love is health
Relentless5/28/2020 I'm beginning to see a very obvious pattern in my life that started since before I was born.
Coming from a large family, my parents took "certain precautions" to ensure they didn't have a 6th child. However, in spite of that, my mom became pregnant with me. During her pregnancy she was told her health was in danger and that the pregnancy wasn't viable. She ignored her doctors recommendations to terminate the pregnancy, put her life at risk, and birth me uneventfully. I was her easiest pregnancy. When I was around age five or six, I accidentally swallowed a penny, which lodged itself in my throat. Being the exact size of my airway, had it moved even a little, I would have choked. That car ride to the ER had my parents on pins and needles, as they struggled to keep an energetic, young me still. Just a few millimeters is all it would have taken to completely occlude my trachea- a pot hole, a sudden stop. From what I was told, I was bouncing around the back seat of the car in excitement while my parents white-knuckled their way to Phoenix Children's from north Phoenix. It was an uneventful penny extraction. My dad called me his little piggy bank for a while after that episode. Around age seven, while crossing 51st avenue with my older siblings, a car cut around the stopped traffic we created. My sister Nora grabbed my hand at the last minute, pulling me up toward the sidewalk as my other sister was stricken by that vehicle. (She lived, albeit with a story to tell). I was unscathed. I managed to avoid near death experiences until 2013, when I became neutropenic with a viral infection, and was stuck in the hospital for 5 days. My white blood cell count was so low my life was endangered. I had no immunity to fight the infection, and simply had to wait it out. Eventually my white blood cell count rebounded, and I lived to tell the tale of how I got (the childhood illness) Croup at age 30. That brings us to now. I'm in the hospital again for neutropenia and sepsis. My white blood cells dropped, which opened me up for an e. coli infection, and my body responded with systemic vengeance. Normally, sepsis creates a situation where your immune system attacks your healthy tissues, leading to organ failure, shock, and death. In this instance, we caught it so early that I have no significant tissue or organ damage. As one of the doctors so eloquently said to me, "your body was in complete control." Nonexistence keeps coming at me, and I keep circumstantially evading it. And while I'm not about to make loud declarations about Life's Purpose or Meaning, it does make me feel wanted, even loved. I don't claim to understand the way the universe works. Maybe this is a beautiful, intended, and elaborate design. Maybe it's well organized chaos. I'm frankly not sure that matters. What matters is that I keep getting more time - another chance, another opportunity to enjoy life's pleasure. And for that I am infinitely grateful. Here's to dodging yet another bullet.
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The way it feels: cycle 15/12/2020 Everyone deals with chemo differently. This is how it has affected me so far.
While receiving chemo, my muscles almost immediately took note. They would twitch and glitch in resistance, like they knew they were being poisoned. It was a bizarre feeling I hadn't anticipated. Between adriamycin injections (I had 2), I needed to take a break to address the fact my chest was tightening, so we (my nurse and I) allowed that feeling to subside before proceeding. To make up for lost time we cranked up the speed of (chemo drug #2) cytoxan from a 1 hour drip to 30 minutes, only to be thwarted by sinus pain telling me I can't handle that speed. (Imagine feeling like you just dove into a chlorine pool without plugging your nose. That's what it felt like. Strange, no?) What was supposed to be a 3 hour therapy session took closer to 5 hours to account for the breaks I needed to put my resistant body at ease. My nurses were awesome, accommodating, and gentle. I appreciate that they were cautious with me, despite my desire to just keep going. During the days following, each of my main organs did a roll call. This is a challenging feeling to describe. They weren't in pain per se, but they weren't unnoticeable. It's like they each took turns speaking up, intervention style, to say they are concerned for me. First it was my heart through fleeting chest discomfort, then my intestines and ovaries. Eventually my kidneys, bladder, and liver all said "hey - is everything okay?" While it wasn't painful, I felt compassion for them, as I knew they were all saying "Hey! what's going on up there? Why did you poison me?" That's a challenging thing to explain to one's own body. I've been taking much needed naps. These drugs are toxic, (specifically to the heart), so energy wanes. My peak energy seems to be within the first 3 hours of waking, them dwindles over time. Although nausea has been mild, my digestive system is a hot mess. Imagine feeling like you just ate 2 XL pizzas (ouch!), but that you're hungry; however you don't want to eat because the idea of eating sounds like more pressure/ pain on your digestive system. It's like that. I'm proud when I can finish a small meal, and grateful when it doesn't make me feel like I am going to burst. I am so grateful to not be vomiting (hooray for the little wins!), though sometimes I wonder if doing so would make me feel better/ less full. Cognition is slower. I only have patience or bandwidth to process one task at a time. It's forcing me to slow down, be present, and not sweat the details, which you can imagine is very counterintuitive to who I am. But, all in due time. There's no rush, no sense of obligation, and utter patience/ compassion for where I'm at. All in all, it's not so bad. I'm not in pain, I'm not vomiting, and I have energy enough to play with my babies on occasion and get some work done, so I call that a win! AboutSnapshots in time across a span of years managing breast cancer Archives
June 2020
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