Fear

1)I know you don't really know what to say. The truth is, nothing that anyone says is really going to help, unless you are my doctor reading me test results, and they are good.

2)I am not brave. I am scared shitless. And if I didn't whine and complain and cry in the hospital, or I don't make a fuss every time they have to take more blood, it is because my parents taught me that whatever your role in life (student, employee, sick person, recovering sick person etc.) whether you chose it or not, you should do it as best you can. I think I was a good patient, but I was doing what I had to do, and that is not bravery.

3)Please don't tell me not to worry, that everything will be okay, that the worst is over. This may be true. But it may not. I am not assuming the worst, or obsessing about relapse, but it would be foolish not to at least acknowledge the realities of my present situation. When you tell me not to worry I know you mean well, but it makes me feel like you are belittling what I've been through and the very real fear that I keep tucked away in a quiet but readily accessible place inside me at all times.

4) I am not 'sick' anymore, but there are still good days and bad days, and they are still often related to cancer. There are so many people out there in this situation, I do wonder how they cope, because 'survivorship' is so very much harder than I had expected. Nobody warned me about this, so if I sob all over you because I'm still getting the hang of this phase of the whole ordeal, please forgive me. I'm sure I will develop coping strategies.

5) If I am not perfectly happy, peppy, positive, please don't have a panic and assume something is wrong and make me reassure you many times that I am okay. It is hard to have to be strong all the time to keep others from worrying about me. Just let me worry and be sad sometimes without making me worry about you too.

6) I am fine. Nothing horrible has happened to inspire this writing, no symptoms, no test results, nothing. I am merely playing the 'what if' game - what if I had never become ill and could live a life absent of this particular brand of fear and drama? It is a nice fantasy...

Pep Talk

I have pereza.

This is the Spanish word for when you feel lazy about something. Keeping up with the simple job of feeding myself on a daily basis is a draaaaaaaaaaaaag. It's not that I miss meat, dairy, sugar, etc. because I sincerely do not. But eating the way I have committed to doing takes planning and considerable effort, and some days I wish it were easier.

I don't keep anything naughty in my cupboards, so cheating out of laziness is not an option. But coming home and gobbling down plain chickpeas with just a bit of lime juice and salt on top should not constitute a meal! (I just didn't feel like chopping up vegetables at 3am after a night of dancing and drinking...chickpeas as post-bar food...I suppose it could be a lot worse...)

Eating out is also complicated. For example, yesterday at a restaurant I ordered a Mexican dish (corn tortillas, lettuce, salsa, re-fried beans) but requested that the chicken and sour cream be omitted. We explained this explicitly to the waitress. No meat, no dairy. NOTHING FROM AN ANIMAL. She nodded and wandered off, no doubt bemused by the crazy gringa. There had been no mention of cheese on the menu, so I was surprised when my meal came to the table topped with a product that most definitely originated in a cow. Grated cheese everywhere -aaaargh! At least it wasn't melted, so I was able to pick it off.

Tonight's conclusion: no more whining. I need to get my act together. More veggies, fewer grains and beans, and definitely more exercise!!! With tomorrow's lunch already packed away nicely in Tupperware, I'm off to watch the most recent episode of Glee. If my taste buds can't have junk food, at least my brain can.

Why aren't the vegetables helping my BRAIN?

There is some serious malfunction occurring in my brain recently. This kind of thing happened to me on a near-daily basis as a teenager, but I like to think that I've made some progress since then. To say so this week would look like a lie.

Sunday I woke up early and decided to take advantage of the sunshine and go for a walk down the mountain. I took my mp3 player (a relic from when no moving parts was still big news) and the two keys I need to get into my apartment building - one for the outside door, and one for my apartment.

The walk was fantastic - I made it all the way up the mountain for the first time since my return without having to stop and rest. These are measurable, kick-ass results!!! I was practically skipping when I got to my apartment and stuck the key in the door.

Or at least I tried to, but it just...wouldn't....go. It was the wrong key. I had a look at the other key to see if I had been twice-careless or just once over. Definitely twice-careless. I walked to a friend's apartment where we first figured out the Spanish word for locksmith and then found one who was willing to come at nine-thirty on a Sunday morning to jimmy my door open.

The locksmith guy was actually kind of cute. Bonus. He had my door open in under two minutes (which is actually a bit of a worry, right?) but I didn't beat myself up over this, because it could happen to almost anybody.

But twice in three days? Forget it! And I'm ashamed to admit it, but today's locked-out drama was far worse. I didn't grab the wrong keys, I didn't grab the keys at all. I left them at school when I rushed out after a meeting that had gone late. I didn't realize that they weren't in my bag until I got home much later at nine. So, back to my friend's house, to devise a plan. (If she hadn't done the same thing twice last week I might have felt silly, but as it stands, we're even. This is not a contest I want to win.)

In the end, I had to get in touch with the school's physical plant assistant, who in turn contacted the security guard, who opened my classroom for me to collect the keys. And I do not live near my school. My school is located down the mountain, along a highway, then down a windy country road. You don't swing by my school to pick something up, you hail a taxi and tolerate the quizzical looks the driver gives you when you say you want to go to a school in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. (Okay, not the middle of the night, but certainly way past the hour when I want to be out in the street!)

What is wrong with my brain? The portero (doorman/security guard) at the school laughed at my forgetfulness and suggested it was caused by lovesickness. *sigh* Not a chance. Can I still claim chemo-brain? I'm supposed to be in control and making deliberate, positive choices in my life. That's what this whole project is about. No more flailing about mindlessly!!

Breathe...

Wheatgrass tastes like something it rhymes with

If anyone tells you that wheatgreass juice tastes good, I think you can be fairly certain of two things: 1) this person has your best interests at heart; and 2) this person is lying.

I conducted my first wheatgrass juicing experiment Thursday morning. I 'harvested' (chopped off with scissors) half of my crop and fed it to the juicer. This produced about three drops of juice, so I cut down the rest and chucked that in too.

Growing and juicing wheatgrass is an engaging activity for the senses...the grass is the green of healthy, living things, and I have admired it every morning while I eat breakfast. I played with the stalks before their little haircut, the clean soft grass made me wish I had a whole field of the stuff to play in. But none of these little tinglings of activity could compare to the smell of wheatgrass being juiced.

Think of freshly mowed lawn, but one-hundred times concentrated. The smell billowed out to fill every bit of my apartment, despite having very little to show for my efforts. The Omega beast had spit out about one and a half tablespoons of liquid grass stain. It was not appetizing.

While in Venice a few years ago I ordered the local speciality - Venetian Cuttlefish. Squid, prepared in its own ink. The sauce was a deep opaque shade of black and began to congeal the minute it was set in front of me. While the flavour was mild and almost pleasant, I feared that somehow the colour of this oddity would cause my stomach to revolt, as if it could detect that this was the colour of dirt, rather than normal digestible food. I felt a similar fear looking at the wheatgrass juice.

And I looked at it for a looooooooong time before deciding that it was time to get cracking so I wouldn't miss the bus to work. Two gulps, and I was out the door. Ugh. I could taste the tangy grass in the back of my throat all morning. (Is this how cows feel??) I must admit, I did not savour the taste - I tossed it back and swallowed as quickly as I could manage. I did detect a hint of sweetness, but mostly I felt as though I were drinking a barn.

I expect it will get easier with practice. To accomplish this though, I need to step up production in a serious way. More seeds, more trays...I don't see how I'm going to be able to do this every morning, but if I could manage a few times a week I think I will be satisfied.

Of course the scientific research regarding the actual benefits of wheatgrass is still pretty sketchy. There are a lot of claims being made, of course, but hard science has yet to offer judgement. All the same, growing wheatgrass is a novel and enjoyable hobby, and the idea at present is to get more green stuff in me, which wheatgrass certainly does.

Laboratory junkie no more

I have a friend who also writes a blog. We were discussing our hobby and she said that a good blog should be updated five times a week. Whaaaaaaaat? My efforts, then, have been woefully inadequate. It is highly unlikely that I can come up with something interesting to say five times a week (or ever, for that matter!)

My hip is hurting again. The same hip is hurting in the same way it did right before I was diagnosed. But this time I will not let it launch me into a fit of panic. The psychologist and I have been working on relaxation techniques, which in practice means I take little naps in her office every now and again. (I always thought the whole couch-in-the-psychologists-office thing was a movie cliche, but it turns out to be very real, and reasonably comfortable as well.) And - gold star for me - I only have to go once every two weeks now, instead of every week.

I could pop into the lab tomorrow for another round of bloodwork to ease my mind about the hip thing (yes, in Colombia you can ask for your own blood work and collect your own results, as well as buy drugs without a prescription), but I was just there last week (and two weeks before that, and the week before that), and it took them four tries to get any blood out, and I'm not sure running to the lab every time I feel the slightest bit funny is a good habit to get into. I'm going to resist.

My proper follow up appointment with in-depth blood work will be taking place next month in Medellin, as well as a scan of my liver to see if it has kicked a (minor) chemo-enabled infection from several months ago.

Yesterday was a good day, but overall this week I've felt really strung out. I ditched an after-work meeting yesterday - with my boss' permission, of course- to come home and just breathe, just be, by myself for awhile. I'm going to try exercise in the morning and see if that helps. The alarm is set for 5:30.

Tomorrow is going to be a no snooze button kind of day :-)

Screw Science

I have officially abandoned my quest for definitive scientific-based knowledge regarding the connection between diet and cancer. For every argument made on one side, there is at least one counter-argument, and I am certainly in no position to know what is valid and what is not, so I give up. *SIGH* What I can say, however, is that whether this whole vegetable/grain deal has super cancer-fighting powers or not, I have not felt this good in a very long time. For this reason, I will stick to my new plan.

I eat as much as I want and never feel bad about it, because everything I eat is good for me. (With the exception perhaps of tonight's coconut milk extravaganza; see below.) And 'as much as I want' really isn't all that much - I'm finding I feel fuller for longer... I don't get regular stomach upsets like I did before, and I feel sort of 'light' all the time, despite weighing more than I would like to, though that is changing as well - the new program is definitely compatible with weight loss.

It's been 18 days, and I had sort of suspected that the cravings would have begun to plague me by now - cheese, chocolate, hamburgers, whatever. But nothing so far. I walk past the M&Ms and the Sparkies (nasty waxy little Skittles rip-offs) in the grocery store on a near-daily basis, and feel not even a hint of longing for these items. Meat is another issue altogether, as my indifference to this seems to be slowly evolving into something approaching revulsion. Not the raw bits in the grocery store so much, but the grilled hunks of it I see on peoples' plates. I have hospital flashbacks and I want to hurl. I have to keep this feeling in check though, as I have no intention of becoming one of those ultra-sensitive preachy types. I do it my way, you do it yours, and ya, as they would say in Spanish.

Tonight I did splurge though. It would appear that I have morphed into this highly social creature...a lasting effect of chemo perhaps? I still love my alone-time, but this week I have found myself in exceptional company every night. And tonight I actually fed my company. Such responsibility!! I have all my life had this (arguably irrational) fear of feeding other people - what if they don't like what I make? What if I mess it up? What if....etc. etc. (It seems like such a silly little thing, but I swear it was a major roadblock in my brain and social life!) I guess that's another one of the side-effects of the big C - I don't scare as easily anymore. So I made some Thai curry (I will not think about all the FAT in coconut milk), and it came out okay, and we washed it down with lots of red wine.

Is it crazy that I feel happier now than I did before I got sick? My life is certainly more uncertain, there are risks, there are fears, and there are an infinite number of bad memories. But I feel that some part of me that has been sleeping for a very long time is starting to wake up and see the world, and actually want to be in it, rather than just observing with quiet indifference. It is a most delicious sensation. It's either that, or the wine. Or the company. Something about tonight was very delicious indeed... Don't you just love that thumbs up from the universe when everything comes together?

Killer Cucumber?

I returned to Manizales yesterday morning and unpacked all my goodies the minute I arrived at my apartment: two new vegan cookbooks, dulse, stevia, rock salt, some kind of fancy low-sodium soya sauce type stuff, and of course the juicer - my oversized, ridiculously heavy, everyone-is-staring-at-me traveling companion. Last night before bed I assembled the juicer and laid out the cutting board and knife, with the intention of beginning my brand new juicing regime this morning.

It did not go exactly as planned.

The machine fulfilled its role without any difficulty, so none of the blame for what happened afterward can fall in that direction. After I finished juicing, I sat and stared at what I had created; a full glass of carrot and cucumber juice. It looked revolting.

First of all, it tasted like dirt. It was a little sweet, but the smell and taste were very earthy indeed. I powered on, rewarding myself after every sip of dirt juice with a little bite of whole wheat cracker. Then I began to notice a slight tingling in my throat. But someone this determined cannot give up just because of a little tingling (okay, and maybe just a little hint of tightness in the throat as well) right?

I sipped the vile juice while I carried on with my morning. I rubbed absently at my eyes as I tidied up the vegetable scraps. I rubbed my eyes with one hand as I packed my backpack with the other. I was at it again as I walked into the bathroom and came to an abrupt stop at the sight of myself in the mirror.

The hives were not such a shock. I had frequent allergic reactions to the blood transfusions after treatment; I am a pro with hives. It was the eyeball thing that really threw me off. It wasn't just itchy, it looked as though it were mutating into some kind of transparent jelly.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

My boss is new to the school this year, and met me only a couple weeks before I was diagnosed in August, so I've been sick for our entire acquaintance. She's been very kind and patient with me. I did not want to make this phone call. "So, I ate some cucumber for breakfast and now I'm covered in hives and my eye looks like it's trying to melt out of my head. I won't be making it into work just yet."

She wanted me to do the hospital thing, but I'm not so keen on hospitals these days. (Can't fancy why.) So, I called the WE DELIVER ANYWHERE, 24 HOURS! pharmacy listed in the phone book. They don't deliver to my neighbourhood until 7:30am.

Eventually, the pharmacy across the street from my apartment opened, and I was given some Hidroxicina Chlorihidrato, which I'm hoping is some kind of anti-histamine. The nice pharmacist lady said it might make me tired and she wasn't kidding. I'm just about ready to take a nap here on the keyboard...

But no. I think I'll just get my quinoa pilaf leftovers out of the fridge and catch a taxi to work. My eyes are red, but as I've been writing they have resumed a decidedly more eyeball-like texture, and the hives are shrinking. I guess I'll have to find a new vegetable to try to like, as it would appear that the cucumber is not going to cooperate.