Late night Ramblings

So here I am blogging about my cancer journey. I get to dig into my archives and post paintings long since dried while I try and keep my family and friends up to date with my prognosis and treatment plan to rid cancer from my body and prevent it from coming back. I've gotten opinions and 2ned opinions and listened to their interpretations of the information and considered the statistics that I am told. I've just minimized my chance of a local recurrence having the 2nd surgery. Check. The probability of having a distant recurrence is now key. "The distant" part of that means a recurrence that is not in your breast next time around. Breast Cancer can "present" itself in a different organ or system. Sounds nasty, because it is. BC cells corrupt healthy cells in a distinctive unique way. If I can make it 10 years without a distant recurrence, it is the gold standard of survival. It means you have just as good a chance of dying from some disease other than breast cancer. Like heart or kidney failure. If I have radiation and survive 10 years, there might be the chance for the collateral damage from the radiation to express itself. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to die of something else after 3 more decades of good living. To get there, I have "quality of life" trade-offs. The radiation to my breast will kill the fast growing cells of the cancer lurking behind, dividing like speed demons trying to infiltrate the healthy cells. The trade off is radiation exposure on all the breast tissue, tighter skin, a really bad sun burn for 7 weeks and exhaustion. Not too bad, I guess that is tolerable.
After a few debilitating weeks of radiation, I'll start taking Tamoxifen. They recommend starting one after the other so we can tell what caused what side effects. One pill a day for 5 years. It will block the estrogen that my body still produces from being absorbed by my cells, the good ones and the cancerous ones, which use estrogen as fuel. They've ruined it for all my cells, including the ones that need estrogen to keep my mind functioning as best it can, my memory working enough to be able to open the front door of my own house, and my skin from drying out. Maybe I'll tolerate all that just fine, like the lucky women who don't lose their hair during chemo. And I've been lucky so far, not having to be facing chemo right now!

Staying alive trumps all those petty discomforts, after all, they are tradeoffs, and life itself is the highest purpose. Looking at my future life through the quality of life lens is a perspective I hadn't imagined viewing through just after turning 50. I was just getting used to the 5 as the first digit in my age. I had just started swimming a mile at a time instead of 3/4! I was dancing and hiking and feeling strong and alive. Five decades of being on this planet in this body and proud of it. Even if it is such a big number, half way to one hundred, half a CENTURY! I started my life in 1959. Someone 50 at that time would have been born in 1909! and they would have seemed really old then.

I was 1, 2, and 3 years old during the 3 seasons of MadMen Leon and I have been watching, escaping into since my cancer was "found out". Each episode consumes us. It's as if we are there, in the saturated colors of the early 60's, sitting in the Knoll chairs, driving the behemoths of Detroit's excess, zipped up tight with our hats and gloves in stylish Manhattan, stuck in the gender and race defined roles, sitting in the front row of the nascent business of advertising and seeing how those times influenced the culture I grew up in and live in now. Our Modern Times. After 40 minutes when I come back to my reality, I think, "oh yeah, I have Breast Cancer." With a capital B and C. In 1961 I probably would have had a double mastectomy by now.

Today on this beautiful May Day, I tried to lay still and heal. Leon took Ezri to a Cal baseball game, Aaron went to a climbing competition in Davis, and I was visiting all my lez friends in LA on the L Word.