I've been staying very busy prepping lesson plans lately. Yep, I'm teaching... another teacher's classes, but I'm grateful for it either way. I sort of forgot how much work it takes to get all the content fresh in my own mind, then figure out what I want/need the kids to learn, then set up a plan for how to get them there. In some ways I make it harder than myself than I really need to. I could spend a lot less time planning if I were content to find videos for them to watch, assigning textbook readings and letting them answer those crap questions at the end of each chapter. I'll be honest, the students will do a little bit of that stuff, but I'm also trying to create activities and build in ways for them to get out of their seats, use their brains for something beyond rote memorization. Doing that for three classes, five days a week is a lot of work. It's good work, and I'm glad to be doing it. This is the sort of job in which I could lose myself, giving all of my free moments and then some over to grading, coming up with ideas for projects and activities, tweaking lectures, looking again and again for the perfect reading. Yesterday I promised Jason that I wouldn't do that this time. I promised that I would set limits on what I will give to this job because the degree to which I have pushed myself in the past has meant giving up a lot: time with Jason, friends, and family; sleep; healthy eating habits; a little bit of sanity.
I like to work. I like to be busy. For months now I've been feeling like I've been doing so little, spinning my professional wheels and contributing minimally to household finances, so teaching -even if they're not my classes for good- feels like a godsend. But, owing to the thankless nature of the profession in general, and the substitute profession in particular, it comes with a few conditions I ought to remember. 1. I'm not getting paid to build these classes from the ground up (even if that's what needs to be done), I am getting paid to fill in for the person who gets paid to build the classes. It's just bad timing that the new semester is starting and she didn't have them all planned out for me. 2. It's ok if everything isn't perfect. 3. This isn't a permanent job. I need a recommendation and to be on someone's radar and I can do that by doing the job very well. 4. I don't need to break myself to do the job very well. 5. I have to be concerned with taking care of myself. I am still healing and even if I mostly feel fine, missing out on rest or creating undue stress are things that will make healing harder.
Everyone keeps telling me that they're sure this will be the thing that leads me to full-time teaching work. I hope they're right. I could use something productive to pour my energy into, and I've been looking for a job for a good long while now. The whole job search process is mighty discouraging.
The day after tomorrow I will have my last chemotherapy treatment. I wonder how that will feel. Right now I'm feeling a lazy sort of anticipation, I'm glad I'm so close to being done, but I also feel kind of ... blank.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Saturday, January 19, 2013
endings
I keep having the strange urge to make an appointment to get a hair cut, as if I had hair to cut. Part of me thinks it would be hilarious to make an appointment only to show up bald, just to see how the stylist would react. What does one say to an apparently delusional chemo patient come to you for services that are impossible to render? I'm curious. I found myself tempted to wander over to the hair dye section of the grocery store, though I can't remember the last time I felt compelled to dye my hair when it was all here. I think I'm just craving the habits of my old body.
Two days ago I had my second-to-last chemo treatment. It felt good, feels good. When I think about how very near I am to the end of this part of the process, I get butterflies. I want to show up to that last appointment dressed to the nines with champagne and noise-makers, confetti and music. I want to run out of there to the triumphant cheers of nurses and other patients, not because I think I deserve it, but because it's the first thing that really feels worth celebrating in about eight months. Ok, the second thing, the first being the removal of the cancer. It's just all been so fucking hard, from the change in my diagnosis to the failed reconstruction to the huge egg harvest that turned out three embryos, precious and heavy with the pressure of one chance and all my hope.
Two weeks from today I will be facing the rest of my life wherein the management of my cancer care is more about lifestyle than regular doctor visits and abrasive medications. The energy these meds have sapped will slowly return. My hair will grow back. I'll have a reason to use my razor again. My bottle of shampoo that has sat, virtually untouched, in the shower will be put to use. The aches that now arise in my bones will dissipate. The pain in my nail beds, the tingling and numbness in my fingertips will (hopefully, probably) subside. I will be able to avoid the smells of the infusion room. Lightly spiced food will no longer set my tongue aflame. I'll have my port removed and the skin on my chest will lay flat once again, rather than stretching and bubbling over this plastic implant.
It's a funny feeling, this coming to the end. Because it feels so momentus, like such a big event, and in so many ways it isn't an ending at all. The cancer center gives patients chemo completion diplomas. On January 30th, I will spend hours in the infusion room and on my way out the door, they'll hand me a sheet of printer paper certifying that I made it. That I stuck it out and got to the end.
But it won't be the end, because they'll also hand me a prescription for Tamoxifen and schedule a follow-up appointment for an mri and a physical exam to monitor for recurrence. And I'll take that Tamoxifen for five years. And I'll go home and schedule appointments with plastic surgeons to find the right doctor to do my reconstruction. And hopefully by mid-summer the reconstruction will be done. Another ending on the horizon.
And I'll take my Tamoxifen every day. And I'll eat well and use the elliptical more. And I'll try even harder to find ways to make myself feel like I'm living instead of waiting.
Because right now, and for the forseeable future, I feel like I'm waiting for the actual end of all of this but it isn't coming for a long, long time, if ever.
I'm having a hard time giving myself over to my future which is riddled with much waiting and all sorts of terrifying things I can't know, and the prospects are scarier now than they were a year ago. A year ago we were thinking babies and vacation and law school and job prospects. Then our life was thrown into upheaval and all those things were scattered to the edges of our field of vision. Now, as the dust begins to settle and the things we wanted have started to move closer to our grasp, it's babies on which I'm fixated. Because that's the thing we can't have (and the thing everyone around us seems to be having), and because for some reason I have it in my head that having a baby is the one thing that will make me feel like I have a normal life again (which is a lot of pressure for a new person and might be precisely why it's best we can't have a baby right now). All sorts of things hold that hope at arm's length - I have five years of hormone therapy to do during which time I am not allowed to get pregnant*; having had cancer renders me an inelligible candidate for many adoption agencies for at least a few years; medical bills and much time off of work has left us financially less stable than we once were, and adoption is expensive. And time-consuming. The whole scenario gets me thinking about myself as defective and that occasionally spirals into guilt about keeping Jason from being able to have the life he wanted. I was only mostly joking when I recently told him that he could easily leave me, marry someone else, and have a kid all well before he and I could even start trying.
Now I'm watching my dear friend's incredible daughter grow and it's a wonderful thing to see. And it fills a selfish part of me with envy. One of the best couples I know is expecting their first child and I'm wildly happy for them. Seeing one of my oldest friends grow an exciting little life in her lovely, round belly is kind of magical. And I want it for myself. I feel guilty; it is a selfish set of emotions that I struggle to control. I have another pregnant friends and I keep meaning to wish them well, check in, and then not doing it because I'm scared of my own emotions, and I'll be honest - I'm jealous of all these wonderful women with their cancer-free bodies, despite my better intentions and my happiness for them. I want to lavish them with gifts and hear about their pregnancies with a desperation that can only be inhabited by those who are unable to participate. I am the mama club outsider, too eager and not allowed to convert to their ranks. What sort of person am I?
This is where I get trapped in all the things I can't know, and how to make myself live this life now instead of waiting around for the things I wanted. I can't know for at least five years whether or not the chemo has made me infertile. That's a big question to just leave hanging around out there. I can't ever know if pregnancy and the associated hormones will flip a tiny cellular switch, making little meals for hungry cancer cells. I can't know whether or not my body even contains those cells. The ground beneath my feet is unsteady. I hate not knowing. I am that terribly nosy, obnoxious conversationalist pestering others to fill me in on what I've missed, unwilling to let Jason keep even the tiniest secret, seeking more details constantly. And here my very own body is full of huge, important secrets and I've the rest of my life (how long is that?) to find out what they are.
Maybe my problem is that I keep thinking that at some point this cancer voyage will come to an end. But it won't. It will progress in fits and starts but it won't end. The end of chemo is the beginning of hormone therapy. The end of hormone therapy is the beginning of trying to make a family, which is rife with its own exciting and frightening potentialities. And through all of this is the continuation of my life, taking care of myself and searching for ways to accept what I don't know, to accept that there isn't really an end to any of this, but that it will get better, to believe that the things I want like a baby and to be able to work full-time without medically necessary interruptions and to be financially stable enough to be elligible adoptive parents and to stop thinking of my life as something that exists between doctors' appointments and treatments are all out there for me. Because all those things are out there... I think.
I suspect that in a couple of weeks these things will feel a little more real, not quite so far out of reach, and over the next few months normality will come back to me in small, modified pieces. And I will relish each morsel.
*Technically, I could interrupt my Tamoxifen regimen to have a baby, but doctors do not advise doing so and they have little to no data on how this impacts the effectiveness of the drug. Also, because it is ill-advised to stop the therapy, they recommend restarting immediately after giving birth which cuts out the possibility of breast feeding. I think if I were to stop taking the drug to try to get pregnant, I'd spend a lot of time scared about how that might impact the rest of my life and as much as I want to shorten the wait, I am more afraid to shorten my life.
Two days ago I had my second-to-last chemo treatment. It felt good, feels good. When I think about how very near I am to the end of this part of the process, I get butterflies. I want to show up to that last appointment dressed to the nines with champagne and noise-makers, confetti and music. I want to run out of there to the triumphant cheers of nurses and other patients, not because I think I deserve it, but because it's the first thing that really feels worth celebrating in about eight months. Ok, the second thing, the first being the removal of the cancer. It's just all been so fucking hard, from the change in my diagnosis to the failed reconstruction to the huge egg harvest that turned out three embryos, precious and heavy with the pressure of one chance and all my hope.
Two weeks from today I will be facing the rest of my life wherein the management of my cancer care is more about lifestyle than regular doctor visits and abrasive medications. The energy these meds have sapped will slowly return. My hair will grow back. I'll have a reason to use my razor again. My bottle of shampoo that has sat, virtually untouched, in the shower will be put to use. The aches that now arise in my bones will dissipate. The pain in my nail beds, the tingling and numbness in my fingertips will (hopefully, probably) subside. I will be able to avoid the smells of the infusion room. Lightly spiced food will no longer set my tongue aflame. I'll have my port removed and the skin on my chest will lay flat once again, rather than stretching and bubbling over this plastic implant.
It's a funny feeling, this coming to the end. Because it feels so momentus, like such a big event, and in so many ways it isn't an ending at all. The cancer center gives patients chemo completion diplomas. On January 30th, I will spend hours in the infusion room and on my way out the door, they'll hand me a sheet of printer paper certifying that I made it. That I stuck it out and got to the end.
But it won't be the end, because they'll also hand me a prescription for Tamoxifen and schedule a follow-up appointment for an mri and a physical exam to monitor for recurrence. And I'll take that Tamoxifen for five years. And I'll go home and schedule appointments with plastic surgeons to find the right doctor to do my reconstruction. And hopefully by mid-summer the reconstruction will be done. Another ending on the horizon.
And I'll take my Tamoxifen every day. And I'll eat well and use the elliptical more. And I'll try even harder to find ways to make myself feel like I'm living instead of waiting.
Because right now, and for the forseeable future, I feel like I'm waiting for the actual end of all of this but it isn't coming for a long, long time, if ever.
I'm having a hard time giving myself over to my future which is riddled with much waiting and all sorts of terrifying things I can't know, and the prospects are scarier now than they were a year ago. A year ago we were thinking babies and vacation and law school and job prospects. Then our life was thrown into upheaval and all those things were scattered to the edges of our field of vision. Now, as the dust begins to settle and the things we wanted have started to move closer to our grasp, it's babies on which I'm fixated. Because that's the thing we can't have (and the thing everyone around us seems to be having), and because for some reason I have it in my head that having a baby is the one thing that will make me feel like I have a normal life again (which is a lot of pressure for a new person and might be precisely why it's best we can't have a baby right now). All sorts of things hold that hope at arm's length - I have five years of hormone therapy to do during which time I am not allowed to get pregnant*; having had cancer renders me an inelligible candidate for many adoption agencies for at least a few years; medical bills and much time off of work has left us financially less stable than we once were, and adoption is expensive. And time-consuming. The whole scenario gets me thinking about myself as defective and that occasionally spirals into guilt about keeping Jason from being able to have the life he wanted. I was only mostly joking when I recently told him that he could easily leave me, marry someone else, and have a kid all well before he and I could even start trying.
Now I'm watching my dear friend's incredible daughter grow and it's a wonderful thing to see. And it fills a selfish part of me with envy. One of the best couples I know is expecting their first child and I'm wildly happy for them. Seeing one of my oldest friends grow an exciting little life in her lovely, round belly is kind of magical. And I want it for myself. I feel guilty; it is a selfish set of emotions that I struggle to control. I have another pregnant friends and I keep meaning to wish them well, check in, and then not doing it because I'm scared of my own emotions, and I'll be honest - I'm jealous of all these wonderful women with their cancer-free bodies, despite my better intentions and my happiness for them. I want to lavish them with gifts and hear about their pregnancies with a desperation that can only be inhabited by those who are unable to participate. I am the mama club outsider, too eager and not allowed to convert to their ranks. What sort of person am I?
This is where I get trapped in all the things I can't know, and how to make myself live this life now instead of waiting around for the things I wanted. I can't know for at least five years whether or not the chemo has made me infertile. That's a big question to just leave hanging around out there. I can't ever know if pregnancy and the associated hormones will flip a tiny cellular switch, making little meals for hungry cancer cells. I can't know whether or not my body even contains those cells. The ground beneath my feet is unsteady. I hate not knowing. I am that terribly nosy, obnoxious conversationalist pestering others to fill me in on what I've missed, unwilling to let Jason keep even the tiniest secret, seeking more details constantly. And here my very own body is full of huge, important secrets and I've the rest of my life (how long is that?) to find out what they are.
Maybe my problem is that I keep thinking that at some point this cancer voyage will come to an end. But it won't. It will progress in fits and starts but it won't end. The end of chemo is the beginning of hormone therapy. The end of hormone therapy is the beginning of trying to make a family, which is rife with its own exciting and frightening potentialities. And through all of this is the continuation of my life, taking care of myself and searching for ways to accept what I don't know, to accept that there isn't really an end to any of this, but that it will get better, to believe that the things I want like a baby and to be able to work full-time without medically necessary interruptions and to be financially stable enough to be elligible adoptive parents and to stop thinking of my life as something that exists between doctors' appointments and treatments are all out there for me. Because all those things are out there... I think.
I suspect that in a couple of weeks these things will feel a little more real, not quite so far out of reach, and over the next few months normality will come back to me in small, modified pieces. And I will relish each morsel.
*Technically, I could interrupt my Tamoxifen regimen to have a baby, but doctors do not advise doing so and they have little to no data on how this impacts the effectiveness of the drug. Also, because it is ill-advised to stop the therapy, they recommend restarting immediately after giving birth which cuts out the possibility of breast feeding. I think if I were to stop taking the drug to try to get pregnant, I'd spend a lot of time scared about how that might impact the rest of my life and as much as I want to shorten the wait, I am more afraid to shorten my life.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
lady parts
Here it is, the thing you all come here - or to almost any blog for that matter - in search of: very personal information about my life! Today's exciting personal information is this: I am having a period! A real-live fest of womanly bleeding, cramps, and lower-back aches! An actual accounting of the functionality of my reproductive system! I understand that this may not seem exciting to the casual observer, or maybe you're one of those folks who has just had it up to the eyeballs with women and their dang periods, but allow me to do a bit of scene-setting.
I haven't had a period, or especially normal physical functions since early October when we went through the whole in vitro process of pumping me up with hormones, harvesting and fertilizing eggs, and freezing the resultant embryos. Shortly thereafter I started chemo which made several things happen. First, it made me tired. Then it made me nauseated. Then it made my hair fall out. It made my skin dry up so that despite drinking LOTS of water, (begrudgingly) taking fewer and cooler showers, and moisturizing like a swamp-dweller transported to Death Valley, I still itch and flake. It makes my bones ache. The aching bones were just a side effect of the growth factor shots, but now are a side effect of both my current infusion drug, Taxol, and the growth factor shots. Ouch. It made my periods stop altogether. And, as if that weren't enough, it gives me hot flashes. Fucking hot flashes at 28 years old! Embarrassing and occasionally hilarious, like the time I was talking to students about travel and mentioned that I did a bit of European back-packing when suddenly a hot flash struck, making me turn BEET RED and SWEATY, which in turn made them very uneasy and very curious. Or the time I had one at a show and two generous men tried to make me feel better by asserting that they were sure they'd experienced the same thing. Sorry dudes, but you have not. I think I appreciate your effort to normalize this unusual phenomenon. Yes, I realize that men occasionally have hot flashes but, as in women, it corresponds to later-in-life changes in hormone levels and these guys were my age.
The only thing any doctors, books, or web forums said about my cycle stopping was that at my age, chances were good that it would return within the next YEAR or TWO, which left me with some serious concerns about the resiliency of my reproductive system, and pretty distressed about what these drugs are doing inside of me. It's strange how important this feels. I used an IUD for years and so had very few and very light menstrual cycles. I didn't anticipate feeling so jilted when the chemo sent me into amenorrhea, but in combination with the loss of so much else that felt normal and feminine, this absence, too, was quite glaring.
Welcome back.
I haven't had a period, or especially normal physical functions since early October when we went through the whole in vitro process of pumping me up with hormones, harvesting and fertilizing eggs, and freezing the resultant embryos. Shortly thereafter I started chemo which made several things happen. First, it made me tired. Then it made me nauseated. Then it made my hair fall out. It made my skin dry up so that despite drinking LOTS of water, (begrudgingly) taking fewer and cooler showers, and moisturizing like a swamp-dweller transported to Death Valley, I still itch and flake. It makes my bones ache. The aching bones were just a side effect of the growth factor shots, but now are a side effect of both my current infusion drug, Taxol, and the growth factor shots. Ouch. It made my periods stop altogether. And, as if that weren't enough, it gives me hot flashes. Fucking hot flashes at 28 years old! Embarrassing and occasionally hilarious, like the time I was talking to students about travel and mentioned that I did a bit of European back-packing when suddenly a hot flash struck, making me turn BEET RED and SWEATY, which in turn made them very uneasy and very curious. Or the time I had one at a show and two generous men tried to make me feel better by asserting that they were sure they'd experienced the same thing. Sorry dudes, but you have not. I think I appreciate your effort to normalize this unusual phenomenon. Yes, I realize that men occasionally have hot flashes but, as in women, it corresponds to later-in-life changes in hormone levels and these guys were my age.
The only thing any doctors, books, or web forums said about my cycle stopping was that at my age, chances were good that it would return within the next YEAR or TWO, which left me with some serious concerns about the resiliency of my reproductive system, and pretty distressed about what these drugs are doing inside of me. It's strange how important this feels. I used an IUD for years and so had very few and very light menstrual cycles. I didn't anticipate feeling so jilted when the chemo sent me into amenorrhea, but in combination with the loss of so much else that felt normal and feminine, this absence, too, was quite glaring.
Welcome back.
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