Be proud

I am still sick--beginning to think I have bronchitis. At 4am this morning I gave in and self prescribed 20 mg of prednisone to bring down the swelling in my throat and hopefully the irritation in my bronchial tubes. At night I cough so much that I can’t sleep. It is a serious, serious drag. Robatussin is bullshit. I know I’m not a doctor, but I certainly spend a lot of time googling things and I am a WFR…

My oncologist saw me last Friday when I was at my sickest and pronounced me, “fabulous! Go upstairs and take your chemo!”

This is the problem with an oncologist being your primary care physician. When you ask about birth control he assures you that probably can’t get pregnant and even if you did, your current chemo regimen would kill any fetus. Then he gets confused, “wait, I have hundreds of patients, are you one that wants to have babies?” When you have a horrible cold and everyone in the civilian world looks at you like you have the plague, the cancer center folks tell you look beautiful and healthy. If only I could live my entire life just being compared to aged cancer patients…

It’s Gay Pride this weekend! Yeah! We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it! I think of myself as a pretty queer straight person and even if you get offended by that and insist that I use the label “Ally” that’s fine. There are a still a freaking ton of parties and cool things to do! Christina and I went to Equalityoga practice this morning and did sun salutations with a few hundred folks. I focused my practice on what I’ve been focusing on for the last few months: radical self acceptance. I think this fit in neatly with theme of trying to get equal rights for everyone because if we all focus on accepting ourselves just the way we are, we would probably start to accept other people the way they are too. Christina meditated on love.

Then I began the long and what I am sure will be tedious search for a maid of honor dress for Sarah’s wedding. I only found one acceptable item on my search this afternoon. Sadly I found it in the Designer section. That Tory Burch—she makes a gorgeous sun dress, but $395 is just too much for me to spend right now… on a dress.

The last month has been unbelievably stressful and intense. I am not sorry to say goodbye June 2009. And now it is practically over. I’m trying to stay focused on what I have and what is good in my life and trying not to dwell on the things that are not just the way I want them. I am mostly successful at this.

Feel the fury

What’s the good word?

It’s been a long 10 days since the Un Hick My Heart Party. Such a large surge of love, celebration, and fun is bound to be followed by a lull. The quiet has been filled with a lot of questions: where do I belong, what do I want, what am I doing, what’s the point, etc. It’s your typical mid twenties whiny bullshit, no worries.

A highlight from the last week would definitely be attending a corporate party with Julian. His company finally got FDA approval for their product and so they celebrated with a cush party at the EMP: cocktail attire, free food, drinks, and FREE CAB VOUCHERS. Is that not the classiest fucking thing you’ve heard of? To make things better, they hired a band that played exclusively 70s/disco/rock covers. Their name (I shit you not) was HIT EXPLOSION. It was awesome.

This was a working weekend which means today was the beginning of my “weekend.” Work feels overwhelming right now—like I’m on the cusp of not doing my job. But I always felt like that when I was going at full tilt. Anyway, I don’t know how to take time off, sleep, clean my room, go to yoga AND do all my work.

What else? I dropped some serious cash at the Nordstrom Half Yearly Sale. I was out of control with the sweaters. One is this BCBG cowl neck that is that kind of thing I would call fabulous and feel fabulous in, but most men would ask, “why do women wear ugly shit like that?” I don’t care. Fabulous.

Right now I’m listening to Ben Folds and drafting letters of resignation that I will not submit. One of my co-workers commissioned a flow chart that is just a list of who everyone’s boss is and then sent it to our entire organization. It’s so fucking stupid. And self-aggrandizing. And inaccurate! The pretense was that this will help everyone know what everyone else does. But all it does is list titles (a big deal at this org, ) supervisors (it’s really important to emphasize the many layers of middle management between people who do work and our CEO), and help you visualize who is at the Top and who is at the Bottom. I also drafted some really severe emails to my co-worker that copied our supervisors, but have decided to wait 24 hours before taking action. I don’t know if I can let this go this week?

I am angry. Someone is going to feel my rage. It might be my co-worker, it might be an unwitting friend, it might be one of my roommates, it might just be a nightly news anchor, it might be another driver, it might the next waiter who is rude to me, it might be the next student who flakes out on something they said they would do. I’m a little scared. I don’t want to rage, but I can feel it burbling.

There's no such thing

As too many pairs of David Kahn jeans. Especially if you buy them on eBay. I know, I said I would never buys jeans on eBay again, but the third time must be a charm because these are absolutely perfect. I found my favorite pair of jeans that I bought about 18 months ago (and since have been discontinued) but two sizes smaller. They fit beautifully.

Oh right. I went to the oncologist today. Dr. K is back! I forgot to ask him about his vacation... I was too busy bragging about the 4 mile run. Anyway, my WBC is up to 8.2, my crit is 37 (up from 25), and platelets 223. That's pretty damn good. Pretty damn normal. Normal enough to start chemo. I was like "whoa there, I don't want to take Cytoxan because I don't want lymphoma and I possibly DO want babies." And Dr. K was like, "Jessie, I wrote a paper about how Cytoxan in such small doses as I'm giving you has no effect on whether you get cancer again and EVERY drug I give you has the possibility of rendering you infertile, but you're young and we'll just see..." And I was like, "meh, good enough, shoot me up."

Cytoxan in. Ara C shot #1 (of 8) done. This was the last big one. There are lots and lots of small drugs to come, but the Cytoxan is the last drug that will send my counts down and make me feel really bad. Ara-C just makes me not hungry which is awesome since I found out by reading my chart that my ideal weight is FORTY FIVE POUNDS less then I weigh right now as 5'8" and a size 10 (with huge breasts, I might add). Will someone redo the BMI already? I think we all realize that it's totally fucked up to call me obese.

The Cytoxan should take full effect sometime early next week so I'm planning on gettin down and partying at Brandon's b-day tomorrow. And perhaps visitors from the South will arriving on my doorstep? Have I ever mentioned what BAMF friends I have? I have BAMF friends.

It's so good to keep doing the "lasts." A couple weeks ago I could tell my nurses, "this is my last Adriomyacin." Today I was able to say to everyone "this is the last Bad Drug I have to take." It was almost scary. On one hand I totally hate chemo and I hate what it's done to my life, but who will I be and what will I do when I have to merge back into the semblance of a normal life? I mean, luckily I have monthly chemo for years, but when they pull the Hick, when the big stuff is over, when my social life doesn't revolve around the nursing staff at the Swedish Cancer Center... My therapist was like, "the transition back can be rough." And I was like, "hah!" But today I had my first taste of panic. I've gotten really good at being a cancer patient. I'm like the best cancer patient at Swedish. Everyone loves me. I do everything I'm supposed to... anyway, I'm good at normal life too, I just saw the light at the end of the tunnel today and it was really bright.

Gosh darn it

Would you believe that there’s a “Blogging for Blood Cancer” week and that this is it? Well, believe it, baby! Since I love blogging and in particular, blogging about blood cancer, I thought I would try to blog every day this week!

And how appropriate too. Because instead of feeling all healthy-like I am feeling pretty cancer-y today. My chemo from Thursday night is starting to take effect: my mouth hurts, I’m tired, my body is SORE from yesterday’s yoga class… Oh, cell death!

But before everything started to suck, I had a nice weekend. On Saturday I went to a community garden work project (yay community! yay gardens!) where there were goats! I love goats! And then my mom and I went to Nordstrom and bought new clothes. When I got home I forced myself to purge my t shirt drawer down to the scant few items I actually wear. Yesterday I went to yoga, had lunch at Geraldine’s (cornbeef sandwich, fries, diet coke, coffee) and then writhed in pain all afternoon because hello! my GI track is dying too! Buy I rallied for dinner at the Lemongrass with the Christinas and my mom. God, I love food. However, I think it’s back to wheat thins and bananas for the next few weeks while I wait for my stomach lining to come back…

Everything looks better in the morning

Shout out to Mike H, my radiologist friend, for some sound advice regarding talking to Dr. K and Dr. M (my radiologist) tomorrow. My mom is also on her way up to go to my appointments with me.

I spent the day recruiting at public high school. Always and interesting experience. On my lunch break I went to Nordstrom and dropped cash on new jeans. Yes, it made me feel better. No, Nordstrom does not have any cute shoes right now. They do have lots and lots of really hideous high healed/shoe laced shoes. Gross. And no, I did not buy the Hobo wallet I have wanted for the last 3 years even though they had it in chartreuse patent leather. I do have some self control...

Great News: my employer approved an extra 4 weeks of donated vacation time today. Barring any more 6MP-like fiascoes this should see me through to 2009. I might have hair by 2009!

Speaking of my hair, about 1 in every hairs is bravely trying to grow--they are about a centimeter and so sparse that you can't see them unless you get really close to me. They're so cute!

Boring post

I haven't been inspired to update lately. I think it's that it's been REALLY cold for April and everyone is really depressed about that. There has been pervasive grumpiness amongst all friend groups. Saturday the 11th it was 75 degrees. Yesterday it was 40 and we had rain/snow/hail all day. Oh, and it was Earth Day so I was outside moving mulch.

The good news is that I'm starting to feel stronger. I've been trying hard to walk places, to go up and down the stairs as much as possible, etc. Yesterday I spend all day walking around and doing mild manual labor. I am SORE today, but happy.

Q-Rachel wants to go shopping today. The apocalypse must be right around the corner.

Tax Day

My mom still does my taxes. I know. I get a huge refund because I only made 12K this year, but I paid taxes in my actual income tax bracket which is significantly higher than 12K/year. That's pretty sweet. With GWB's little kicker I'm staring down some serious cash. What to do with it? Of course I want to go out and SPEND it on clothes, but that's what They want me to do. And I don't want to do what They want me to do.

I went back to Dr. K after my "week off" and guess what? I get another 10 days off! My platelets are still too low to work with, but they are coming up. I only need like 20, 000 more or something. I also was relieved to hear I'm still slightly anemic. While I've been pushing myself really hard to put on some of the muscle I've lost, it's hard to notice that anything has happened in the last week except that I've gained 5 lbs of... what? Fat, I'm pretty sure. Whatever. If I'm anemic, there's a chance that part of why it's so frickin' hard to walk up the stairs is because I don't have enough oxygen in my blood.

I meet with the radiologist on Monday and plan on starting radiation on the 28th. I start chemo again (spinal taps and oral drugs) late next week. I have to 6MP again which makes me nervous, but I'm taking 90% less, so it shouldn't shut things down this time around. Are you tired of hearing me talk about cancer? I just have one more thing to share. There's a doctor/physical therapist who is part of the oncology group that does PT/work out regimens for cancer patients and I am going to go see him next week. Hopefully he'll help me get my active-on.

Well, the only other thing of note is that Oasis was on the radio this morning and I decided to re-devote myself to What's the Story, Morning Glory?

Oh, and if you're getting married in September and you want me to come, tell me now because I have 3 freakin weddings to go to already!