Monday, December 31, 2012

Let's Review: a timeline

Most of you know that we homeschool the girls, so you might surmise therefore that I love timelines. You would be right. Timelines are a wonderful way to illustrate for the girls how history develops, how people of a certain time interacted and dealt with each other.

Today, it's a good way to show you how this whole new adventure developed...we'll just pick it up this summer...

June 30: our final day in a "home"

We were renting near Sunny Point and had given notice since we were getting a PUPPY! Landlords said NO to the dog, so we knew we had to go. In fact, we had given our notice way back in April, thinking we would have plenty of time to buy a house and move in before the dog arrived. That didn't happen. We put in seven offers and got rejected on each one. Some offers were kind of low-ball, but many were aggressive. Didn't matter. No house. Therefore...

July 1: First day of being "homeless"
The girls LOVED to announce this everywhere we went. Technically, we were able to stay with a dear friend for two weeks before we got out the camping equipment and moved to the campground out at Auke Bay. Greg actually spend one of these weeks in Green Bay for training. (Happy side note: July 1 is also the first day of our benefit year for insurance, which turned out to be very good timing.)

July 13: I flew solo down to San Francisco, drove for four hours, picked out and picked up the puppy, then drove back to SF and flew back to Juneau on the 14th. Meanwhile, Greg and the girls started the outdoors portion of our summer. Joined Greg and the girls at a primitive site in our spacious wall tent. Fun!

Quail Ridge's Keta Roe (8 weeks) 

 


This is the site where I lost my wedding ring.
July 21: Moved to a different campground with some sweet, hot, clean showers and great trails. Still in the wall tent. Here's a visual:


July 22: This was a Sunday. We all got up early to shower (so nice when you're camping) and head to church. There was NO LUMP that morning.

July 24: Tuesday. Played soccer with my buddies at the downtown turf field. Noticed while I was running that I had some substantial pain in my right breast and that sprinting up and down a soccer field did not seem to be helping matters, nor did my extra super duper bra. Mentioned to a few of the other ladies that I must've taken a ball to the chest and forgot about it. In the shower that evening, I found the lump. It was more of a crescent-shaped disc and it was exceptionally painful. I'm guessing about 1/4 inch thick, and about three inches at the longest part and about 1.5 inches wide. And let me again emphasize that it was NOT THERE a mere two days earlier. Somehow I found myself doubting that. I figured I must've missed it somehow, or overlooked it, or even was in denial. But things happened later in this scenario that changed my mind and made me realize that it was entirely true and indeed feasible that there was no lump on Sunday, even though it was huge on Tuesday.

Things kind of blur after this for several weeks. After seeing my nurse practitioner, we tried two 10-day courses of antibiotics, thinking this crazily fast-growing thing was mastitis. During that time, Greg and I ran our first Triathlon, the Aukeman!, on August 4th. While I continued to play soccer, camp, fish, hike and just generally do life-as-usual, this lump was still growing, not reacting to meds, and still hurting. 

Not sure if all of you know this or not, but I REALLY love playing soccer. Normally, I play in several different leagues with CCSL, an org I actually helped run for a few seasons. So even though I was in pain, I kept playing, thinking I would eventually play through the pain and it would just go away. I actually played some of my best soccer in a long time in August with a great group of older moms with kids. We played against some really young, agile, fast players and managed to hold our own fairly often. It was great!

While I was living it up playing soccer, I was also doing lots of doctor visits and testing. Each time I talked to someone, a friend, a tech, a doc, about my symptoms, they each maintained that 'cancer doesn't hurt'. I call BS on that.

During these weeks, I had a mammogram. Let me just say YOWCH! Then I had an ultrasound. Then I had an MRI. Once we got the results back from these, my doc said, "It's time to head south to the experts", so we did. Once south, I got a biopsy (another way worse YOWCH!) and the results confirmed that I had breast cancer. That was Sept 10.

We flew back to Juneau for chemo and started that on Oct 10.

Four rounds of AC chemo, once every two weeks for eight weeks. My nausea was under control most of the time and I really only had one terrible week. The rest was very manageable. The tumor remained unchanged until the days right before the third treatment when it seemed to just lose its shape. Still dense, still painful, but suddenly not a lump anymore. By the time I finished the fourth dose on Thanksgiving, the tumor was all but gone. Imaging showed the cancer was still there but diffuse.

Dec 11: Bilateral Mastectomy. Okay I gotta be honest here. I do not miss my curves at all. I miss my mobility though. Right now I still have quite a bit of nerve pain as well as cording or webbing, an effect of the surgery.

We're doing okay, prepping for whatever comes next. I'm laying low and trying to rest and relax and stay sedentary right now so I can get my drains out on Wednesday. I'm hoping that will help with my mobility and range of motion.

That's it for now. Happy 2013 to each of you!

Thanks for checking in, y'all.





 

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

unwitty

I've been putting off posting because I am just not in the mood for witty reparte' these days.

But then I thought there may be a few people who were interested to know if I was still alive or not.

So.

Yes, I am alive. The surgery was a snap! For me. Less so for my mom and Greg and Greg's mom. It might have been a snap for the girls too. They stayed at the hotel with Greg's mom and had a ball. Thanks, LML!

The docs are happy that I opted for the bilateral instead of just the right side because they needed to yank out 22 or so lymph nodes on the left side as well. The pathology showed that maybe I have two different types of cancer, one in the breast tissue and a separate one in the lymph nodes. There doesn't seem to be any anxiety about that from the docs, but we'll see once we start the new chemo how everything reacts.

Speaking of which, we got a revised schedule of our near future from the oncologist. After I recover from this surgery (they're giving me about three weeks for that) we will do 12 weeks of chemo followed by six weeks of radiation, followed by at least another year of more chemo, maybe two, maybe five, maybe for the rest of my life. Depends on how my body and/or the cancer reacts to it.

And speaking of the recovery, it's not so snappy. It's painful and awkward and time-consuming and hard. And I seem to be a lazy and crabby patient. Not a productive combo, really. But it does leave lots of room for improvement. :)

We were blessed to get over Snoqualmie Pass thrice on this trip already, once just hours before they closed it due to "Winter Storm Drako", a relatively wimpy system (by Alaska standards, anyway) that rained and blew hard on some parts of Seattle. There were also quite a few accidents on the pass on the way back to Yakima. One in particular had me praying hard and immediately for all involved. Very sad and scary to see. We are thrilled to report we had no problems, didn't even need the chains.

The entire household, save myself, is out shopping today. This may be all the evidence needed to prove my "crabby patient" allegation. All you naysayers, take note.

We are anticipating a very very Merry and blessed Christmas and wish the same for all who read this.