Y’all know I’m not usually at a loss for words, in fact, if I can’t find the right words, I just keep talking anyway. And I’ve never been shy about sharing everything I’ve been through with my cancer for the last 18 years. Once, early on, I asked my then boss if I was sharing (ok, complaining) too much. She smiled and told me that when she is suffering, everyone around her is going to suffer with her (you really had to hear her say it in her down east North Carolina accent). And I've usually found it easy to share my misery, but for the first time this last week I had no words to express how I felt, even to myself.
I know everyone is suffering with this new reality of Covid living. We are all stuck indoors, especially those of us who are at high risk, which gets a little tedious. Grocery shopping takes a lot of planning to know what to order when you won’t be picking it up for a day or two. Doctors visits are fraught with dangers when your destination is a clinic in the hospital that is actively treating Covid patients. Everyone avoids contact with everyone else, suffering hug withdrawals, unless you are lucky enough to be able to quarantine with your spouse. Of course, your spouse might not feel so lucky if you tend to be the cranky type. I’m pretty sure real estate agents are reconsidering the marketability of this open floor plan craze.
I think Netflix and Amazon Prime are the big winners in all of this. That brings me to the overuse of the Amazon app and the 'surprise packages’ it seems I ordered that keep showing up at our front door!
Where was I, oh yes, what I was trying to find words for. Some things can be a complete punch to the gut, even when you’ve half expected it for years. At my last oncology visit a couple of weeks ago, I found out that the cancer has spread to my liver. That’s not a good thing. So it's now in my bones, a few nodes in my lungs, a lymph node grown round like a golf ball, and now my liver. The hope is that my cancer continues to be pokey and in three months, when I have my next scans, it will not have grown any or maybe even shrunk some.
To aid that hope my oncologist switched me from the estrogen I’ve been on for a couple of years back to the tamoxifen (an anti-estrogen) I was on 18 years ago. Yep, slammed right back into menopause
Dr. Carey initially wanted me to go on a chemo pill that would more aggressively go after the cancer. But it also comes with all the side effects of regular chemo. While we were all discussing the different options, she asked me what I was thinking. Before I had a chance to find a better way to say it, I blurted out “Well, I could take the chemo, be sick for the next few months, and then get Covid and die, and by then I'd have given it to Doug. That would really suck.” She had to admit that with the chemo pill my chance of exposure is increased as I’d need to go to the hospital for blood tests every three weeks. So we all agreed on the less aggressive tamoxifen and only a once a month hospital visit. So a little less misery, at least physically, for a few months.
In other news, our cactus turned 44 years old. It has only produced single blooms three times, a few years apart, and only in the last ten years. Well, it has been totally showing off with a trio of blossoms a couple of weeks ago and about four more a week later. If the squirrels don't take them, the blossoms should turn into an edible fruit called a Peruvian Apple!
Lots of surprises in August
