2. Those hummingbird babies are going to hatch today! When Phoebe leaves the nest to get a bite to eat, you can see there are holes in the eggs. You can’t tell from the images, but the nest (which is built in a rose bush) is about the size of a golf ball, and the eggs are the size of Tic- Tacs. If you click on the link, you can peek in their nest. (There are, at this moment, 4,640 people peeking in her nest.)

(Edited to add: The original hummingbird link either got overloaded or hijacked, so I’ve changed the link to one provided by the owners.)

Related posts:

1. Missed appointments and a hummingbird obsession
2. Duncan, Phoebe and the Barn Owls
3. Watch Jason change his life

It’s getting to the point where I’m wondering if I’m subconsciously doing it on purpose (is that a contradiction in terms?). I was scheduled to see the surgeon on February 4, but I had to reschedule to March 8, because I was in that 8-day career planning thing. But then on March 8, I got the time wrong in my head, even though it was right on the calendar.

As for the oncologist, I can’t even remember why I missed it last time. But this time it was because I got on the 86 bus going in the wrong direction, and by the time I figured it out I was in Nepean and irredeemably late. I ended up at GC’s house, eating homemade soup and playing with the lovebirds, instead of at the cancer centre having my breasts thoroughly groped.

I haven’t been entirely remiss. I’ve done the pre-appointment mammograms and blood tests. I just can’t seem to show up for the actual appointments. I’m really starting to wonder about myself, especially since I successfully made it to approximately 118 appointments last year without missing a single one.

Here’s something interesting: a live web cam of a hummingbird nest. Phoebe the hummingbird is usually in it, keeping her eggs safe and warm. They’re scheduled to hatch between March 14th and 16th. I’m mesmorized.

Related posts:

1. 2009: The Readers Digest Condensed Version
2. Life goes on
3. Tick tock

Not me. I’ve been feeling unusually stressed out and a little depressed the past few weeks.

A bunch of things are weighing me down. Even the fact that I’m feeling stressed out and depressed is stressing me out and depressing me. It’s not compatible with how I see myself. I’m the one who’s supposed to ride the waves, roll with the punches, get back on the horse. I’m supposed to be the eternal optimist. Nothing’s supposed to get me down.

So I went to see a counselor. She told me that sometimes people summon up reserves of strength to sail through a crisis (like cancer, for example), but once the crisis is over, the feelings catch up with them. And that’s when they start showing signs of stress or depression. Maybe that’s what’s going on with me.

Unemployment is kind of stressful too. Career-changing, job-hunting, financial worries – it all adds up.

All I know is I feel ten years older than I felt a year ago. And I physically feel something unpleasant in my body. It’s in my stomach and chest and face and shoulders. It builds up until I sigh deeply, which relieves it temporarily, and then it starts building up again.

I tried googling stress. But it freaked me out to read about what all that extra cortisol is doing to my body. Yikes.

What else is new?

• I heard from my ex-husband a couple of days ago, for the first time in 10 years. He sent me an email saying he’d found my blog and has been reading it. That gave me a moment’s pause. I mean, I write this stuff and I put it out there for anybody and everybody to read, but every now and then I’m startled to find out that a particular somebody is reading it. Like my ex-husband. I felt the same way when my mother started reading it, and when my son did, and when my boss asked me if I was Zoom.

• Last night we bought some Hoegaarden beers and drank a toast to Dave1949’s health. He just finished his cancer treatments and is looking forward to starting to feel better soon.

• GC and I went to the Ottawa Calligraphy Society’s open house the other night and some scribes made us these lovely complimentary name plates.

Related posts:

1. Blah blah blog
2. The day I got cancer
3. Could it be a manufactured economic crisis?

Anyway. They’re suggesting I have my uterus and ovaries removed. The uterus because of the fibroid, and the ovaries because when you have breast cancer, it’s not such a good idea to have ovaries and no uterus. (That’s because the ongoing hormone treatment for breast cancer changes once you go through menopause, and if you have ovaries but no uterus, they’ll have no way of knowing when you’ve gone through menopause.)

After doing some research, I’m inclined to think I’m not going to do it. I’m ready to let my uterus go, but not my ovaries. Because of the breast cancer, I wouldn’t be a candidate for hormone replacement therapy, so I think having my ovaries removed would mean an instant end to hormones. I like hormones. Among other things, they protect against heart disease, osteoporosis and wrinkles.

Anyway. Did you hear about the guy who got busted for possessing Simpson’s porn? He’s a registered sex offender now, because Australia considers underage cartoon characters being depicted in sexual situations to be child pornography. Australia has also banned small-breasted women of any age from appearing in adult films, presumably on the grounds that it might arouse pedophiles. The world just keeps getting weirder.

Related posts:

1. The medical oncologist sums things up
2. A call from the doctor

My blog was resurrected after a near death experience with an ill-fated WordPress upgrade. I got approached by a stranger and asked if I was Duncan’s owner. I wrote three real letters, with paper and ink and stamps and everything. I sold a piece of art to a mysterious dark-haired stranger. Everybody at work got layoff notices, but we were told to keep it secret because they might be revoked.

February:

The bus strike continued through the coldest of the cold snaps. I hurt my back. GC and I started getting up before dawn each morning to follow the murder of crows.

March:

Barbie turned fifty. I lost the Tofu Challenge. We played board games in public. A lump was found in my breast. My layoff notice was not revoked and my 18-year job came to an end. I made a sock monkey.

April:

I played a lot of Farm Town on Facebook. I became a slightly disgruntled former employee. A single sneeze changed my life. I reflected upon my mercifully short marriage and other romantic bumblings. GC and I got a community garden plot.

May:

The lump in my breast was diagnosed as cancer. It changed everything. It took me awhile to wrap my head around it. People were really kind to me. Debbie and Bonnie and Grace came over and created a garden of hope for me. GC and I planted our vegetable garden. GC was my rock.

June:

I continued to wait to find out if I was going to die. There was good news and bad news. GC and I went to the Naked Bike Ride. I did my last volunteer shift at the Shepherds of Good Hope. My severe back pain got a diagnosis. The cancer surgery got postponed because of it. Then I had the surgery and was very, very happy.

July:

I got tired of waiting. I contemplated my own mortality. I revealed the meaning of life. GC and I celebrated our first anniversary. I started using a wheelchair. I got the cancer pathology report. We saw Astronaut Love Triangle.

August:

I had another operation to remove the rest of the cancer. We took up geocaching. We went to the Folk Festival. I was given a gift I love.

September:

I found out I wouldn’t need chemotherapy. I had spine surgery. I started walking again. My son grew up. My back incision got infected and I was told to lie down for six weeks.

October:

I had radiation treatments every day. We celebrated my birthday at a gorgeous cottage lent to us by kind friends. My great-niece, Chelsea, was born.

November:

I wrote a novel! GC and I adopted two lovebirds – Billie and Lester – from the Humane Society. I bought another new toaster.

December:

I bought a little art. I did a lot of contract work. I met and fell in love with my great niece. I had another MRI, to find out why I was still in pain. I whined. I won some luxury yarn! I got some wonderful Christmas gifts, including a Kindle. I knit and tinked. I dealt with some long overdue family stuff. The year flashed before my eyes. On New Year’s Eve I purchased Astronaut Love Triangle’s first piece of visual art, while celebrating beer’s 8,009th birthday.

Postscript:

Also, while I didn’t blog about it yet, for fear of jinxing it, I’m very happy to report that over the past two weeks I’ve noticed a dramatic improvement in my pain and my ability to walk. I went cross-country skiing yesterday and it felt good. I’ve stopped all the painkillers, and, for the past week, I’ve only been taking one time-release anti-inflammatory a day instead of two. So maybe I did get my wish, which was to wrap up the cancer and the spine problems in 2009!

Happy New Year everybody! Thank you for reading, for commenting, and for being part of my life throughout 2009. As GC said, “For such a bad year, it’s been a pretty good year.”

I have even higher hopes for 2010.

Related posts:

1. The Year in Review: 2008
2. News from the back front, and random notes
3. Not recovering yet

In 2009 I had two mammograms, three breast ultrasounds, a pelvic ultrasound, an abdominal ultrasound, a bone scan, two biopsies, six MRIs, one radiation set-up, 18 radiation treatments, three pre-ops, three operations, three post-ops, 10 dressing changes at the hospital, 19 visits from the home care nurse, 10 physiotherapy appointments, a chest x-ray, 10 pain-management appointments, two appointments with the medical oncologist, three appointments with the radiation oncologist, four appointments with the breast surgeon and five appointments with the neurosurgeon.

Approximately 117 people saw my naked breasts, and about three-quarters of those people touched them.

I am really looking forward to 2010!

Related posts:

1. I can’t think of a title for this post
2. The Year in Review: 2009
3. Back on the merry-go-round

Barkley

Related posts:

1. Support Julia!
2. More news. And a harbinger.
3. Treats at the end of treatment

I’ve got a new lump in my right breast. It’s very small, it might not be cancer, it might just be scar tissue, but it’s in a completely different area of my breast than the cancer and surgery was. It’s where the MRI last Spring found an “area of suspicious enhancement.” I never did find out exactly what an area of suspicious enhancement was, exactly, but after another ultrasound last Spring I was told that it was probably a false positive on the part of the MRI. Now, six months later, there’s a lump there. The surgeon wants to wait and see. She’ll MRI it again in six months and see if it’s changed.

I feel like I just got off the cancer merry-go-round, and I don’t want to jump back on again just yet – especially if there’s nothing I can do about it. I had to get used to having cancer in the first place, and then I had to get used to not having cancer, and now I have to get used to not knowing if I have cancer. And doing nothing. Just waiting.

It’s not that I’m worried. I’m not. One of the benefits of having had cancer is that it stripped the word ‘cancer’ of its power to terrify me. I’m not scared of it anymore. Or maybe I’m just not scared of breast cancer. Or my breast cancer. I don’t know. But I’m not worried or scared.

It’s just that I’m weary. I moved through this past six months on the strength of positive thinking and tons of support from other people. I borrowed positive momentum from everybody I know, including all of you. But a week ago today, when I finished my last radiation treatment, I finally exhaled. I let it all go, all that momentum, because I thought I didn’t need it anymore…I’d made it to the finish line and now I could just let go. I never imagined I’d need to muster it all back up less than a week later. I’m trying, but so far I’m mostly just feeling kind of lackluster and drained.

In the good news department, my back incision has finally healed. The home care nurse pronounced it sealed yesterday, and for the first time since mid-September, I’m dressing-free. (By the way, in case you think I haven’t had a shower for two months, I have to set the record straight. Shortly after Home Care started coming in, they switched to waterproof dressings just so I could shower.)

In other news I’m going to try to get my flu shot today. It should be good for a blog post if nothing else.

And finally, my nanowrimo novel is up to 17,378 words. The last couple thousand words have been kind of smutty, which surprised me even more than the boyfriend who hanged himself in the closet on Page 1.

Related posts:

1. A preliminary plan unfolds
2. I can’t think of a title for this post
3. Rethinking the Pink Ribbon

At any rate, I was very glad I summoned up the energy to socialize, because I had a lovely time, impending illness notwithstanding.

It’s not the swine flu. My temperature was well below normal. I had a whole litany of complaints, ranging from mundane stuff like headache to more exotic things like all the ligaments and nerves and tendons in my legs felt like they were too short. My breast was sore because the radiation continues to cook it for two weeks after treatment. Also, I’m in the process of weaning myself off my addictive painkillers, so various pains are starting to break through the painkiller barrier. And I think I’m coming down with perimenopause, and a touch of hypochondria too.

On top of everything else, I just started taking tamoxifen yesterday, and will be taking it every day until 2014. It’s the final part of my breast cancer treatment plan. It will likely produce symptoms that mimic perimenopause, so I expect to be completely confused in that department for the next five years. I won’t know what’s real perimenopause and what’s fake perimenopause. And what happens if menopause occurs during the next five years, as I sincerely hope it will? Will I have real menopause and fake perimenopause simultaneously?

You know what else? I hate my pharmacy. Earlier this year I switched from the world’s best pharmacy (Shoppers Drug Mart at Bank & Laurier) to the world’s worst pharmacy (Shoppers Drug Mart at Westgate). In the past I wouldn’t have complained because I hardly ever had to go to the pharmacy. But now? I average about one prescription a week, which generally means two visits and a phone call.

Here are some of the things I hate about my new pharmacy:

1. They hire staff with insufficient command of the English language. (I don’t expect English to be their first language, but a rudimentary command of English would be good too.)

2. They’re rude. They rush me away, refusing to answer my questions, saying “You go now. Okay? You go.”

3. They’re cold and unfriendly. They seem to resent customers.

4. They always leave me standing at the counter for several minutes before serving me. There can be six of them working back there, no other customers in sight, and they take turns glancing up at me and then ignoring me, waiting for someone else to serve me. My last pharmacy sometimes got busy and kept me waiting too, but it was always because they were busy with people. These guys do it because they’re busy with stuff.

5. They usually can’t find my prescription. They look through a big bin of prescriptions, declare it missing, check computers, ask one another, glare at me like it’s my fault, make me re-spell my name, and finally recheck the bin, where it was all along.

Yesterday I picked up my first Tamoxifen prescription, and was served by an incompetent new pharmacy assistant who couldn’t speak English and who had to ask her supervisor for direction on every single little thing.

The woman in front of me accidentally dropped her coffee and handed the pharmacy assistant her empty cup. She had to ask her supervisor where the garbage was. But she didn’t actually ask. She took the cup to her supervisor, held it up, and looked helpless. Her supervisor showed her the garbage pail.

Then it was my turn. I mentioned to her that there was a puddle of coffee on the floor, right in front of the wicket. She came out and looked and went to tell her supervisor.

“Split,” she said. “Split.”

Her supervisor didn’t understand. She fished the coffee cup out of the garbage, held it up, said “split” again, and pointed to where I was standing. The supervisor came out, looked, got some paper towels and cleaned it up.

Then I told the pharmacy assistant that I was here to pick up my prescription, and I spelled my name. She wrote it down, looked it up, and eventually found my prescription.

“You have before?” she asked. I shook my head no and she pointed at the pharmacist, indicating that I needed to speak to him.

I stood at the consult wicket and a few minutes later he came over and told me about my prescription and possible side effects.

“It’s like when a woman gets a period.” he said, “Things like bloating and cramps. Hot flashes. Bleeding. Moods. You know like your cycle, you get symptoms but then you get used to it?”

He paused. I waited.

“It’s hard for a guy to explain this,” he said, looking flustered and apologetic.

I felt sorry for him, and decided to let him off the hook. After all, I’ve got books with whole chapters about Tamoxifen. I’ve got the Internet. I don’t really need a flustered pharmacist to tell me the side effects.

Even though it wasn’t a very helpful conversation, it was the most human exchange I’ve ever had at that pharmacy so far, and left me feeling slightly better about the place.

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2. I fell down the stairs and I don’t hate winter anymore

Zoom, moments before the last treatment

I know I said a couple of months ago that the oncologist told me I could start referring to my cancer in the past tense, since radiation is aimed not at treating cancer but at preventing a recurrence. So officially I’ve been ‘over’ cancer for awhile. But it’s hard to feel like you don’t have cancer when you’re having daily cancer treatments. You know what I mean?

Now I feel it. I feel like I can begin to put cancer in the past. And I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to say that.

Radiation machine #18, and the little table I lay on while being radiated

“I’m going to scrub all the green magic marker off my breast,” I said. The technicians have been calling out numbers (22.2, 88, 8.5, and 8.7) and scribbling on my breast for a month now, and asking me not to wash it off. (By the way, if you ever have to have these treatments, wear a cheap disposable bra for the whole month, since it’s going to end up permanently stained a splotchy green.)

“Oh no,” she said, “Your breast tissue is still very tender, and you mustn’t scrub it. Let it wear off naturally.”

The view from the table: Ceiling tiles painted by one of the radiation technologists

After the final treatment, GC whisked me off to Second Cup to celebrate with a cranberry-apple muffin, and then to Chances R for the breakfast special. We reminisced about the whole thing (cancer – not breakfast).

Tomorrow – this is so exciting – I’m celebrating the end of cancer treatments with a free facial at Oresta’s Organic Skincare Confectionery! Remember my one and only facial in November 2008? That was at Oresta’s. A couple of days ago I read on Laurie Kingston’s blog that Oresta’s is offering complimentary facials to women with breast cancer.

Oresta wanted to do something for women with breast cancer, while avoiding the whole pinkwashing thing. Ultimately she decided to offer free facials to women with breast cancer. And I think it’s lovely. There’s plenty of unpleasantness associated with cancer, so when a company offers something pleasurable directly to affected women, it’s wonderful, and very much appreciated.

I’m going to keep celebrating for a few more days too. Tonight, after my MRI, I’m celebrating Octopus Book’s 40th birthday at the Carleton Tavern and Raw Sugar’s first birthday at Raw Sugar. Both are open to the public and free if you’re looking for something fun to do.

Related posts:

1. Rethinking the Pink Ribbon
2. 2009: The Readers Digest Condensed Version
3. Back on the merry-go-round