Will I Glow in the Dark by Christmas?

One week of radiation under my belt…well, not exactly under my belt, if you know what I mean. A few weeks ago I had an appointment with my radiation oncologist. I didn’t like him at first, but by the end of the visit, I thought he was all right. I probably didn’t like him because he brought up all bad memories. He started from the beginning…so you found a lump in your breast? And then he ran through everything…the number of lymph nodes involved…all the gory details that I haven’t thought about in a long time. Doctors like to tell you stories about other patients. Dr. Dean said that there’s almost no reason to take time off work while you’re undergoing radiation. He highlighted this with a story about two cocktail waitresses, both from the old Desert Inn. First, he treated a young gal in her twenties. She went through radiation without needing to take even a day off. Then an older gal [I think he said in her seventies...must have been well preserved] came to him for treatment. She wanted a note to get her off work. He said he couldn’t do it, that it would be age discrimination if she couldn’t work, but the young one could. Point well taken…radiation’s no big deal. This week I started my treatments on Monday. I go early in the morning before I go to work. I was a little nervous and apprehensive the first day. The two girls set me up, drew all over my chest; and Dr. Dean came in for a moment or two. The treatment itself only takes minutes. They said the first day is longer than most days because of the first-day prep. They’ve been right so far. I’ve gotten to work quickly every day. Thank goodness that I’m getting my treatments near home and school. Here’s how it works. I can’t wear my earrings or necklace; and I don’t want to wear my wig, pressing it down on the table, etc. There’s a tiny little dressing room, if you could call it that. There’s no mirror, so here’s what I do. I carry my jewelry and wig and leave them in the car. When I’m finished with the treatment and go to my car, right in the parking lot I change my hat up for the wig. I hope for the best as to how the back of it looks since I can’t tell. Once I get in traffic, I try to decide if I have enough time at each light to get an earring on and maybe put the back on it at the next light. Somehow, I’m almost together by the time I get to school. On the second day when I went into the dressing room, I noticed that the transparent shoe hangar on the wall had my last name on one of the pockets. I told the girls (technicians)…just what I always wanted…my own private, labeled holder for my medical gown. Also, on the second day, I asked about deodorant under that arm and/or lotions. They asked if they had given me the handout on skin care the day before, which they hadn’t. This answered some of my questions. During the day on Monday, I had what looked like marker all the way up on my neck. One or two people mentioned it to me, but I just said that I’d lost control of a marker…that seemed quite believable to teachers. On Tuesday, I mentioned the marker all over my chest to Tina, and she said alcohol would take it off. On the way home, I bought alcohol; but it was tough going to get the marker off. The next day I asked the technicians about that; and, once again, they had forgotten to give me something…little pads that take it off. They said it’s actually paint. Lying on the table for the first treatment, I was thinking…Oh, please let this be a good day for these girls (technicians). I remember thinking that when I used to go to the hairdresser…let this be a good day for her…you don’t want to be there on the day she’s had a fight with her significant other or her dog was run over. Can you imagine the difference between a bad hair cut, from which you can quickly recover, and the possibilities of radiating the wrong section of your body, for example, your heart or other vital organ? It puts a bad haircut into perspective. On Tuesday while lying on the table, one of the girls, out of the blue, mentioned that this was Mike, a whatever technician who would be checking on my skin each Tuesday. There’s no time for modesty while you’re completely exposed to whoever walks in. You might as well just get past it, because there’s little you can do about it. Most of the time I just keep my eyes closed, so I don’t know who’s in the room; and I don’t much care. I just want to get through the treatment and go on with my day. I mostly just try to say decades of the rosary while I’m lying there. Oh, it’s not all that comfortable. You lie on a completely flat table, but they do put something under your knees. There’s a sort of head-rest, and I have to turn my head to the right to avoid the rays shining on my left side. Both of my arms are above my head, and there are two grips to hold on to. My elbows are flat. The first day, I hardly thought I could keep my arms in that position much longer; but since then, it’s been faster and more tolerable. Thankfully, someone gives you an arm to grasp so you can pull yourself up when you’re done. I’d be there for the duration without help. Another patient comes in around the same time I do, and we talk when we can. It’s only for a minute or two because I get called in; and when I’m done, she’s on her way in. She told me she’s 73. I would never have believed it. She looks great for her age. She said her daughter got breast cancer first, and she was going back and forth to California to help her; and she got cancer herself. See? there are much worse scenarios than mine. Will I glow in the dark by Christmas? I hope so; I’m working hard on it. That’s a question I posed to Patti the other day. She was standing up on a chair in the testing cupboard that’s outside my office. I couldn’t see her so I didn’t know she was in a precarious position. I just called it out to her. She said she almost fell off the chair, but she got down and came and gave me a hug. By the way, about hugs…my hugger, Lety, left Harmon and went to work in a middle school. Now, I’m back to hug training again. Superna, who’s transferring from the library to the office, is definitely going to be a hugger. Also, there’s Patti and JoAnn and Sherrie and Tara. I’m noticing a couple of other possibilities so I’m still working on the hugging thing and adding members to the club. The holiday season seems to soften up even the most tense, so random hugs are easier to come by at this time of the year. I saw Donna again this week, and that’s always great for me because she’s such a solid survivor. She looks great, and she says eventually this all becomes memories. Won’t that be great when I have to read back through this blog, if I will ever care to, just to remember what cancer treatments were like? I haven’t yet told about my first Herceptin treatment so I’ll get to that next time. In the mean time, if you see a lady with reddish, blondish hair or no hair but a hat that says “Bad Hair Day” tearing through “Tarjay” or a mall; and she appears to radiate glow-in-the-dark markings and Xes on her chest, just say, “Happy Holidays” because that’s me!

Crying, Cookies, and Caricatures…

Crying…What seems like ancient history now, last April, I wrote on this blog the following comment about crying…”I’d like to cry; but there are not enough tears in the world to cry about this…so why start…” I still feel the same way, but sometimes tears show up, planned or not. When does this cancer patient cry? In the shower, no not about my body or the mutilation of it, but about whatever thoughts I might be having at that moment. Crying in the shower is good. The water’s running anyway. You don’t have any make-up on. Best of all, no one can hear you. And if they do, they can ignore it or pretend they didn’t hear. Right when you go to bed…that’s a good time to cry. Again, no makeup, not bothering anyone; and you can just go to sleep when you’re done. When I hear about someone I know or a loved one of theirs who has cancer, I can’t help but cry; because I know that the effect on everyone in their family is devastating and that they have the battle of their lives ahead of them. Mostly, I try to stick to crying alone. It’s better that way. In my job, I have people cry in front of me often, mostly adults but sometimes kids who are in my office because they’re in trouble. It’s always hard to know what to do when an adult cries, but that’s someone else’s tears, not mine. I don’t like to put anyone in the situation of having to deal with my tears; I think crying is personal and introspective. Most recently, I almost cried…when talking to Patti about her daughter who had breast cancer at 25 and now is saddened, at 29, to have to wait years to start her family. But, fortunately, Patti and I were able to get past the moment…I said, “Don’t get me started; I could cry all day.” And we moved on with our work. I almost cried in front of someone last week, but I held it back. I was on the table to have a CT scan to prepare for radiation treatments. Mike, the technician, was a really nice man and was dealing with what I’m sure he’s very accustomed to…people under stress. I told him I was having some anxiety, and he told me to think about my breathing, that the slower you breathe, the less anxious you will be. Good advice. I almost cried when I told him that it’s just a little difficult to have just finished chemo and to now be back on a table again preparing for another adventure in treatments. Somehow, I held the tears back; and I survived the scan. I imagine that each person’s tolerance level for holding back tears is different. I think mine’s pretty high, but I feel that one day the dam’s going to break; and whoever’s around me at the time better hope that Noah’s not far away. It’s going to take more than a rowboat to escape the ocean I’m holding back.

Cookies, a great comfort food. Cookies can remind you of so many things. Right now cookies make me think of J.J. Whenever he comes over, we make cookies. You must be guessing that I buy the kind all cut out for you to just put on the cookie sheet and bake. We made pumpkins and ghosts for Halloween; and now we’ve made an assortment of Christmas shapes. Sometimes we frost, and sometimes we don’t. Five year olds tire of carefully decorating with little dots for buttons and eyes on the snowmen and little strings of color to show lights on a tree. After a certain amount of time, a five year old, just lets the frosting rip on one of the shapes. Guess which cookie gets eaten first? Of course, the one loaded with frosting. The only difference between a five year old and an adult is that the child does what he’s thinking about, while the adult thinks the same thing but holds back with some silly sense of decorum. Cookies also remind me of years ago when I was a stay-at-home mom. In those days, I really created the cookies. Mixed up the ingredients, rolled out the dough, cut it with a cookie cutter, made the frosting. Yikes! What a chore that sounds like now. Also, long ago I had a recipe for cookies I made every Christmas season. I know I made them with chocolate and sour cream and then decorated them with chocolate frosting and red and green sprinkles. Probably my fondest memory of baking comes from when I was a child. I grew up in my grandmother’s house. She had a pantry, not what is commonly referred to as a pantry now [a cupboard with shelves]. I mean…she had a pantry! It was a walk-in pantry. There were a million good things stored in there on shelves and in drawers. Plates, bowls, cooking utensils, spices, etc. When I was very small, I used to stand on a bottom drawer next to my grandmother while she prepared doughs and other stuff for baking. She made great pies, and she made donuts very often…just dropped them into a steaming bucket of oil, fried them, and took them out to drain and cool…but not for long before someone ate them. My grandmother was a gentle person. I wonder if my grandchildren will ever describe me that way??

All right, caricatures…Here are some Dictionary.com definitions:

A picture, description, etc., ludicrously exaggerating the peculiarities or defects of persons or things.

A representation, especially pictorial or literary, in which the subject’s distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect.

That’s what I am right now. I am a caricature of myself. The wig…yeah, it’s something like my hair used to be…sort of red, sort of blond. But the hair is so thick. Women my age just do not have thick hair like that, well maybe some, but I didn’t. To me, the wig makes me look ridiculous, unreal. The damn eyebrows…now, they’re really a riot! To draw them on, there’s not even a hint of where to start. I have no memory of my own eyebrows. I know they weren’t very long, certainly not arching way over and past the eyeball. Every day’s a new adventure in drawing on my eyebrows. In the end, though, they are made of pencil, not hair. So, between the wig and the eyebrows, I am a caricature of myself. Oh, sure, Thank God, my voice is still the same, my brain is still working, and I’m still the irreverent person I managed to develop into over the years; but I do not look like I’m supposed to look. Speaking of irreverent, I remember once saying that I was slightly irreverent; and someone who knew me well said, “Slightly?” Anyway, people who didn’t know me B.C., don’t know the difference, which is pretty funny isn’t it? They actually think I have thick reddish, blondish hair. They probably think that I’m a little quirky for my age and that I like to draw on my own eyebrows. I think people who have known me for awhile look past the caricature features and just see me. For each and every person, you have to face yourself in the mirror every day. You have to look at weight gained or lost, wrinkles showing up, eyebrows that need plucking, other unwanted facial hair or growths, happiness or sadness; but what you see is you. When you finish your make-up and your hair, you have accentuated the positive and minimized the negative. You have enhanced your image to something that pleases you and you believe will please others. When I finish my make-up, draw on my eyebrows, and put on my wig, I don’t see me in the mirror; I only see the caricature of me.