Trip Report: Days 1-2: London

Look, it's ANOTHER trip report! 9 days after we got back from Charleston, I abandoned Ben and Papaya and set out to Europe with my mom.

Traveling with my mom has a few pretty sweet benefits, because she's Diamond Platinum Elite 1000 Level or something with Delta. I hoped this would lead to a first class upgrade, but alas, they seem to be kind of stingy with those on international flights. We did get access to the Virgin Atlantic lounge for free both ways, though, which turned out to be extremely fancy. They told us to be at JFK three hours before the flight and it took about twenty minutes to get through security, so we had plenty of time to enjoy the amenities.

We had eaten breakfast at the hotel but got some additional food in the lounge, mainly because it was free.

Then we flew to London! We arrived in the evening, which turned out to be a million times better than the early morning arrival I've experienced on every other trip to Europe. We found a restaurant just down the street from our hotel that was still open at 10:00pm and had some dinner and wine, and then went back to the hotel and went to sleep. I took pictures of all the wine so I could look it up later. This one is apparently not available in the United States.

We stayed at the Doubletree Hyde Park, near Notting Hill Gate. (Second benefit of traveling with mom: all hotels were free through her Hilton Honors points!) This is the same neighborhood where Ben and I stayed a few years ago so I was sort of familiar with it and knew there were good tube connections nearby. Since our first morning there was the same day as the big market at Portobello Road, we went over to check it out.

We got over there fairly early but by 10:00 it was totally packed - very touristy but fun to see. We both bought small crossbody purses which turned out to be perfect for the rest of the trip, as they were very lightweight.



Oddly almost all the pictures I took are of food. POTATOES.

More food.

Here's a giant thing of paella!

Then we went back to the hotel to put on some fancier clothes, and headed into Kensington Gardens for high tea at The Orangery, which was built by Queen Anne as a conservatory in the early 1700s.

We got legitimate British Pimm's cups!

And the waiter offered to take our picture without us even asking for it.

Look at all this stuff! We had no trouble finishing it off.

Then we walked through Kensington Gardens and around the palace.

This is the famous gates where the memorials to Diana were, but see behind it where there's the wall with the guard station at the corner? THAT'S WHERE WILL AND KATE AND HARRY LIVE. They are really serious about you not taking pictures or anything in that area. I was hoping for a glimpse of Harry but alas, did not get one.

After going back to the hotel and changing back into jeans, for some reason we walked the entire way through the park from our hotel to Buckingham Palace.

And then down through St. James' Park to Trafalgar Square, and popped into the National Gallery for a snack and the National Portrait Gallery to look at a few pictures. Although we were already pretty tired, we then decided to set out on Rick Steves' historical walk of The City of London, which turned out to be insanely long and detailed. But we learned lots of things about London.

This is Somerset House, a big palace right on the Thames. Before we left I had just finished reading about the big palaces lining the Thames because one of them was mentioned on Downton Abbey recently! Most of them were torn down after World War I.

This is the Royal Courts of Justice, their highest civil court building.

This is Samuel Johnson's cat, Hodge. I am still not entirely clear on who Samuel Johnson is.

The walking tour went all the way past St. Paul's and to the Monument, but we didn't make it to the end because we ran out of time.

We met up at a very old and atmospheric pub called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese with my high school friend Fred and his husband Will. You may remember Fred from when we met up with him in Denmark. I had not seen him for nearly twenty years before September. I guess now Fred and I are going to be the type of friends who meet up for coffee and dinner in various European cities every six months. It was crazy packed and the service was terrible, but Fred assured me the service is terrible nearly everywhere in the UK. We enjoyed some beers and fish & chips and great conversation, and then we took the tube back to the hotel to rest our feet! We covered a lot of ground on our first day in London - I thought surely it would be the most walking we'd do the entire trip, but little did I know the death marches to come.

Trip Report: Charleston, Take 2

Oh boy, I'm getting behind!

I finished my last Herceptin treatment on February 24th, and had the port removed on the following day. Port removal turned out to be every bit as irritating as port insertion: I had to be there at 8:00am, couldn't eat or drink anything, and then sat around until 2:30 before the procedure because they had some type of emergency. And then I didn't even get any sedation so the IV insertion and the starvation were all for nothing. Next time I'm supposed to have "surgery" I'm going to risk death and drink some freaking coffee beforehand. Anyway, I was very mildly sore for about a day and a half and that was it. Definitely not as painful as when it went in.

The next day we drove to Charleston for a little weekend celebration! We stayed at the Andrew Pinckney Inn, which was great. We were actually in the building across the street from this one, but you could go in the lobby and get cookies whenever you wanted.

I sprung for the junior suite.

Look at all this coffee! I have never stayed anywhere so generous with the in-room coffee.

This picture over the couch was alarming, though, once I noticed that it looks like a creepy alien eye is peering from behind the plant. I feel sure this is not intentional but once you see it, it cannot be un-seen.

Our main goals on this trip were to wander aimlessly and eat a lot and relax. As part of the relaxation portion, Ben brought this library book for some light reading.

The first night we went to Husk, which was my top restaurant priority upon booking the trip. It was fantastic! This picture of my entree is the only one I took, but rest assured everything was equally beautiful and delicious. Highlights included our appetizer of fried chicken skins, which was a huge portion, and the beverages. The wine was excellent and they had a big selection of non-alcoholic drinks, too, so Benjamin got to try some fun stuff.

On Saturday we toured the Aiken-Rhett House, which does not allow photography inside but was very interesting. It's preserved but not restored, so has a slight air of creepiness throughout.

This is the park next to the house.

  
We met up for lunch with my friend Emily and her boyfriend, who were coincidentally in town at the same time, but sadly did not take any pictures. Then we just walked around town for a long time. The weather was perfect. These houses are on the waterfront.

Saturday night we ate at Blossom, which I think was the best meal of the trip. Unfortunately we overestimated what we were actually capable of eating and got way, way too full. Ben couldn't bend at the waist to take off his shoes. It was rough!

Sunday we did some more walking.

And then we went out to Middleton Place plantation to look around. It has the largest gardens in America (I think? or at least they were the largest at one time) and they take really great care of it. I was initially kind of horrified at what it cost to get in ($43 per person for gardens & house!) but after wandering around there for a few hours it was obvious how costly it has to be to keep up.

The original house burned after the Civil War. This was a small side-house used as a business office but they have all sorts of family treasures in there now.

This is the oldest tree in South Carolina.

There are lots of animals at Middleton Place!

For our last meal we went to Slightly North of Broad, which was also our last meal the last time we were in Charleston. We need to stop going here last because we're always too full from the weekend by the third day. Still, we managed dessert.

I also saw a lady there with super short hair sitting at an adjoining table and eavesdropped enough to determine she was also a breast cancer person. I later saw her in the bathroom and said that I noticed her short hair and she said, "I noticed yours too!" and then we hugged and talked about our treatment plans and stuff. What a fun secret club! Just kidding, it sucks.

It's been over a month now since I finished treatment and I'm kind of alarmed at how little I think about it (aside from being annoyed with my short curly hair and repeating to myself, "if it comes and goes, it's not cancer," regarding my occasionally achy right hip). I had a followup with my radiation oncologist's nurse practitioner last week and I kept getting the feeling she expected me to be more freaked out than I was. Most people do have a difficult time with the end of treatment, but I wonder if having the Herceptin for nine months following chemo helped me feel like it was tapering off rather than just ending abruptly.

I don't have any appointments now until mid-June, which is the longest doctor-free stretch in over a year. It's a touch unsettling. I have to trust that they know what they're doing, though, and don't think I warrant any more treatment. I do sort of wish I could keep having some, though. Like just a chemo booster once a year or a little extra burst of radiation once in a while. Just in case!

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. 

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!

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.

T Minus 28 Days

I now have normal hair. I know this because a couple of weekends ago, two separate people I haven't seen in a year (a barre instructor and my dry cleaning lady) briefly didn't recognize me and then said, "oh! you cut your hair!" when they heard my name. To which I naturally replied both times, "no, I had cancer so it all fell out." 

I'm trying to stop saying that. It's kind of a bummer.

Four weeks from today is my last Herceptin. I'm getting my port out the next day. After that I have a mammogram at the end of March, one at the end of September, and I'm back to once a year like a normal person. I guess they really do think Stage IA breast cancer is usually cured after treatment.

When I was first diagnosed everybody wanted to hook me up to talk with their friends who had gone through this. One of the people I emailed with was a friend of one of Ben's coworkers. She'd been diagnosed with Triple Negative Stage IIIB cancer before she turned 30. She's now four years out from the end of treatment and has a toddler. Her sense of optimism was unfathomable to me at the time; how could she have a child, knowing she could essentially go at any time? She told me, "You can't worry about recurrence. You just can't." 

Now, almost a year later, I understand what she means. It's not that you can't let yourself worry, it's that you become physically and emotionally exhausted and have no other choice but to move on. I'm reaching that point, I think, where my brain is starting to let go not because I want it to, but because I simply cannot continue to worry every day that there is cancer in my body. I have to think about something else. The reality is that the five-year relative survival rate of Stage IA breast cancer is 100%. That doesn't mean it's definitely not coming back, but it means I'm as likely to be killed by something else in the next five years as I am by breast cancer. Those odds are about as good as they can get. I feel pretty certain that even if breast cancer does kill me, I won't die wishing I'd spent more time worrying about it. So: Onward.

Right now I'm spending more time obsessing over my March trip to London & Paris (why do I always book these things so far in advance?) than I am about dying of breast cancer. That's a big step toward being who I used to be. I'm not quite there, and I don't know that I'll ever be there, but closer is progress.

Christmas in the Mountains

I had a Herceptin treatment in December 23rd and neither of us felt much like flying on Christmas Eve, so this year we decided to stay in North Carolina, and ended up renting a house in the mountains near Asheville with our friends Todd & Elise. We drove up there after my infusion and stayed through the 27th.

Unfortunately it rained 80% of the time and was 75 degrees the rest of the other day, so it wasn't quite the winter getaway we had envisioned when booking the trip. It's a good thing, though, because the "road" to the house was a Scottish-style single track path straight up the side of a mountain. I don't know what we would have done if it was icy; it was terrifying enough in the rain.

The house was great, though! Perched right on the side of the mountain.

The view from the deck was fantastic!

On Christmas Eve we drove into Asheville in the downpour and went to the Biltmore Estate. My company sells their wine, so they hooked us up with free tickets, a special private winery tour, a red wine and chocolate seminar, and then a sparkling wine tasting. And then we had dinner. It was a lot!

We had to buy ponchos and umbrellas on the way there.

On Christmas Day the rain finally relented, at least for part of the day. Christmas morning Ben said he was going for "a little stroll" so I decided to join him in my pajamas, given that we were isolated on a tiny road with only a few other houses around, most of which appeared to be empty. Also I figured there wasn't much of anywhere to go. Fortunately he managed to find a steep path up the side of the mountain that we could climb up.

Later that day the wifi went out so we all sat around reading our books in silence for a few hours. It was lovely. 

However, by the 26th we all had cabin fever and drove into Asheville despite having no concrete plan for how we would spend the day. Elise and I ended up sitting in the Asheville Bier Garden reading books on our phones all afternoon while Ben and Todd wandered in and out. It was pretty perfect, actually. We finished with dinner at Chestnut and drove home early Sunday morning. A nice quiet Christmas!

28 Weeks Post Final Chemo

It's ten months to the day since my breast surgeon called and told me I had breast cancer. "I got your biopsy results back, and it is a small cancer." I guess she was trying to make me feel better with that "small" business. My oncologist also said, "Well, it's small," the first time he felt it. WHO CARES?? CANCER.

Anyway, now that December is here, I've been thinking a whole lot about how glad I will be to put this garbage pit of a year behind me. I'm not usually one for artificial milestones and all that, but god, 2015 has been the worst. But I decided that rather than listing out all the things that made it terrible - because everyone reading this knows about my big personal ones, and the sadness in my friends' lives is not for me to share - I should instead probably write a post talking about the things that made it good.

I'm absolutely not one of those people who thinks we should Learn Lessons from going on a Cancer Journey or some bullshit, but I have learned something whether I wanted to or not, and mainly it's that I'm living the life I'm supposed to be living. I know because when I found out I had cancer, I didn't feel like I had a pending list of items to take care of. I didn't want to change anything or do anything differently. I just wanted MORE. More time with Ben and my family and friends, more traveling, more books, more sitting around my house in pajamas with cats.

There is a sense of urgency now underlying everything and I'm not really sure I want it to go away. That sense of urgency is responsible for being six weeks from paying off our house, for making the decision at the last second to go to my 20th high school reunion and having an awesome time, for booking a trip to London next spring with my mom (sorry, Hillary), for realizing that if I've wanted to drive an Audi A4 for ten years I should probably just go ahead and get one. I mean, not until we pay the house off - I haven't lost my mind or anything. But after that.

It's like I'm constantly walking a line between wanting to live my normal life and also feeling like I need to treasure every second and take every opportunity to do everything interesting or fun. For now that feels okay, and part of me hopes I don't ever lose that feeling of conscious gratitude I've gained as a result of learning in one terrifying second how fragile the little life I've created actually is. Part of me is still pretty pissed off about that one terrifying second, though, and wants my naive little life back.

My hair is weird, and I am tired of talking about it, but here it is. 

I know I need to not cut it and just push through until it grows enough to not look like an elderly style, and I know I should be glad to not be bald. Essentially, though, having hair like this feels the same to me as when I was bald. "Oh, but I like it!" people say. Well, fine, but I didn't do this on purpose, and it's different from anything I have ever seen on my head before, and it's a constant reminder of my year from hell. Someone recently said to me, "Some people pay a lot of money for curls like those!" but of course I did pay a lot of money for curls like these. Like, way more than anyone has ever paid for a perm.

I have 78 days until my last Herceptin. I'm going to try to schedule my port removal the same day. I'm ready to move on. Yeah, it might come back. I might have cancer growing in my body right this second. But I need to try to at least pretend I believe it's going to be okay for a while.

What's Up?

Nothing much is up. After a second consecutive October of getting no sleep and having the DVR build up to frightening levels of to-be-watched television, the baseball playoffs are over, but this time the Royals WON. The Royals won the World Series! It's been a few days now and I'm still not over it. I keep watching Hosmer's slide into home in the bottom of the ninth on YouTube. At least I lived long enough to see that happen! World Champions!

Benjamin is tired of me making "at least I lived long enough to see _____" jokes and similar. I don't really think they are jokes, though, not completely. I still don't believe I'm done with having cancer. I believe it a little more than I used to, and I think I will continue to believe it more and more as time passes, but for now I haven't had a day yet where I believe it for the whole day.

I have six more Herceptin treatments, which doesn't sound like a lot but unfortunately they're every three weeks so that adds up to 112 more days before it's over. I like that I'm still getting an expensive drug pumped into my body, though (especially one that doesn't cause any side effects), and I like having the morning off work to read my book in a comfortable chair, so I don't mind too much. Ben gets to go with me to two of the remaining six, since he now works for the government and gets a million paid holidays. He's never been with me to a treatment before, so it will be nice for him to see what it's like. And to show off my handsome husband to the nurses.

My hair is quite something.

My head looks very much like my Grandma Dorothy's head, or at least it will in a few more weeks. Every week I take this overhead shot, and I keep expecting it to sort of start settling down, but each week I'm surprised how much it's changed in only seven days. I am really, really tired of discussing with coworkers how curly my hair is. It didn't used to be curly, did it? Isn't that weird how it's growing back curly? Oh no, not really, most times it grows back curly after chemo. Really! Why is that? WELL I DON'T KNOW CAN WE STOP TALKING ABOUT IT NOW.

Deep breath. 

Really, though. It was better being bald. At least everyone was too shocked into silence to make me talk about it six hundred times a day. I really would be better off living alone with Ben and Papaya on an island in the North Atlantic. Except then I wouldn't have access to the Duke Cancer Center, I guess.