1. When you have surgery your body is sliced open with a really sharp knife. After the slicing and removing or twisting or sewing up or fixing up your secret innards section of surgery is over, you have to be put back together. From the inside. You are sewn, cauterized, melted, glued or magicked - all of your cuts and seams stuck back together neatly. Sometimes this glue or mouse-thread or magic sticky stuff makes teeny tiny blood vessels inside your insides get kind of stuck together and not work very well. Little capillaries or tiny little arteries might not be connected to the same rivers and streams they used to be connected to.
This means that anywhere in your body where you had surgery you might have weird little patches of patchy little towns and villages that are no longer receiving the same nourishment, the same bloody nourishment, that they used to. They might be kind of cut off and isolated from the body's main circulatory system. Like a walled off little village that doesn't communicate effectively with the outer suburbs and counties and states and countries of your universe.
What does this have to do with me? Do you remember me telling you that even after my second surgery, the doctor said that a tiny little margin of cancer cells had been left inside of me? A crescent moon? Well that slice might not have gotten effectively poisoned. It means that even though I've had chemotherapy, there may still be a little tiny bit of cancer inside my chest, inside my breast that's still there, unpoisoned, untouched, lying in evil wait. I think I have to go under the knife again: lumpectomy number three.
2. You're supposed to start radiation four weeks after chemotherapy ends, six weeks at the outside. It's been two weeks so far.
3. When your breast is radiated you get tattoos, little dots that help them guide the beams in. Wonder if I can get some kind of a design, like little yin/yang signs or little teeny tiny peace signs? Or I get to pick the color of ink?
4. My doctor thinks that only my left breast will be radiated, but she wants to discuss my complex case with her Tumor Board before she makes the final decision about whether they also will be radiating my lymph nodes. That is a board that I never hope to be a member of. Or see in Chance when I play Monopoly. Meet away, leave me out.
5. The radiological side of the Austin Cancer Centers office north is on the right side of the hallway. I've never been over to the right side of the hallway and I found it much more comforting and delightful than the sickening and poisoning left side of the hall. I never want to go to the left side of the hallway again. Never thought I prefer the right over the left, but in this case I do.
6. They recommend California Baby calendula cream to help your skin with the burning. It supposedly works better than any prescription.
7. Tests show that high levels of antioxidants or vitamins A, D, E, or C render radiation therapy ineffective.
8. I will be receiving some kind of new accelerated radiation beam, I hope it's not a freaking microwave, that will make me only have to have 20 sessions instead of 30. This means I'll go every day Monday through Friday, at the same time of day each day, for four weeks straight. Each session will be only about 15 minutes. I will need to schedule it around my yoga practice, my personal trainer schedule, my tennis lessons, my pilates, and my membership and duties as a member of the board of the ballet, and the museum, and opera, and my duties as a guest lecturer at SXSW and a model for Fashion Week and running a local food bank. Actually I meant I'll try to schedule it around my viewing of the Today show, driving kids in a van, and occasionally going to Thundercloud Subs for a tuna sandwich.
9. My friend Rebecca used to try to steal bites of hamburgers from my radiologist's son and we discussed that today in my meeting.
10. The plan is still as clear as mud. I'm having a mammogram tomorrow, and then my surgeon and my radiologist and my oncologist and I and the scheduling department in the hospital and my cardiologist and perhaps the media and Pres. Barack Obama all need to consult and figure out what/who/where/why is happening first, tests, or CAT scan, or surgery blah blah. Everything depends. No one knows anything yet and everyone was confused by everyone else's requests and information. So it's a boiling pot of sticky jam but soon will cool to a sensible plan.
11. None of this bothers me. NOTHING AFTER CHEMO SEEMS LIKE A BIG DEAL. As long as I'm not being injected with rat poison I'm delighted. Bring it on.
Number 11 resonates. After experiencing things that are horrific enough, it makes anything else life throws at you seem like "meh". Here's to being on the right side, not the left. (How often do I say/think THAT??)
ReplyDeleteSlap your mouth!
ReplyDeleteRat poison really does put radiation in a whole new light :)
ReplyDelete