Event acceleration

It's Halloween. In normal years, I would be all prepared for the trick or treating holiday. But the year hasn't been normal.Or maybe I'm just really bad at normalizing the whole cancer thing.

I always call it "the whole cancer thing." Like calling it that provides some distance from it or something.

Even after surgery and months of treatment, I still don't feel like a cancer - I don't want to call myself a victim, because I don't feel like one, but I don't feel like a survivor yet, either, so I guess I will have to go with - patient. Cancer patient. Funny, but I don't feel very patient either, but I guess you have to be when you have cancer.

Truth is, I don't know HOW to label myself. I'm in cancer limbo. I see the effects every day: Bald head, next-to-no eyebrows, moon face, inability to remember stuff and organize (which wasn't that great in the first place but is definitely much worse now). But it still feels like it is outside of me, like this isn't really my life. I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, not really thinking about what is happening, or even what my future will be. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's a "live in the moment" kind of attitude. It doesn't really feel positive, but it doesn't feel negative either. I don't even know. I just know that it feels like everything is even more of a blur than it was before; like time is slipping through my fingers and I can't even register what is happening.

Every event is coming way too fast except the next cancer treatment. Where is the time going? How did we already get to Halloween? Thankfully, my daughter requested, a few weeks ago, a costume from a catalog that I was more than happy to say "yes" to, since it was as easy as calling, giving them my credit card number and getting it in the mail a few days later.

This event acceleration seems to be affecting my whole family. It took the kids three nights to carve their pumpkins. They started on Sunday night and finished up last night. And before they finished carving, there was a mad scramble to find the book report form that my daughter needed to have done by today. And a Scout meeting. And homework. When they finally finished carving their pumpkins, we realized we had no candles to put inside them. So my husband took them to Wal-Mart at 9 p.m. to get the candles.

So many details that seem to be forgotten.

Then I have to remind myself that I have never been very good at remembering details. I have to make lists for my lists. The only things I remember clearly from my childhood were the events in which there was photographic evidence. Everything else is kind of blur.

I'm seeing a pattern.

Maybe the event acceleration of my life is simply me being me. I'm just remembering how much I'm not remembering more than I used to.

And I did manage to get my son that black cloak today that he asked for. So I guess I'm actually prepared for Halloween, even though it was very last minute. I guess it's sounding more normal than I care to admit!!!!

Happy Halloween!

Wordless Wednesday: The blustery day

It is windy. 'Nuff said.

View this cool wind map that shows just how windy it is!

http://hint.fm/wind/

Rotten, but beautiful, egg

I'm standing in the kitchen yesterday morning and notice a slightly rancid smell. I get out my best bloodhound nose technique and begin sniffing around the counter top. My sniffer keys in on a plastic glass with an intricately painted egg inside. A project done by my daughter this past summer at an art camp.

I pick up the egg. Oh my gosh, the smell almost gags me.

I say to my little cherub, who is in the bathroom off the kitchen, "Sweetie, is there still a yolk in this egg?"

She said, "Yes. The art teacher said it would be fine if it didn't get cracked."

I said, "Well, it's not cracked as far as I can tell, and it stinks to high heaven. I'm afraid I'm going to have to throw it out."

The look on my 10-year-old's face when I said that almost brought me to tears.

I decided instead to do my best to blow it out, knowing full well that it would probably be the grossest thing I have ever done.

It was pretty close.

I was able to stick a pin in the top and bottom to get a hole started, and then slowly made it bigger with a round toothpick.

And I blew. First came out some pretty stinky reddish-yellow glop, then came the black nasty stuff. By this time, my cherub was out of the bathroom, attempting to have breakfast. She looked at the black nasty stuff coming out, held her nose and just said "Yuck."

Yuck is right. I have cleaned up baby puke, dog puke, baby poop and dog poop, and they were all a cake walk compared to blowing out a rancid egg. I took these pictures before I actually blew out the egg, just in case my attempt to make holes in it didn't work and it broke.

After seeing what came out of the egg in a structured blow, I'm glad it didn't break while putting holes in it. The black nasty stuff would have been everywhere, and that probably would have made me puke!

The whole procedure really stunk up the house. We had fans going and windows and doors open.It was quite a a raucous start to my Monday.

But after running lots of water into it and through it and blowing and huffing and blowing some more, then airing it outside overnight, I think we have an egg that will no longer stink up the house.

And kids, don't EVER let anyone tell you that an egg will be fine as long as it doesn't crack. Eventually, the stuff inside gets nasty. You have to blow them out if you want to keep them.

Tonight, I'm walking

My husband, son and I are walking for breast cancer awareness tonight. Windy as all get out today, but hopefully by the time of the walk, it will have calmed down a little.

It was my husband's idea. I thought it was a really great idea. October is Breast Cancer Awareness month and this walk will help out the North Dakota Women's Way program.

North Dakota Women's Way helps women who are not as fortunate as I am to have a great job with good insurance. So, not only will the walk do me good, (because I haven't been very good about getting out and walking now that it has gotten a little cooler) but it will do good for other women as well.

I have given to breast cancer research and awareness programs before, but I didn't think much about what I was doing. Now it has all kinds of meaning for me. (Funny how that works, isn't it?)

I have heard many times how far breast cancer research has come in the last 10 years because so much emphasis is being placed on screening and early detection, not to mention improved technology. I just read something the other day that the survival rate of early detection breast cancer is now up to 95 percent after five years. That's pretty darn good, if you ask me. (And also puts my old brain at ease knowing chances are pretty good that I will beat cancer and see my kids off to college, and hopefully get married and have kids of their own!)

And walking to support other women as a way to say thank you for my increased chances? It's the least I can do.

My left eyebrow

So, when you have cancer and you don't have much hair on your head, somehow you don't really focus on your eyebrows, until one day you notice that one is starting to look much thinner than the other.

That happened to me last week. I noticed that my left eyebrow was starting to get a few "holes" in it. But the right one was still looking pretty good.

I blame it on the fact that I sleep on my left side most of the time. And I'm guessing my face probably gets smushed into the pillow a little bit while I sleep because when I get up in the mornings, I notice that the hairs of my left eyebrow are all akimbo. So I smooth them down and get on with my day.

That is, until last week when I noticed I was looking a little lopsided in the eyebrow department.

Suddenly, the fact that I was losing my left eyebrow became an all-consuming problem to fix.

I tried filling in lefty with an eyebrow pencil, but it looked a little darker than the right, so then I tried filling in the right side a little bit, and it still looked wrong.

So I did the next best thing. I plucked righty to match lefty. It wasn't hard. The hairs came out pretty easy.

And I just put a tiny bit of eyebrow pencil on each side to get them looking a little less holey. Painfully pencil thin, but less holey, nevertheless.

It's funny, but losing my eyebrows has been more of a bummer than losing a whole head of hair! I suppose it's because you can't cover it up with funky turbans and other head dresses that make me feel like a pirate!

Pretty soon, I suppose, there will be no more eyebrows and I will have to learn how to make myself fake ones with the eyebrow pencil.

Or maybe I'll just go all Whoopi Goldberg and forget about the eyebrows.

Cancer protein

For many years, my blood was on the low end of the hemoglobin count, so my doctor told me to take a multi-vitamin. Which I have been doing pretty religiously.

Only problem? Unless I had a full stomach of food, those vitamins had a tendency to make me puke-y.

Literally.

I have gotten woozy and lost my lunch (well, usually supper) from taking a multi-vitamin without a full stomach more than once.

So imagine how discombobulated I became when when my cancer chemotherapy made me so nauseous I had no desire to eat for the first two months, let alone take a multi-vitamin that might make me even more puke-y.

I was pleasantly surprised when I got brave enough to actually take the vitamins that, for whatever reason, they didn't make nauseous like they used to BEFORE chemo.

Go figure.

What had changed about my diet? I asked myself

"Self," I responded, "You are eating more protein."

"Could that be it?" I asked.

"Well, maybe," I responded.

You see, the doctor said I should more protein. The chemo nurses said I should. How can you argue with people who tell you to "eat meat!" I say.

But the added benefit of not getting as nauseous? Well, I did what any curious soul would do. I "googled" it.And this is what I found....

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18537470

In a nutshell (or maybe more appropriately, a bacon wrapped chunk of sirloin) the study concluded that  high protein meals with ginger "reduced the delayed nausea of chemotherapy."

Okay, I didn't have the ginger, but if a chunk of red meat can help get me over nausea, well, I'm going to partake!

Excuse me, but I suddenly feel the need for a steak!

Volunteer corn cobs are a bust

My kids set some Indian corn out for the birds to eat and apparently one tough seed managed to get growing, which I wrote about in June: http://mytwoacres.blogspot.com/2012/06/corn-anomaly.html

So the other day, I was cutting down dead flowers and decided to check the cobs. This was what I found....

Not very pretty, is it? And it was the only cob that actually had a few kernels on it. The rest were completely kernel-less.

So I guess volunteer Indian corn from a seed that just happens to sprout and grow in my flower bed isn't as cool of an idea as I thought it was.

Oh well, live and learn.

Less taxing

My headline is probably a little misleading, particularly in this full throttle election season.

This post isn't about politics or taxes. It's actually about cancer, or rather the drug that I am now taking for cancer, called Taxol.

I have had three Taxol treatments so far -- only more to go -- and I must say (said like Martin Short's Ed Grimly from Saturday Night Live fame because I'm that much of a nerd) I'm feeling (knock on wood) so much better than I did on the Adriamycin and Cytoxan. Taxol appears to be much less taxing on my system. I don't get naseous, and I'm not as worn out. And I get very few body aches either, which is nice.

Of course, I'm not growing any hair.

But I'm not losing any more either.

I still look like a chia pet.

But what an excuse to get more beanies and scarves and stuff, which I just ordered, to the tune of way too much money. I figure my chia head deserved a few more accessories to beauty it up a little!

I bought a wig before I lost all my hair. I haven't worn it.  The wig is hanging on the rocking chair in the bedroom. It looks better on the chair than it does on me!

But I digress.

Taxol does tend to make your fingers and toes a little numb, although I'm not having too much numbness. It also tends to loosen your fingernails and toenails. I just hope I don't lose them, because that would be kinda icky.

But if that's the worst of it, I guess I can't complain much at all. Well, I can, but that would just be silly.

I'm just so glad that I'm feeling better. There is something to be said about how much your attitude improves when you don't feel icky all the time. Yesterday I cut down some of my plants for the winter. There are a lot of them out there, and some of them are still green, so I just cut down the most wilted ones.

I understand the weather is going to be turning cold later this week (chance of snow, even) so there will be a lot more to cut by this weekend.

I digress again.

So Taxol is less taxing, and I am always happy with less taxing (wink, wink)!