NYC 2015!

Last weekend my internet friends met up in New York City for our second annual NYC meetup! This time we stayed way downtown in the financial district. This view of the Statue of Liberty was only a few blocks from our hotel!

Ellie and Kate immediately started a weekend-long trend of posing with random items.

For the first night's dinner we went to Trinity Place Bar & Restaurant. They had these fun layered cocktails called Champagne Sangria! There were too many ingredients to remember. They were delicious.

After dinner we walked around for a while and found the Wall Street bull. We also attempted to buy matching I Heart NYC t-shirts but they were all sized for tiny people.

Alexander Hamilton's grave was just up from our subway stop, with One World Trade in the background.

We took the subway to midtown for our first full day and walked through Times Square to Rockefeller Center, where some of us took the elevator to the top. The internet says this is a better idea than the Empire State Building because the lines are shorter, plus then you can actually see the Empire State Building instead of looking out from it. There was no line at all! And the views were amazing!

After that we took the subway back downtown and walked through Little Italy to Chinatown.

We had an amazing lunch at the Shanghai Cafe. We each ordered one or two things and then somehow food just kept arriving long past when it seemed reasonable. We sadly were unable to eat all our dumplings! The total bill for 8 people was $66. I pretty much want to go back to New York right this second to eat this food again.

We walked and shopping throughout the afternoon and then stopped for ice cream from a Mister Softee truck before heading back to the hotel to shower and change for dinner.

For our second night's dinner we went to Rosie's, a Mexican place in the East Village. It was very good, although they didn't seem to have air conditioning. 

After dinner we walked alllll the way back downtown to our hotel. Total mileage for the day: 10.54! Good thing I have that fitbit so I can keep on eye on these things.

The next morning we had plans for brunch at Russ and Daughters but there was about a half hour wait, so we walked around on the Lower East Side taking pictures.

There are like ten more of these in various places. NO SHAME.

The food was worth the wait. We all got some version of a bagel with cream cheese, smoked fish, tomato, red onion, and capers. Plus some knishes to start. Plus an order of blintzes and chocolate french toast to split for dessert. 

The tomatoes are the best I've had all year, for sure. The whole thing was perfect! After all that food we had to walk it off some so continued wandering around and shopping, etc. It was pretty hot, but still early and not too bad if we stuck to the shady side of the street.

This guy was hanging out in a convenience store doorway. 

We were a little worried the Hells Angels were going to come out and kill us for this, but it all went off without a hitch.

Then we did the Hard Times tour at the Tenement Museum, which was really awesome. You have to make advance reservations and it seemed like kind of a pain in the ass but it was totally worth it. There are many other tours you can do, too, so it's a place I'll have to go back to on future visits.

Robert Fulton is also buried at that aforementioned cemetery, near Alexander Hamilton.

For our last night, we took the train to Queens to an internet friend's house for dinner and a big meetup with the NYC area girls! This was on her block.

Most of us had never been to Queens before so it was awesome to see a different part of the city! 

We had an amazing time all hanging out, too. Thank you, Jane Magazine, for having those message boards a hundred years ago. I don't know what I would do without these friends! It would be a sad life.

Update on the Cancer

Today I am 13 weeks out from my last chemo. That's a quarter of a year! I am still having people ask me on a daily basis, "how are you feeling?" 

Dear Everyone: 

I AM FEELING FINE. I FEEL LIKE A NORMAL PERSON. YOU CAN STOP ASKING ME THAT QUESTION.

My hair is getting a touch unruly.

I still have a sparse spot in the front and center of my forehead but Ben claims it's filling in. It's hard to tell in this picture but I think it's going to end up the same red color as always, which is a relief. People are asking me what I'm going to do as far as a future hairstyle and I have no idea. It took four years to grow it out to the length it was before so clearly I don't really need to worry about it at the moment. Mostly I just want to look like I have a purposeful haircut again, and I think I'm almost there. Maybe another couple of weeks.

I have six more months of Herceptin and 119 months of tamoxifen (my doctor says 59 months, but I'm pushing for the 10 years. Just to be safe, you know). Neither of those things give me any trouble at all, so I really think this is mostly all wrapped up and I can just have a normal life again. Of course, that's all assuming it's not coming back (or presently hiding in my body, which to be honest is my main concern), but everyone tells me it's probably not. About twenty percent of the time I believe them. That's an improvement over what it used to be, so hopefully with time I can maybe even get up to believing it 50%. 

In the meantime I'm trying to live a normal life and do things I like to do - hanging out with Ben, talking about how cute Papaya is, reading, planning vacations, exercising, cooking, working my way through my Netflix queue. There is this sense of urgency underlying everything now that I don't think was there before; I definitely have more of a drive to do things and go places. I think that's a good thing, though, as long as it doesn't get out of control.

I went somewhere!

Since Christmas I have barely left the house, much less the state. And because Banana's illness made leaving even for a weekend a huge pain, I hadn't been on an airplane since last June. Fourteen months! That's crazy. 

I'm admittedly going a little nuts the last month or so with planning trips and activities, now that I feel like a normal person and have the freedom to do whatever I want again. Ben and I had decided long ago to skip our 20th class reunion because of a combination of my cancer and also not caring too much about going, but as the deadline for buying tickets grew nearer I realized I really wanted to go. If nothing else, I'd get to see my niece and nephews for the first time in eight months. I knew there was no point in trying to convince Ben to go so I bought a ticket for myself and Becca agreed to be my date.

And it was worth it! This one is getting big! He never stops moving for a second. He is like a human Banana, crawling all over the place where he isn't supposed to be.

Friday night Shannon and I drove to St. Joe and picked up Becca and grabbed a quick $7 dinner at Taco Bandido, a ramshackle fast food place only a native St. Josephite could love. The highlight for me is the taco burger, which is exactly what it sounds like. I called one time to ask how they made it so I could re-create it at home and they said, "well, we put the meat and taco sauce on a bun and then add lettuce and cheese." Oh, cool.

MMMMM. Becca also got these items for dessert. She said you pronounce it with a fancy long U sound but somehow I doubt it.

After that we went to an enormous country dance bar that used to be a Green Hills supermarket. There were like 28 stalls in the bathroom. It was pretty weird. I asked for the best beer they had and he gave me Bud Light. There was also a $10 credit card minimum so I had to buy 4 and then handed them out to various high school classmates. It was interesting that most people stuck to their friend circles, even though some of us hadn't seen each other since graduation. Also interesting that in a class of 400+, I'd say about 75 people turned out. Still, it was fun!

I had a really good time on Saturday with these nerds.

We went to the pool, which was strangely deserted, and ate a million Doritos.

Mira and Griffin seemed to take my mostly baldness in stride, but Sully told Mom it was "creepy," and then later I overheard him telling his friend Savannah, "Aunt Molly looks kind of freaky with that flat hair." REAL NICE, SULLIVAN.

Saturday night I drove back to St. Joe for the formal reunion dinner and had such a nice time! It was in this weird rustic barn/event center in a part of town I have definitely never seen in my life - part of the time the Google Maps lady had me driving on a gravel road between two 8-foot tall fields of corn. Saturday was a lot more mix-y than the first night - people circulated more and I got to spend time with people I hadn't talked to in years and years (and in some cases, maybe ever), including a good friend from junior high I sort of lost touch with in high school. I didn't get home until 2:00am! 

Sunday we had a girls' outing to the Royals game. It started raining as soon as we pulled into the parking lot, so Mom and Hillary fashioned head coverings out of plastic bags. See, if they would just shave their heads they wouldn't have to worry about this.

It did stop raining soon after we arrived, but then of course the problem was off the charts humidity. So steamy! Still, we hung in there. I haven't been to a Royals game since Griffin was a baby, and certainly not since they were actually a team worth watching.

Mira and I had a hard time getting our natural sunscreen to absorb properly.

Sweaty family portrait!

We ended up leaving after the 7th inning because of the heat. Once the sun came out it was brutal, and at one point Mira said, "Mom, this isn't safe for kids." It isn't safe for anyone! They won, though, and we got to see the good parts so it was worth it.

It was a good weekend trip! I can't wait for more of them! Coming soon.

Day Trip to Hillsborough

For our first post-Banana weekend, we decided we needed a way to distract ourselves from sadness and also take advantage of the newfound freedom of being able to leave the house for more than 8 hours at a time. We drove to historic Hillsborough, North Carolina, about 45 minutes away, to visit the Ayr Mount plantation house.

It was great! There was only one other couple on the tour so it was a very personalized experience. The tour guide was really knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the house's history and architecture. We sure do love a historic house tour.

After the tour we drove into downtown Hillsborough and got lunch at the Saratoga Grill, a cute restaurant on the second floor of a little shop, overlooking the main drag of downtown. We had eaten a bunch of fried things and dessert the night before so both got salads which were huge and delicious!

Then we walked down the main street and visited the Orange County Historical Museum, where we saw the only complete set of colonial weights and measures in the United States!!!! 

And then we kept walking a little more to see the Burwell School, which was one of the first women-only schools in North Carolina. One of the girls who lived there was a slave who ended up buying her freedom as an adult and being Mary Todd Lincoln's dressmaker.

It was a good little trip! It has us interested to visit the other plantations and historical sites around the area that for some reason we have never bothered to see.

And finally, here is the state of my head. This was on Saturday and I think it already looks longer only four days later. It's really growing in earnest now, and I am close to looking more like Furiosa than Cancer Patient. In another couple of weeks Ben and I are going to be genuine hair twins, which is every man's dream, right? To be hair twins with your wife?

My littlest fattest buddy.

Last Tuesday, one week ago, was our Banana's last day. Our wonderful vet came to our house and gave us (and him) hugs and the end was so peaceful, and for that I am very grateful. The past year and a half of his life was not very peaceful at all, and we were glad we were able to put an end to all of his trauma in the least traumatic way possible.

Still: it was hard. So hard. He was such a sweet, hilarious, mischievous, affectionate cat. I've never had a cat before who sought human attention when he was feeling stressed, but this one did. Every time Ben vacuumed he insisted on getting under the covers with me, and when we were at the vet he wanted to be held in a tight little ball with his face buried in somebody's neck. He was just the best boy that we could have ever hoped for when we picked him from the SPCA, even considering he was pretty great in those first few minutes of getting to know him. He will be very much missed.

Within a very short period of time after his passing, though, we realized just how much his problems had come to dominate our lives. When you have to do a thing like medicate a cat every 8 to 12 hours for 18 months, you sort of lose sight of how taxing it is, keeping to that schedule. You forget what it was like to just have a cat you feed and pet once in a while and can leave for long periods of time. I definitely have some guilt over how much I've appreciated the freedom of life without Banana's epilepsy, but as Ben said, we wouldn't have put him to sleep if the negatives hadn't come to outweigh the positives for all of us. And that is true.

Papaya seems mostly unaffected. She has been a little more affectionate than she used to be - she wants to sit on our laps in the evenings now, which was only an occasional thing before - and she is very upset every morning at 5:00 a.m. that nobody is willing to be awake with her, but I'm hoping she'll settle down a little bit with that over time. We think she's going to be just fine as a solo cat overall.

The end of an era! It's just not fair we only got five years with him. There will never be another Banana.

Aftermath

I realized the other day that my main anxiety-based issue is not that I'm afraid I'll be in the small percentage of people who have a recurrence. It's that I'm afraid the statistics are all lies. In my heart of hearts I secretly believe everybody who gets cancer dies from it. Even though clearly that's irrational! I know it's irrational! But knowing and feeling are unfortunately different.

Yesterday I discovered estrogen positive but progesterone negative cancers have a slightly worse outcome than those in which the tumor is progesterone positive. So what's the statistic, in the big, long-range metastudy that came to this conclusion? That negative number? It's that only 97.3% of the Stage I progesterone positive achieved disease-free survival. I'm not even Stage IB, you know, I'm Stage IA, so probably my chances are even better than that 97.3%. Unless.... UNLESS!!...it's all lies. MAYBE IT'S ALL LIES.

Anyway, despite all that overall I'm doing okay. The real problem is that Banana has come to the end of the road with his epilepsy, and this weekend we are going to have to put him down, and the anxiety and sadness this is creating in me is spilling over into other things I normally wouldn't think up to be bummed about. Right now he's on three times the therapeutic dose of Keppra for his weight and twice the Zonisamide, and the seizures are still coming, and increasing in frequency.

Our wonderful, wonderful vet told me last week she would support us 110% in whatever we decided, and when he had another seizure yesterday and I called her, she said, "Molly, this is the right thing to do." She said he is the toughest case of feline epilepsy she's ever treated, and she believes he would have died at some point in the past year without our efforts in trying to keep him stable.

He has been the best of cats. Life isn't fair.

Status: Slow but Sure

It's been six and a half weeks since chemo but it already seems like a long time ago, which means I'm getting really impatient with being bald. I've been having to shave my legs for a couple of weeks (and annoyingly I am out of the habit, which means half the time I forget to do it) but the head hair is lagging. In the last week or so, it's finally starting to visibly grow in earnest, though, and it feels nice and fuzzy and soft. I'm really hoping for a non-shiny scalp by the time I go to NYC next month.

My eyebrows are non-existent, though, and I have maybe seven eyelashes on each eye. I can make up for the brows with pencil but I've quit any attempts at mascara as it just makes me look like a weirdo with seven eyelashes. Still, even that is getting better - you can see tiny lashes starting to grow on the bottom, and my brows have sort of a five o'clock shadow effect in certain light. 

This is pretty cool, too: I didn't lose any fingernails, thank goodness, but by the end of chemo they really hurt and were looking pretty gnarly. I keep them polished all the time so I only really see them between paintings, but today I noticed you can see a clear line of new, healthy, post-chemo growth. Yay!

As far as radiation goes, my whole breast treatments are over and I only have four more boosts (extra treatments aimed at the tumor site). My armpit is red and there are a couple of intermittently itchy areas, but for the most part radiation has been a piece of cake. I'm looking forward to having my mornings back, although I will say it's been nice to essentially work six-hour days for the past few weeks. 

I met with my oncologist last week for the first time since chemo ended and, as always, quizzed him about various aspects of the possibility of recurrence and he finally said, "well, I'm just not worried about it because there's a greater than 95% chance you aren't going to have a recurrence." I've read that some patients keep their ports in for a few years after chemo in case they need it again and to that he smiled and said, "you're getting that port out. Whenever you want." 

I have seven more months of herceptin treatments ahead of me, but it's really starting to feel like I've made it through and am on the other side. It feels dangerous to just move on with my life and stop worrying every second, but as we say in Nar-Anon, "living this day is the only way to have a life." So that's what I'm going to try to do.