Saturday, February 27, 2016

Finished.

This is the face of someone who doesn't have a port anymore!


It's also the face of someone who waited FIVE AND A HALF HOURS with no food or drink to get said port out, and who didn't even get any sedation via the pointless IV that had been inserted all those hours before and therefore could totally have eaten breakfast and had coffee like a normal person, but I digress. It's out, I'm done with treatment, that's that. 

I have a mammogram at the end of March and one in September, and the next year I go back to annually like any other woman my age. I don't see my oncologist until June. It's hard to trust they know what they're doing - that apparently the statistics bear out no further regular tests - but as my friend Emily said, "they've been right about everything else so far, haven't they?"

I GUESS. 

So here I am. Just a regular person again. "Weird" doesn't really begin to cover how it feels to come out the other side of this. I have no recollection of what it was like to be someone who had not been diagnosed with cancer. I don't think it's possible to go back to being that someone, even if I remembered what it was like. 

For a year I have taken life a day at a time; cancer took from me the ability to make assumptions about the future. Today I know for sure that in two weeks I'm going to have high tea at Kensington Palace with my mom (and hopefully Prince Harry), so I guess I'm starting to take it a couple of weeks at a time now. Maybe that will someday become months at a time, or even a year, but I'm not counting on it. Right now what I have is enough. It's certainly better than it has been, anyway, and if I don't lose the sense of urgency that goes along with learning we can all lose everything in the blink of an eye, that's not the worst thing in the world. 

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

LOOK AT MY CAR THAT I GOT

I've wanted a little Audi since we lived in LA. For well over a decade. It wasn't until a few months after the cancer diagnosis that I realized, "hey, I should go ahead and get an Audi." I'm a grown up! It's okay to have the thing I want! 


I was going to lease it but Ben did the math and kind of freaked out and we determined it made more sense to buy. I went to the Audi dealership with more than a bit of trepidation about the whole process, but it turned out to be much easier than I expected. There was only one new 2015 left on the lot, so it was already discounted. The salesman was very disapproving when I tried to negotiate further ("I can tell you right now my manager is probably not going to go for this,") but surprise! His manager went for it. Shocking.


I wanted an Audi mainly because of the following:
1. It looks awesome.

And I wanted a new car because:
1. Diet Cokes always fell over in the shitty cupholders of my Mazda6.
2. I couldn't see very well out of that Mazda, either. It was too big.
3. I wanted heated seats and bluetooth.

Look how I can park this right in the center of the spot without even trying! My terrible spatial awareness in the Mazda had become a running joke in the McClure household. I was seriously the worst at driving that car.


To my surprise I totally love driving it - so fast and powerful! Ben told me I would love the engine but I thought I wouldn't care about engines. I guess maybe everyone cares about engines when given the opportunity, though.


I keep trying to think of places to drive so I can hang out in the car. Yay!

Thursday, February 4, 2016

On This Day

I don't usually pay attention to my "On This Day" things on Facebook, but I've gotten pretty sucked in over the past month or so, watching 2015 me blissfully post pictures of my kitties and statuses about TV shows, having no idea what was about to be discovered in my right breast. It's like a slow motion trainwreck, watching my life about to come to a screeching halt. It was on this day, February 4th, that I went to work as usual and then to barre, where I chatted with an acquaintance about trying to make our husbands come to a class on Valentine's Day. I went about my evening and got in bed to read, and a few minutes later sat straight up and made shocked, terrified eye contact with Ben. I still don't know how I noticed that tiny lump at all. I can't figure out what I would have been doing to feel it; my best guess is that my book, a heavy one from the library, was resting on my chest pushing my hand into the underside of my breast. Or that it was my Higher Power at work.

A lot of people date their Cancerversary from the official biopsy results and diagnosis, or from the day of surgery when it was removed. But my life changed forever in that instant. Never for one second did I believe it wasn't cancer. I guess that's the hypochondriac in me - most people would play the odds and assume that as a 38 year old woman with no family history, it was surely benign - but as it turns out, my hypochondriac instincts were not wrong. (Finally! Vindication!)

So here we are, one year later. One Herceptin treatment to go before I'm sent back into the world like a normal person who only goes to the doctor every few months. Not too long ago I would have called it "a year from hell," and of course it's not been any picnic, but I guess like with any trauma, our minds do a good job of helping us forget (or block out) the worst of it. Somehow I have gotten used to this state of being, as a Cancer Person, and forgotten what it was like before.

At the Cancer Center they make you fill out these forms with each visit, rating your overall distress on a scale of 0 to 10. For the first time yesterday, I couldn't think of a single thing to be distressed about. I was feeling ZERO distress. How is it possible? 


So I guess I've turned a corner. For now.