Friday, December 31, 2010

Ding dong the year is dead

Shit, man, what a year. The first five months were bloody hard professionally, but so freakin' rewarding. I try not to be too sentimental or foggy-brained about work, but I had (and still have) a rockin' team and job. Full stop.

Then "the troubles" began in late May and I had the most brutal month of my life. I knew my diagnosis before it was delivered to me in Dr. B's office on June 22, and it was four weeks of feeling like one foot was in the grave and one was back on earth trying to hold it all together somehow.

The c-dawg ripped my old brain out that day and replaced it with mush at first, but it was mush that was willing to learn about how to do things a little differently to say fuck you to the numbers and the two big tumours in my breast. Six months later I feel grateful that things haven't gone as poorly as they could have. I'm here, I feel fantastic, and no matter what the official word is, I've made progress everywhere. According to me.

Now it's December 31 and I'm getting ready to begin a month of cell-cleansing to ready my bod for surgery and the future. And the best part of it all? I have an army of detoxers flushing out the Purdy's along with me. Awesomeness. A particularly big shout out to AJ, who despite a hectic work schedule and not even owning a juicer, has today agreed to join in on the "make juice not war" campaign in January. You rule and I love you!

In the darkest of moments in May and June, I felt the weight of death, disease and a battle I wasn't positive I could be graceful about, but I never felt alone. The whipped cream topping on the friends and family I see and speak to every day has been the support through this ol' blog. And by golly, that warms my tin heart and lizard brain.

Seriously 2010. You were kind of annoying. But I see big things for 2011. Smaller things in some places, but definitely bigger things in other places. :-)

Happy New Years Eve!!

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Back at the laser beam

I'm now officially a model student when it comes to positioning myself on my custom-made body form on the radiation table. As my cancer twin S will likely attest to, it's stupidly important to please the techs who buzz around you like measuring robots every day. Today I was as close to perfect as I could be, with only some minor pulling of the sheet underneath me by my big bad techs.

I recognized one of the whitecoats at the main computer today but didn't realize until I'd left that it was one of the moms from Frances' daycare. Strange to think she may be peering over my chestal area sometime soon - bloody small city.

Pete was in the waiting room with the girls, chatting up the other patients and escorts. One woman was there from Los Angeles with her brother, who lives on Galiano Island and was in for two treatments today. Mamma mia. I won't be complaining about commute times again. Another woman was there with her husband, who was on cancer part two after 10 years in remission. She said he had cancer in his gums after living for years with ill-fitting dentures.

"Smoker?" Pete asked.

"Oh yeah!" the woman responded enthusiastically.

Tomorrow I meet up with Dr. R, my surgeon, for another consultation. I'm going to try to needle a surgery date out of her, but really I just want to talk out my options again, six months after seeing her the last time. One thing she said to me the first time I saw her keeps running through my brain. I hadn't received my official diagnosis yet, but she had looked at the preliminary MRI results and said it looked like cancer. I was crushed and started crying like a baby.

"Until you get the official results from your doctor, just try to live your life. Don't go on a juice fast if you're not on one already. If you jog already, go for a run, but don't start a new routine now."

Spoken like a person who has never been faced with the c-dawg herself. Because all you want to do (after all the wailing and depression and the moments of laziness) is to do absolutely everything differently. I wish I could have been with that Carissa in the examination room that day. I would have told her to just go with what her gut tells her to do and mark that day as stage one of a kind of rebirth that will continue to confound, piss off, inspire and excite her six months later.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Angling for a big c-free 2011

A matter of days before the great detox experiment of 2011 begins in earnest for as many as 13 peeps. Super exciting.

I know that detoxing means different things to different people and this may even be detox numero uno for some. But whether it's to lose some Santa weight, kick the sugar or caffeine habit, get more of the green stuff into your gullet or just start some fresh eating routines for the new year, one thing we'll all be doing as part of this gig is giving cancer the finger.

See, after all I've read and learned over the past six months, it's us, not hereditary illness and the evil that men do that are making the c-dawg an unwanted visitor for so many people. And by this, I don't mean if you get it, you deserve it. I mean that we can't control our DNA or the fact that we live next to a toxic waste dump and suck on BPA-laden pacifiers, but we can decide to put the best shit into our bodies to counteract all the badness in the world. We do have control over this.

And this, somewhat disturbingly, means more than just following the Canada Food Guide and hanging on to the belief that what the man tells us is good enough. Get so much fruit and veggie goodness into you that cancer doesn't know what the hell is going on. Push your body into alkaline territory so disease has no choice but to say sayonara.

It'll be hard, but then it'll be easier and we'll all win by getting closer to being cancer-free in 2011.

Friday, December 24, 2010

A detox new year

The numbers are climbing people... I think we're up to 11 now, but I would love to have a few more fruit and veg heads for the new year. Even if you only do it for a week, two weeks, three weeks - if you have a juicer, let's give this thing a try on Jan 1.

To recap, we're talking water and fruit/veg juice for breakfast (and a piece of fruit or two if you're famished), a salad chock full of veg and as many cooked/steamed veg you can cram in your gullet for lunch, then a dinner of more raw greens with cooked greens and a piece of fish or chicken. No coffee, caffeinated tea, beer, vodka, red meat or shortbread, but you can cook with butter, drink red wine and have some dark chocolate for dessert. And that fruit/veg juice? As much as you want.

If you're on the caffeine and processed/sugary foods extravaganza (who isn't over the holidays), the first few days will be unpleasant - likely headaches, some stomach upset - but it'll subside. Soon you'll feel fab. If you're used to a big breakfast, it'll be a bit tortuous to turn that frown upside down and eat your biggest meal at night instead, but after a week, it'll feel oh so much better to be lighter in the morning. Yes, you'll be getting fibre. Yes, you can make the juice ahead of time and refrigerate it for up to 24 hours. Yes, you'll have to buy and wash a shitload of fruit and veg, but seriously, this is the way our bodies were meant to consume.

So give it a try, won't you? It's based on Detox 4 Women, a quick read and a book full of other suggestions (like dry body brushing to stimulate your lymphatic system, rebounding, and switching to Stevia instead of sugar if you have a sweet tooth). I've been doing the light breakfast thing for a week or so now and am good with that routine (and admittedly a juicing queen), but I'll be fussing with lunch and dinner right along with you and flushing the coconut tarts and brownies from my system, too. But if it helps us all have the cells of angels and a kickstart to living a long, cancer-free life, then really, is it not worth a bit of a try?

Merry Christmas, yous guys. You all rock my little world.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Replanning permission

The radiation techs had the same difficulty today getting excellent clearance of my lungs before zapping me, so they called in the big guns (the radiation oncologist), who barked out some numbers while the ladies shifted me this way and that on the table. But no dice. They decided that the original plan and tattoos were no longer as close to perfect as they liked and that we had to start from square one again.

So tomorrow I go in for my second planning CT. I missed today's zap and will skip tomorrow's and Thursday's, so will make those up with some double or triple zaps sometime between now and the end of January. Rama lama ding dong.

All this pokes at my brain with a resounding, "your boob has grown, therefore the cancer has grown!". I try to shove it aside and focus on my coconut tarts, but tonight it will poke a little longer inside of me before I put it in the "nothing I can do about that, so shut the fuck up, brain" pile, which grows daily.

I'd really just like to get on with things so I can get the stuff cut out of me already. All this waiting around feels like the wrong thing to do with an aggressive sort like my beloved c-ballz. Push it aside. Restart the planning. Get this thing fucking going.

Monday, December 20, 2010

I feel it all

After three days of being zapped, radiation is already becoming a bit of a drag, but I eat it up with my spoonful of cod liver oil and try to remember it's all good for me.

The Christmas crew is on this week, so measuring was a bit more slapdash. They were happy with the first zap, but when they moved the ever-seeing laser eye around to the side, they realized they didn't have a clear view of my tattoo on that side so had to remeasure the whole shebang. All this resulted in my right side turning numb and my eyebrow becoming so freakin' itchy I had to bite my tongue to keep from reaching up and scratching (no moving your arms, Ms. McCart!).

My parents came to the clinic to watch the girls and the girls entertained the oldies in the waiting room. Little kids are a bit of a rarity in the house of cancer, so no one seemed to mind Frances' snotty nose and Stella's smoker's cough. Plus, the girls were jazzed about going out for breakfast after, so it was all good.

Running through my mind the entire 20 minutes on the table was a question one of the moms from Stella's school asked me the other day: "What does cancer actually feel like?" Shite, man. That stumped me a bit and I babbled out an answer.

I mean, physically it used to feel like swollen, thick, warm skin. Then less so. During chemo it felt like twinges - which I think were side effects from the drugs. Now it still feels unusually heavy and a bit warm again, but in a different way, like the beginnings of a sunburn. And sometimes it feels like muscle soreness. But mostly it feels like nothing, which is the strangest feeling of all when you know there are a couple of golf balls in there taking up residence and hopefully dying a painful death on the back nine.

When I think about what cancer feels like, even though it's by definition a physical thing, I think mostly of how it has tweaked my emotional life. It's changing me and no matter how it all turns out, it'll pile on more good shit than bad. Not saying I love the c-dawg - I still think it's a horrible bitch. But damn if I'm gonna let it boss me around anymore.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Detox redux - what to eat for breakfast

My first radiation appointment can be summed up in three phrases: name on paper bag to store gown I'll reuse each time; technicians fussing with my position to ensure laser beams of death don't puncture my heart (and only shave a little off my lungs); me trying desperately to hold back a coughing attack while tears of throat-stifling roll down my cheeks. I do it all again today (with a dose of Herceptin to boot) and every day until January 28. Let's hope today I can get into position in less than 20 minutes.

I wanted to post a little more on the upcoming detox-o-rama. I hope the lovely ladies (and bodacious boys) who are doing it with me are able to buy or borrow the Detox 4 Women book. It's got some good deets about the rationale and meal plans, but please don't feel the need to follow it 100%. I won't be.

I've been doing some dry runs of the breakfast/morning routine to see how much of a baby I'll be about it and how I need to tailor the food. Here's what I've been eating before noon:

At 6:30 am I drink 2 huge glasses of water (about 5 cups)
At 9:30 am I make and drink 1 huge glass of green juice (about 2.5 cups):
  • 1 stalk celery
  • 1/3 cucumber (regular but unpeeled)
  • 2 carrots (organic and unpeeled)
  • 1/2 lemon (organic and unpeeled)
  • 1 small beet (regular and peeled)
  • 1/2 bag of spinach
  • 1 apple (organic and unpeeled) - I use apple instead of Stevia or some other sweetener
* you can make this the day/night before (stays good for 24 hrs)

And that's it. If I can't wait until noon to eat lunch, I'll have a banana or other piece of fruit or veg. So far so good. Energy is through the roof - no heavy breakfast feeling, but peeing every 10 minutes.

Believe me - adjusting to a light breakfast goes against everything I've been taught and have practiced since the 1900s. But the idea here is that when you stop eating at bedtime, your body naturally switches into elimination mode and you want to help it do that as much as possible until noon the next day. So eat foods in the morning that can be digested quickly, not slowly, and you'll have digestive energy in spades as the day wears on. Make dinner your heaviest meal, not breakfast.

I know this will be Pete's most difficult adjustment. He's a die hard oatmeal fan. But if I could say goodbye to cereal a few months ago and now my muesli, it's possible, y'all. And those good enzymes your body/cells will be taking in? Sweet child o' mine. And it's only for four weeks. Do I have any more takers on this thing? We're up to nine now!

I'll post more on lunch soon...

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Quicker than a ray of light


Radiation day one today. I'm not terribly fussed about it, other than the fact that it's the beginning of my daily schedule not being my own for five weeks. Bummer. But all the boob propping-up procedures are rote by now. It's like before you have a baby you're all, "but they're my private lady bits, for me and Jon Hamm alone!" and by the end of it all you're like, "who else wants to take a look - you? you, sir? Don't worry, Jon's cool with it."

Now I'm desperate to know my surgery date so I can give myself the end point I need to make a decision on one vs. two. I still change my mind every day, with my kids weighing heavily on the two side and my confidence in my newfound alkaline diet on the one side. Now that I write that out it sounds bloody absurd. Kids vs. diet confidence. Hmmm... I mean, it's fucking radical to cut them both off, but it's also not terribly normal to get breast cancer at 37. Shite, man. Let's just drop it for now.

I had lunch with the lovely man who saved my professional arse when I ditched work to get cancer back in June. By all accounts he's doing a bang-up job and I can't say I'm surprised. I know he doesn't read my blog (bastard), so I'll tell you now that boy is one to watch. He's smart, funny, organized, a damn hard-worker and doesn't take much shit around these parts. He's also my bud, so when all this is over for me next year (in a good way), I hope he gets rewarded big time. Thank you, PB, for stepping in and being a true rock star over the past six months. I miss talking to you every day and I'll never have pho without you (okay, maybe I just lied about that last part).

So I'll be off now to get blasted by some deadly rays of light and hope the lasers kill these sucker dog tumours dead. Dead, I tell you!

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

All I want for Christmas is hair

Only because my boy is adorable and I look like I have a mohawk and therefore kind of bad ass, otherwise you won't see a shitload of pics of me with my baby chick head...

Monday, December 13, 2010

Reimagining Christmas

I love Christmas. I don't wear a Santa hat around town or dress my kids in red & green underwear every day, but I generally walk around in a happy fog, smelling pine wherever I go. I think it's the winding down, the socializing, the baking and the eating, and it's the last two that I'm trying to toy with a bit this year.

Before the c-dawg came along, I was fully committed to moving toward a whole food diet - which included baking with butter and sugar and eating the whole fucking cake myself if no one else liked it. Since June, I've been playing with alternative flours, oils and sugars to see how it all turns out. It's mostly shite, let me tell you, and the resources on the intertubes are shite as well. I still visit the sites and bakers that use butter and sugar and white flour, but I hold out hope I can make a great cookie or cake without the homage to saturated fat, refined sweetness and gluten.

Today I'm finally getting around to making macarons (I know, all talk, no action on my part), which at least uses almond flour. We'll see how that goes. But Pete has a standing request for shortbread this year, so let's face it... I'm still married to Roger's and Island Farms for at least a few more weeks.

In other cancer news, I finally debuted my peach fuzz to the outside world on Friday at my work party. It was lovely to see everyone and it all made me miss work and the normalcy of getting an email on a Friday night for something needed by Sunday. It was also interesting to see the reactions of my Victoria peeps. Most everyone was warm and open and even fucking amazing about it all, but there were a couple of male colleagues who were kind of uncomfortable even speaking with me for longer than a moment, like I was going to make them feel my tumours. I tried to be all copacetic about it, but I'm thinking now there was nothing I could do to make them feel better. Ah well. I had a blast dancing in my hooker shoes and drinking more red wine than I have in ages.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Detox the world

Besides rubbing my fuzzy head to will my hair to grow faster and vacillating between wig and no wig for the big work party tomorrow night, I've been thinking a lot about detoxing in January. Every January Pete and I generally do a cleanse to deal with the black russian/egg nog/chocolate santa build-up, but this year (duh) feels a little different.

I have the month of January to get my cells in tip-top shape before surgery in February and although my intake is already riddled with the green juice and many things raw and annoyingly wholesome, I'm thinking of kicking it up a notch in the new year. My lovely sister-in-law in Edmonton sent me the book Detox 4 Women by Natalia Rose. The basic premise lands as close to what I've been aiming for as any other book I've read so far (and I've been consuming these tomes by the dozens, y'all). The nutshell version is four weeks of green juice for breakfast, salad/veggies for lunch and salad/veggies with fish/chicken for dinner, with a yes to red wine and dark chocolate.

It'll mean giving up my precious mid-morning muesli, but otherwise it shouldn't be too brutal to adjust to (with a few parts of the detox tailored to suit me). The reason I want to do it (and thanks, L, for suggesting we do it together) is that I want to recruit a bit of a small army on this thing. Whatever your thoughts are about detoxing, this one is really about molding your everyday intake into something that's immune-boosting and cell-happy. No supplements. No strange mushrooms drinks. No special orders from pretentiousfoods.com. It's about realizing that just because you're healthy now doesn't mean your bod isn't crying out for something better.

Anywho. Just bouncing it around right now. If no one else ends up joining me, I'll have sweet little L to share it with come January 1.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Out of the gutter

I received so many loverly emails, comments and phone calls after my last post that I felt like quite the wallowmeister. I'll admit I had a couple of bad days where I was cursing the c-dawg for visiting me and staying way too long. Sometimes I give in to the greater challenge that a couple of big lumps present and play out the scenarios for much too long.

The thing that gets me sometimes is that I look at my girls and think, I don't want a stripper raising them! Not that Pete would ever marry a stripper after my exit... maybe date one, but he'd probably marry some burgeoning film producer or accomplished novelist or some other such successful beyotch. And then I'd have to spend the afterlife haunting her ass. But after I come to my senses a little I realize that life is messy, none of us know what's around the corner, and for me to spend more than a moment dwelling on the potential cancer spread and all it could take away is completely missing the point of this whole exercise.

So thank you, my peeps, for all the support, and please know that I will continue to fill my bod with the green meds, visualize this beast taking a permanent hike, and try to be in the moment with Frances and Stella as much as I can without getting too 7th Heaven about it all. And if the stripper enters our lives eventually, at least I'll know the girls will potentially bring a new skill into adulthood.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Serenity now!

There's this thing called chemo brain - kind of like baby brain, but not as adorable. Anyway, I think I had it and now it's gone.

For five months I traveled along the windy chemo road, passing by picturesque side effect villages, stopping to experience the local life, and honestly not sweating the big bad cancer destination much. The majority of my brain space was occupied with just getting through this phase and thanking the goddesses for the good days. I had dark thoughts, to be sure, especially in the beginning, but my sleep wasn't disturbed much and my mind wasn't as endlessly busy as it usually is. Definitely a general fogginess and an odd kind of calm.

Now that the fog has lifted, my brain is on fucking overdrive. Let's start with the case of this blasted 38-year old woman in Toronto who was a writer and mother and blogged for Chatelaine about her HER2+ breast cancer. She lasted all of two years before the cancer attacked her lungs and eventually took her. Back in the summer I had read a little excerpt about her and cried like a baby, then forgot about her and went on my merry chemo way.

Then yesterday, while I'm drinking a mug of green tea in the final minutes before going on a spa adventure with Pete to celebrate the end of chemo, I pick up the Globe and land on the woman's obit and begin crying like a baby again, torturing myself by visiting her canceriscrap.com blog and trying to pinpoint where in her treatment it all went sideways so I'm not caught off guard by the signs with my own experience.

And the spa day? Lovely, but as Pete fought back the snores of the extremely relaxed, my mind raced the entire time, swirling around waiting for radiation and what the cancer was doing in the meantime, waiting for surgery and what the cancer would be doing in the meantime, how long a spread would take to kill me, how I could possibly prepare for that and how having a positive outlook was bullocks when the cancer was taking over your body. Oh man, the mind never stops, even when I'm otherwise busy.

If this is the end of chemo brain, gimme serenity now!

Friday, December 3, 2010

Bedtime for chemo

Yesterday I saw a respirologist, Dr. S., to make Dr. A. feel better about canceling round eight. Dr. S. said that although there was no detectable tumours on my lungs from the CT, I had what's known in the breathing biz as "ground-glass opacity". This really just means there's either fibrosis or some kind of inflammation in my lungs, which is usually treatable or goes away on its own or could lead to bad stuff down the road.

He confirmed that I did indeed have pneumonia, so the cancer clinic did right by me to prescribe antibiotics, and most importantly, that canceling round eight was the best decision. My never-ending cough and low-grade fever, along with the pattern the cough followed (disappearing when I was on steroids, then coming back after chemo) and the rash I got on my forehead all point toward a rare and serious reaction to docetaxel that would have worsened if I had another dose of it.

Dr. S. listened to my chest and heart again and ordered some basic lung capacity tests for sometime in January to record a baseline, but he was comfortable that I was recovering on my own and wouldn't need any other meds or treatment. He also sang Dr. A's praises (which many others have as well), saying that she was thorough, absolutely anal about paying attention to side effects and spends an inordinate amount of time researching options for patients and discussing possible treatments with other docs. So there's a serious worker bee under her ultra-cool demeanour. Almost six months into this jazz, I suppose I should surrender a little to her expertise and stop wanting her to be my buddy...

... but not before I complained to Dr. S. that it made me very uncomfortable when Dr. A. asked what I thought about canceling round eight. What the fuck do I know? I've had a dry cough when I get a cold for my entire life, I want to get everything I can out of chemo before I abandon it... don't ask me now what I think! I think I'd like a chocolate bar and a martini, dammit. Dr. S. agreed that the question was unfair and then spent another 15 minutes just chatting with me about what chemo does to your body and how people have misconceptions about what pneumonia looks like and how I felt about this whole experience. And this was at the end of his day, 20 minutes past when his office usually closes.

I walked out of the joint feeling pretty great, and completely fine about ending chemo at round seven. But it also made me feel a little bossy. So this morning I called to bug Dr. A's office about filling out my long-term disability form before the end of the year and called my radiation onc's office to poke around about setting a surgery date in the new year. I'm getting a little tired of waiting around in cancer land. I got shit to do, people!