numbers

hey!  one more chemo round done.  three more to go.  at five treatments, i suppose that means i have officially turned the corner toward the chemo finish line (which is still a ways off. assuming things go as planned i will be done with chemo toward the end of october).  i'm on a new med for these last four rounds.  i guess, following the law of diminishing returns, chemo meds (or at least the ones i'm getting) begin to lose their potency on the tumor after about six rounds (though the crummy side-effects only increase), so rather than keep me on the meds i was on for the first four rounds, they give me a new start essentially, with a new med, though the cumulative effect (side-effect-wise) of chemo doesn't go away with a new med, so i could very well continue to be more and more worn out with each round.  however, this med isn't supposed to produce much in the way of nausea, which was one of the least pleasant (though rather mild given the good anti-nausea meds they have these days) side-effect from the last drugs.  this new med however, will give me lots of good joint and bone and muscle pain, though the silver lining in that is that if i make the good choice, i'll be able to attribute that feeling to the chemo and keep my paranoia in check that the cancer's metastasized to my bones.  there is something of a safety-net feeling while you're on treatment.  i start to get a little nervous toward the end of my three-week period that the cancer's revving back up again.  as much as i hate the feeling chemo gives me, as much as it's not good for me in some unknown number of long-term ways, it's a relief to know it's in there and presumably killing some huge number of cancer cells.   

and the news from my oncology appointment yesterday was encouraging.  when the doctor felt the tumor (as accurate as that might be) he said he thought it was at about 3 cm (by 2 cm by ??cm).  this down from it's highest point at 11 cm (based on the mri, which may have overestimated) or the first oncologist's measurements of 8 cm.  and there we can already see the diminishing returns, given that after two rounds it had decreased by about half.  so thank you, thank you epirubicin and cyclophosphamide for doing your job, and may you go on your way helping others and i will go on my way and we will not look back and i'll visit with taxotere for awhile and i will take my bone marrow booster and my flucanozole and my steroids to try to stave off the count drop and the swelling and the yeast infections it has no choice but to want to give me.  and i will be happy doing this.  i'm happy, because yesterday the doctor used the word 'marvelous' to describe how well he thought the tumor was responding to treatment, and he gave me his own, tailored-to-my-case, in his own opinion, off the top of his head, no data included, five-year survival statistic of in the 70's to 80's percent, which sounded quite alright to me.  he didn't throw it out unprompted mind you. he didn't say mine was the most amazing case he'd ever seen and that he should retire right then and there on the highest of high points in his career (he is only in his 40's, but how cool would that have been?!).  no, no-- after i made it clear to him with my begging to give me a number, any number, higher than zero please, and, if at all possible, something over fifty, he gave a long talk about how the numbers don't really reflect a real person, how they're already outdated, how they don't fit my specific and somewhat unique (in that I'm young, in that I have (so far) had a good response to the chemo, and in the fact that I'm getting chemo before, rather than after surgery) circumstances, and how the numbers only say whether a person lived or died at the five year mark and not whether they died of cancer or old age or from being hit by the phantom bus.  he did that tiptoeing around until i convinced him that i really did still want a number to stick into my head.  that it would make a difference in my outlook-- that to know i have a fighting chance and that not all stage 3's eventually, whether it's tomorrow or 20 years down the road, turn into stage 4's, to know that I might never have to go through chemotherapy again or have somebody tell me I have cancer, again... just to know there's a chance that this really could be one year out of my life and never again and that i might, just might live to be 91... 

after that, he threw out the numbers, and i took them.  

and i need to remember that i didn't just walk out into the street one day (not yet at least) and get hit by that phantom bus.  i walked into a doctor's office in a country with excellent health care and was told i would get the most up-to-date treatment for a curable cancer.  i absolutely cannot complain about any of it.  

4 rounds and a sound

it's been so long since i've posted you probably thought i succumbed to the cancer.  no, no!  still here.  still doing well, if it weren't for the blessing in disguise which is chemo.  i had my fourth round today.  my fourth of eight.  and eight, i have decided, is all i'm ever going to need.  this requires vigilance on my part and probably some powers i'm humanly incapable of possessing.  so a decision without a lot of teeth in the enforcement department, but as they say, where there's a will, there's a way, so i might as well have the will to get this cancer over and done with and out of my body and then never the twain shall meet again.  there, i've said it. that's the decision and i'm not even going to think about how long never again seems from a 33 year old's perspective.

so, for posterity-- round three: round three was a bit tougher on me than the first two.  i didn't get off the couch (much) for about four days.  then i was up but worn out for the next two and then took a gigantic nap the next day-- friday.  so that was week one.  in week two, beginning on saturday, i developed crummy canker sores on my lips which lasted for a good eight days and which had me eating two-thirds of my meals from a straw (not the same straw all eight days mind you).  fortunately, my weight held steady, but i'm also thinking i consumed my yearly allotment of lidocaine in those eight days too, so maybe that's why.  and yet, when the nurse said they might have to adjust my dose downward to try to prevent it from happening again, i did put up a bit of a protest.  whatever the maximum dose is, i want it.  even if it means more canker sores, mores straws, more lidocaine, i'll put up with it if it ultimately means my decision about never again is going to mean something.  but well, i get to (hopefully) live without the canker sores, because the doctor ultimately did decide to lower my dose a bit (25%).  this is my last round with these meds so in the end i did get most of it and next time i get a new med with hopefully the maximum dose for all four rounds.  also apparently there is no evidence to suggest that tailoring the dose to meet an individual's need, and not just to their body mass (which is how the dosing is figured initially), affects the ultimate outcome.  so, it's all okay.

well... enough with cancer.  here are some pictures of life that goes on...

i'm sure i don't need to tell you that these are not in chronological order, especially as we were here, at tivoli, yesterday...

peas and carrots

i think i'll write a little bit about my tumor.  

it's to the point now (size-wise) where i realized this morning just how difficult (if not impossible) it would have been for me to notice it before it jumped in size.  not impossible in the sense that i don't feel anything there.  but now i know what i'm looking for.  kind of.  see, i never had the hard, circular lump every girl is trained to look out for.  mine was definitely more of a "mass"-- and now that it's a much smaller, less defined mass, i know that at this point in its growth (when might that have been?  february? march?), i would have had to do a lot of investigative work to ever realize anything was wrong (seriously... beyond comparing one side to the other, multiple times, with lots of puzzled looks and shrugs, i would have had to go to the library and done extensive research, and even then it wouldn't have been clear, someone's description on a piece of paper in a book).  even if i had noticed that "it" was an "it", i don't think i would have called the doctor because all one ever hears about is pea-sized lumps.  

what is my point?  i don't necessarily have one.  i just felt like a not complete failure this morning upon realizing this.  but maybe i'm wondering what the solution is to 'problems' like mine.  routine, early mammograms i suppose, but then those pose their own problems (again, i'll refer you to this article) which, on a society-wide scale, probably outweigh the benefits of catching the few people like me.  i understand that and i don't even mind falling through the cracks in support of less overuse of fancy diagnostic tests for routine purposes.  maybe because i know i would have politely declined a mammogram at my age with a paucity of risk factors, had i been offered one for no (known) good reason.  even if i'd had a friend, just like me, who ended up with stage three breast cancer.  it still was out of the question that breast cancer was ever going to happen to me.  some other cancer, maybe.  but breast cancer?  no.  why not?  well... i don't know.  i don't buy skinny jeans the moment they become popular.  or smart phones either.  or read bestsellers the moment they become such.  and so in that sense, i don't get the most common invasive cancer in females worldwide.  ... but... now that i think about it... i did succumb to skinny jeans two months ago... and smart phones (well over a year ago now)... and i did read and love angela's ashes (in december 2000... 20 months after it was last on the bestseller list)... and i did, of course, as we all know, get breast cancer... though i can still count myself in the minority... i am one of the the "ones", of the one in eight u.s. women (neverminding that it was caught in denmark) who will get it ("it" being the invasive, not in situ type).  

so my thoughts?  my advice?  well, if you're a woman, and especially if you're a man, the odds are still with you that if you're thinking like i was, you're right... you will never get breast cancer.  so that's some good news right there.  it still feels like sort of a fluke that i ever got it.  but just know that it's not always going to feel like a little pea-sized lump.  it might feel like a mass of tissue, a little more solid than it feels on the other side.  green tea and flax seeds and omega-threes are not bad things to incorporate more regularly into your diet.  eat lots of vegetables with your meat, especially if you burned it on the grill.  eat more vegetables, period.  and less sugar.  why not?  and move.  just walk, for example, more frequently throughout the day.  and get your vitamin d.  and maybe try this water bottle instead of the plastic ones.  and i'll stop lecturing right now, but there's a lot we can do to make our lives healthier, even if the odds are, at least slightly with us that we won't get cancer.

adventures

it does take the wind out of my sails just a bit to lose good pictures.  i thought i'd gotten them all uploaded, handed the phone to greg for his adventure out with william, henry, and william's friend, and told him to go ahead and delete the pictures, i'd put them all on the computer.  only i hadn't.  so there are many good pictures... poof! of the old grain mill, the mill stones, henry and greg peeking their heads out of the barn's second floor window, the picture william took of me, and the one i took of him.  well, we lose things.

but some did make it onto the computer... of our adventures on thursday and then greg, william, and henry's adventure yesterday... so we can enjoy those of course!


first, tadre mølle... an old preserved mill farm, not too far from us, but not easy to access using public transportation...







the garden... with greens and flower ringed beds...

bean pole... 

 the impetus for the visit... to catch something in nets... preferably crayfish and that sort of thing...

searching... 

waiting...

looking out at the countryside...

and back to their path toward the garden and their bridge to the woods...

onto the little wooded trail...

looking up to the tall trees...

and back to the fisherman...

trying this place and that...

in the end... he managed to catch a dead bug and rescue a live one... this though was just an unidentified bit of scruff...

and greg caught this rock... which had been the resting spot of a leech... though he'd escaped by the time i took the rock's photograph...

henry and me into the woods... up a tall hill...

better to crawl...

and over to the sheep, who were not interested in turning for the camera...

or for henry's 'baaa's'...

later, greg, henry, and i drove over to a peninsula off the fjord called bognæs.  a place we'd biked to last summer at some point-- probably our furthest bike ride with the burley.

another nap...

and lots of deer.  this was a little guy.  he seemed too little to be away from his mom, but other than sensing us in the distance, he seemed to be pretty confident...

more tall trees...

as close as we got to the water on this day...

and yesterday, greg, william, and henry's adventure to stevns klint... cliffs on the island we live on... to the south of us...

ice cream goes hand in hand with a beach day for these boys...

greg trying to get a picture of henry, or maybe henry trying to get a picture of greg...

exploring the museum...

and having fun at the park...

my own little update... is that i had my easiest day of chemo this time around, but my most laid-out-on-the-couch weekend directly following chemo... so the rhyme or reason to it is not entirely clear, but it seems that the cumulative effects of chemo, at least with regard to this weekend, seem to be making their presence felt.  the amount of nausea (minimal) has held steady however, so i can't complain about that.

well, take care for now!