Bomb in My Belly

Just a quick post and link today. The New York Times has a great article on coping with a cancer diagnosis. They mention a couple blogs I'm not familiar with, but will definitely check out now that I know of them.

And not five minutes later, an edit. Read Jan Hoffman's mentioned article above and then visit Tara Parker-Pope's Well blog entry on the article. If the topic is at all relevant to you, take part in the discussion by posting in the comments. I'm thinking of a response now myself -- if I actually get something formulated, I'll repost it here.

Seriously, life is kind of silly and random sometimes.

In honor of the now-warm weather, I declare this the long weekend.

The instructor teaching the class I am currently enrolled in looks kind of like my mom, which means (I guess) that she looks kind of like me. It puts me in a bit of a reverie sometimes -- I look at her and imagine her nose and cheeks and forehead are somehow connected to me genetically. She was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago and is (I assume) currently cancer-free.

Once I saw a fill-in oncologist when my regular oncologist was on vacation. He was from South Africa and had only ever treated one other patient with ovarian cancer as young as I was myself. He told me it was eerie, we looked so much alike.

The world is a funny place sometimes.

Looking for a new roommate can be fun if you think of yourself as a panel of judges rating auditions.

Half past noon, and i"m waiting for my roommate to wake so we can go for brunch.

Things to do this weekend:

• transcribe 30 minutes of interview and write a 500-word article based on said interview (cinch-y, but tedious)
• put away clean laundry
• find a book to read -- I've been enjoying French authors (in translation, my reading comprehension allows me to muddle through newspapers, not novels) and short novels (they match my short attention span)
• respond to emails
• listen to Fleetwood Mac, repeatedly

Last night a girl at the bar squatted over the toilet, missed the bowl entirely, and peed on the floor. I was in the stall beside and pee ricocheted off the floor and onto my foot.

Scrambled eggs and coffee sound like heaven right now.

Long weekend begins now.

Cue vodka sodas, dancing, gardening, homework, and barbeques.

Happy Victoria Day.

about time

I am still alive and quite healthy.

Mom is doing well (despite rather uncomfortable lymphodema) and had her double mastectomy and reconstruction las fall.

I was recently in New York where I met the lovely Jen.

Toronto is warm and sunny today, and I'll be putting more vegetables in my garden this weekend.

I'm not sure how to update this blog. The feelings I have about this whole experience now are in some ways more complicated than they were in the past when I was just so unhappy and angry about the whole thing. The grief is mostly gone, but the anger is still around and possibly worse then it was before. I find anger more personal and harder to write about than grief.

I've also never really gotten over the loss of anonymity on this blog. I'll try to work around it somehow.

Tomorrow my mom has her final chemo treatment. She then has eight weeks before the double mastectomy and reconstruction. She's doing well - great, even - and was planning on returning to work after the long weekend, at least until she had her surgery (at which point she would be off for another 6 weeks). Except she won't be going back, since the medical clinic she worked for decided that it would be cheaper for them to outsource the job she did. So they gave her two weeks notice.

Two weeks. As if they hadn't come to this decision weeks before. Instead, they waited until right before she was planning on returning to let her know that she had no job to return to. As a result, she missed an opportunity to take over the job of a retiring friend in a clinic she enjoys working in. And given the fact that she's about to face major surgery in two months time, and has just finished 4 months of chemo, she's not exactly in a position to be looking for more work.

You would think that an employer who deals with sick people all the time would have more compassion. What a bunch of fuckers.

Seriously.

Invaded

Apparently I haven't posted enough, so the spambots have taken over.

Things are find here, mom has one last treatment left before taking 8 weeks off before her double mastectomy.

I've been busy with magazine stuff -- we launched a couple days ago, and I have a post-launch story which is well worth telling, but another time when I'm not about to head to bed. It involves a park, a shooting, public urination, and drunken phone calls. Don't worry, no one died.

I wish I could figure out a way to write comfortably here now that I am somewhat easily googleable by my real name. I'll make that my project for the next month, perhaps. These long silences are kind of ridiculous.

All clear

After a three-hour wait to see my oncologist (or, rather, an oncologist -- I saw a resident today), I got the all-clear. CA-125 was two! Two! and the results from my CT scan last November showed everything to be normal or unremarkable, though I have a phrygian cap on my gallbladder and a circumaortic left renal vein (anatomic variant) which basically means nothing. Just interesting facts to note for future reference.

I have a bone density test next Monday.

Must go to bed, will write again tomorrow.