Between Scenes

Nothing is happening to me right now. It's been four weeks since my surgery and I've healed just fine, no infections. I'm waiting to start radiation.

We took a vacation from this again, just Roland and me. We went to San Francisco. We ate at Cafe Zoetrope in North Beach, went to wine country in the Russian River Valley, met up with friends at a burger joint on the Embarcadero, and visited Alcatraz. This is me on a hilltop in the Russian River Valley. It is insanely beautiful there. Boy, you have to be stubborn to be a winemaker, is all I can say. The other photo is a posted sign at Alcatraz, obviously.

They try to feed you this crap about Alcatraz not being such a bad prison, just a cold and boring place to be. Why, there were even families living on the island, and they had Christmas caroling and gardens, and everything. All the cells and stuff are on the second floor of the building, which means there is a basement/ground floor that the public doesn't see. I bet that was nice, too, back in the day. Still, it was kind of strange how the Western sun streamed in pleasantly through the barred windows.

We also saw Spoon at the Fillmore. They gave a good show of old and new favorites, plus a couple covers.

In Dreams

Some people who know me know that I've always had a bone to pick with That Big Sports Celebrity Who Is Also A Cancer Patient. My spouse argues there is no backlash to foment against this guy, so my bumpersticker ideas ("I'm 6ick of [him]"; "7 is enough already") won't go anywhere.

Celebrity, upon retirement from his sport, declared he would work tirelessly to bring awareness to the problem of cancer and offer support to those affected. When I looked for support for my young child, I did find some help from an agency that is funded by Celebrity's foundation. Yay, he really does do something, right? But the main agency where I get support for myself doesn't receive a dime from Celebrity, even though someone he once cared about is affected by breast cancer.

Whatever.

One of my recurring dreams is, I am working in a restaurant. (I waited tables for 5 years.) Last week I had this dream again, and believe it or don't, Celebrity was in it. He was a waiter, along with me. He was stacking plates and folding napkins and shuffling menus. We knew we had cancer in common and that our current work was a good service to others (see how the unconscious mind loves wordplay?).

So I find it interesting that Celebrity's out-of-retirement announcement hinges on his desire to uh, something about shouldering the burden of cancer. This just rings as disingenuous to me. Why not be truthful? He loves being loved for the thing we loved seeing him love. Dating the Rock Star, the Preppy Fashion Designer, and the Semi-Talented Waif Actress got boring. There were rumors about him seeking high, statewide office, but I just couldn't see him in a suit, sitting in a meeting about the State Preservation Board with the delegation from East Texas. Those political people are too boring and unsophisticated for him and the job itself is a drag.

I suppose it's possible to be completely self-aggrandizing and yet doing good for others. But I don't buy it that the first seven times were for just himself, but this next time is for the Cancer Nation.

Drink the Bubbly of Your Choice Because

I just heard from Dr. Solemn. He told me that the pathology came back and there is no cancer in my tissues.

I'm Okay

Surgery yesterday went fine. Solemn and IH did their thing. They discovered the cavity from my previous surgery, at end of a little corridor inside my breast, almost like a small chamber at the end of a cave. Solemn re-excised the tissue, IH filled in the cavity with fat from another spot in my breast and closed the incision. He didn't reposition my nipple (thank God) as he planned to, because it made an acceptable return to its proper place on my breast, once he was done with his work.

I'm a little stiff and sore, but really want to avoid the pain meds, as they keep me awake at night. Last night I got up and watched a show about people wanting to know what their houses were worth, a show about a couple wanting to move so the wife would have more room for her doggy day care business (don't you want them for neighbors?), an infomercial about total cleansing, and the rerun of CNN's talking heads, blah blah blahing about Hillary's speech last night.

Okay, I'm rambling about nothing, so I'm going to go. Back when I'm more lucid.

Surgery Today

Today is my surgery, a so-called partial mastectomy (lumpectomy) and scar revision. I will also get my portacath removed. It's not been easy to be a front seat passenger all these months because the seat belt hits the lump on my chest where my port is.

I haven't had much chance to talk about the loooong journey I've taken up to this point. I was considering a California team of surgeons for my next procedure. But since we seem to be back at a relatively simple place in my treatment —nothing drastic is going to happen — I decided to have this at home and recuperate in the bosom of my family.

Well, off I go. See ya on the flip side.

Crucifixes and Cancer

Oops, there's a few people who don't know my surgery is not today. It's next Tuesday, Aug. 26, at 12:30. Dr. Solemn will be doing the re-excision of the tissue, and Dr. Impossibly Handsome will be prettying up what's left over, immediately after Dr. Solemn is done with his work. It's a day surgery — I'll be home in my bed that night.

The reason for the delay is, Dr. IH changed the venue to the Big Imposing Catholic Hospital (BICH), and I was not made aware of this. I told Dr. Solemn's office I just can't be involved in the Catholic health care system unless it is a matter of immediate loss of life. So they changed the day of the surgery and returned it to The Other Hospital — where it was supposed to be in the first place.

I visited a breast cancer patient at the BICH in July. She had just had big surgery and was out of the ICU and recovering in a regular room. There's new construction going on at BICH, and we could hear every power tool the crew was using. The crucifix on the wall of the room jiggled while they worked. If I'd known her better, I would have offered to pull it down and stick it in the trash. I don't know what happens when you remove a crucifix at BICH. Maybe they don't let you.

Anyway, this issue goes very deep for me. I was raised a Catholic. A churched and confirmed Catholic. Not the yeah-my-grandmother-never-missed-Mass-but-the-rest-of-us
-only-went-drunk-on-Christmas-Eve kind of Catholic. Add this to a family history of breast cancer, and it makes for a transformative experience, let me assure you. BICH does help out the poor with health care, and I've even contributed to that fund. But it doesn't mean I have to let them be part of what happens to me.

Cancer On 120 Grams of Protein A Day

When I was pregnant, my diet wasn't good. The What To Expect When You're Expecting, superior-type granolas would not have approved! But I was very scrupulous about my daily vitamins, extra folic acid, and calcium. Almost the day after I had my baby, however, my discipline toward supplements dropped off to nothing. With the pressure of gestating a human off me, I felt free to slack off.

Even before my cancer diagnosis I had returned — somewhat happily — to a new regime of taking supplements for so-called brain health, mostly vitamins and some amino acids (like tyrosine and GABA+). When I was diagnosed, I snagged an appointment with Mr. Sought-After Nutritionist, Ph.D. Sought-After added some things to my regimen, namely taurine, glutamine, CoQ10, and melatonin.

Taurine is one of the things in the energy drink, Red Bull (ew).

Glutamine powder, mixed in a small amount of water, supposedly grows a barrier on the gut and helps with neuropathy (tingling in the extremities). I know that when I was on chemo if I missed one of my thrice-daily doses of glutamine, my burned-from-the-inside-out feeling got worse. I never had any mouth sores nor any neuropathy, which are common side effects of chemo. Glutamine has the texture of that same grit they use to polish your teeth when you go to the dentist, but very little taste. It doesn't stay in suspension very long, so it helps to down it fast from a tiny Dixie cup. My brother called it booger juice, but it really didn't bother me to use it. Its benefits were so noticeable.

CoQ10 supports the soft tissues and protects heart health. High quality CoQ10 is not cheap. I had to avoid it and my vitamins the day before, the day of, and the day after a chemo infusion so as to not interfere with the cancer treatment. My heart used to be healthy before they gave me chemotherapy and I'd like to think it's still all right.

Melatonin had kind of a heyday about 15 years ago or so as an insomnia fighter. It doesn't cause drowsiness. It seems to work by sitting on estrogen receptor sites and cuts down on estrogen in the body. Estrogen keeps women awake at night, and it fuels tumors.

I also added DIM, another supplement that has a role in estrogen processing. It's not cheap to use it, either. Luckily, our health plan offers a discount on this particular supplement.

My new regimen also included a low glycemic diet, which indicates no tropical fruit or white flour. No salads made of leaf lettuce — too dirty for a person with a compromised immune system. Add 8 oz of a processed tomato product every day — lycopene fights cancer. Eat 120 grams of protein daily — all kinds, all sources, including red meat twice a week.

This last one was much harder to do than you would think. For example, 8 oz of red meat only has about 64 grams of protein. You still have another 60 to go. Eat a pound of steak, then? Maybe not. Check the nutrition information on a food label some time and you can see how difficult this really is. I'm pretty sure I mostly did not ever get up to 120 grams of protein every day. I bet I got half of that. It's a pain in the neck to keep track of. I can only drink so many whey protein smoothies before I feel annoyed about it. A great protein source is that Fage Greek yogurt — 15 grams in a serving! The word is out about Fage. HEB was totally out of it when I went there the other day. But even so, you still have about 100 grams of protein to consume, somehow.

I'm talking in past tense because, with the horrid chemo out of my life and that crisis now over, I feel pretty slacker-ish again. When will I ever learn? A fellow cancer patient recently admitted to me that she, too, is often AWOL from her supplements. How much better could she feel if she would just get on board and stay there? As you can see, there is a lot of self-reprimanding we do. We have to be model patients, after all. We have to do our cancer the right way. Everyone's looking. I'm supposed to still be on all of this stuff, all the way through radiation.

I wistfully nibbled only a little salad when I was on chemo, dreaming of the day it was no longer off limits to me. I'm a little surprised that I'm not enjoying it now the way I thought I would. I nearly forget to buy lettuce when I shop now, having steered clear of it for six months. Organic leaf lettuce has gone up since I last bought it, I was kind of shocked. I'm also still skipping eating bananas, melon, and pineapple. After you eliminate something from your diet, it's harder to return to it than you think.

My taste buds aren't wrecked anymore, with chemo over, and that metallic taste is gone. But I still feel like I'm not really experiencing food the same way I did before I began to be treated for cancer. My late therapist described the condition of depression as, "The salt is gone out of life." I still feel like the salt is gone out of eating. It holds so little pleasure, not in its anticipation, nor in its reality.

Some of this could be attributable to our household's new, gluten-free regimen. But that is another story.