft boobies… 🙂

The other thing I’ll be figuring out in there is how to get back to whittling my waist.  20/20 worked for me, but was CRAZY expensive, and we’ve had a lot of co-pays this year.  My favorite trainer is no longer at the kind of close to me gym… and the gym closest to me is about to go 24 hour… which would be super helpful.  I like to go to the gym and watch biggest loser on elliptical.

So just one last update on what’s been now, since we all know I’d rather skip straight to next.

My eyes were unhappy for the first few days, so I just kept them closed.  When I woke up yesterday I was able to sit with the light box (as the dog thinks of the laptop according to me) in my lap for a little while and get caught up on mail & dog shaming.

The side effects have been pretty much the same as the other three times. Pain has moved around more.  I’ve had a couple of awesome visitors who brought me mittens, food, and a reason to keep my eyes open. The only other one, which I was told to expect, is that my nail beds hurt.  All 20 of them.  They feel like they were stepped on or stubbed, but it’s JUST the nail bed, except for when it’s more pain than that.  Oh, and my pecs are super cranky. But that has been on going since my last fill. Hoping that once I stop the chemo after the fills, that the pec pain will also go away.

Oh, and my lips are peeling, so I both need to put more Burt’s Bees on them and quit chewing on them.

All in all, I’m feeling like I’m seeing the other side of this. That may be optimistic, but I always have been a glass half-full girl. 🙂

And I’ve missed a couple of days. I even had a few long blinks at Skyfall on Friday night, but when my eyes tweak out, it seems best to let them close.
Other than the blinking, I’ve had the bone pain, but in general I’m just waiting it out & being grateful that I can see the finish line from here…
As long a I blink carefully!