27 Monday Jun 2011
Writing this at the hospital … been through the machine once already and am waiting to go through a second time as there is some suspicious “activity” in the pelvic area that they want to re-check.
Back soon! They’re calling me…
[update below…]
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22 Wednesday Jun 2011
It’s that time again … got a call from the hospital yesterday (while I was fretting about having to make this terrible decision) and was told my next PET scan would be on Monday at 8am. And then the scanxiety set in. I haven’t had it this bad since last year at this time. In fact it will be almost exactly a year, just one day off. Though of course I had my last PET in January.
I was nervous last time but, as I only had a couple of day’s notice, I didn’t have so much time to worry. This time it came as a surprise because I thought it wasn’t going to be until the end of July, and so now I suddenly have almost a whole week of sleepless nights ahead of me.
The other thing that makes it scarier this time is that since my last “all-clear” two very dear friends have had inoperable recurrences and have been given chemo as a last resort, and I worry that I’m next. As usual I am kicking myself for not having made all the healthy lifestyle changes I should have, as if daring the cancer to come back – how stupid was that? But of course there’s nothing I can do about that now to change Monday’s outcome.
I have so much planned for the summer now that work is finally picking up, and I so want to be able to do it all. In fact, I have a tapas tour on Monday evening. Wonder how I’ll manage to do that if I end up getting bad news. BUT… all of this is scariest in the wee hours as I lie awake and turn it all over and over again in my mind. Right now the sun is shining and there’s lots to do.
04 Wednesday May 2011
Posted in cancer, change, chemo, death & dying, fitness, health & happiness, home, hope, hospitals
May 4th 2008 was the last day I ever felt “healthy and normal”. The next morning I woke up with excrutiating abdominal pain and the rest, as they say, is history.
Three major operations and two bouts of chemo later, I am in remission and have been since September 2009, but of course the risk of recurrence is always there. This was seriously brought home to me when my friend Gaelen was recently diagnosed with new metastasis after three cancer-free years. Around the same time another friend – my power twin Jed – got sick again and is now facing a treatment-without-cure situation. It’s made it harder for me to go along in my usual state of semi-denial, which makes for a lot of sleepless nights and general emotional upheaval. But mostly I’m okay. Because, as far as I know, I’m still okay.
Anyhow, not trying to be a downer, but anniversaries are always a bit poignant in that “will it be my last??” kind of way. As I’ve said here before, perhaps if I’d made more of an effort to do all The Right Things I’d be feeling less, well, annoyed with myself right now. Every day I wake up determined to eat broccoli and forego wine and spend two hours at the gym, and then … it’s not that I can’t be bothered, but things are never simple and I’ve had lots of stress in other areas of my life and I can’t seem to get it all together at once. As if I have all the time in the world to get it right…
One thing I’ve learned these past three years is to be less judgemental about people who can’t seem to get it together. Well, except for me. Are you very hard on yourself, or are you able to just go with the flow?
06 Friday Aug 2010
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It started with solo trips to the hospital for my monthly chemo port cleaning – I realised that if I went in the evening it was less busy and I could be in & out in about ten minutes. The first time I taxied there and back and the whole thing took less than an hour, which I thought was pretty good. It also felt good not to have to ask someone to come with me – thought it best to save that favour for scarier appointments like seeing the oncologist and going for PET scans. And so I started planning the port cleaning trips for evenings that Nog had a class nearby – we’d meet up after we’d both finished, go for a tapa and then walk home together (same price as taxi fare, but much more pleasant!). From there I started getting braver and braver…
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22 Thursday Jul 2010
Posted in cancer, food & drink, friends, health & happiness, hospitals
Pilar & Isabel
2/3 of my fabulous nuclear medicine team
Made personal history yesterday by going to The Hospital for an oncology appointment … ALL BY MYSELF. I’d called all my usual hospital buddies and they were either away on holiday or, like Nog, not able to get away from work because of the very inconvenient appointment time – 1.45. This also meant that I would be at the tail end of the typical morning’s backup and could expect an extra long wait. You can probably imagine how much I was dreading this. But in the end I decided to take the bull with the corns (a wonderful malapropism from an old student of mine) and do something about this instead of feeling scared and helpless. And so…
casa azahar 