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!