New Years eve thoughts

Another whirlwind week...I had my stitches taken out on Wed. which is exactly a week from when my port was removed.  My scar is itching so I am assuming that it is healing.  The stitch removal was super easy and super fast and I floated out of the dr. office feeling that something was different. I even voiced it to Mark.  Nope, I have no clue what is different but something is!

We spent a couple of days with Dana and Summer and kids because Autumn had her first dance recital...She was the star (as well as Dana who played Mother Ginger ;)   We just got home a little bit ago.  Friday was my most favorite day of the 2 and a half days that we were there (after the recital of course) because  I had gone to see my COS while the family napped.  I had to track her down and in the process I ended up having a little meeting after the meeting with a couple of old mutual friends of Bill W. that I had not seen for a very long time.  We ARE ALL GRAMMAS NOW!  Where did the time go?  It was wonderful!  We laughed and laughed at all of the crap we have had to go through in our journey.   Sometimes all we can do is laugh, right?

Summer, Mark and I had our own little meeting that morning about how so much had gone on in all of our lives these last 10 months.  Life did not get put on hold just because I had cancer...Guess what? We even shed some tears...this family that does not crack under pressure with tears (except Mark, he is very tender hearted and cries easily) shed some pretty serious crocodile tears while we shared our feelings.  We like to say that we laid our guts on the table.  I realized that healing of a different kind needs to take place for our family.  Emotional healing.  I am a little afraid because I didn't know that I was walking around so emotionally wounded.  I am not going to go into what Summer and Mark said because that is not my place, but I know that I felt raw emotions coming through our conversation.   How awesome of a family do I have that we can sit and share from the depths of our gut and have it speak straight from our hearts!  I felt like all of this time we thought that we were all staring cancer right in the face yet we were so afraid in the dark recesses of our souls!  Too afraid to say " I am afraid that you are going to die" or "are you afraid of dying"?  I have to honestly say that I never thought I would die but a few times in the middle of the night I sometimes would think  "what am I gonna do if I die?"  HA!  You die, bird brain!!

The insanity is so obvious to me now but I think that I have to go through a little bit more of the crazies before I can speak with any kind of survivor wisdom.  All I know is gut talk and my gut has been asking me lately...where do I fit in?  I am fearful of who knows what....there is free floating anxiety all over the place and I feel like I really don't belong anywhere....I guess I didn't plan past one day at a time.  This I know... I am alive, and I will live until I die. 

I feel so unprepared to take care of Mark and be the wife that he needs.  Life keeps happening and tonight is a perfect example.  I can choose to see the ugly of a situation that came up or I can choose to understand that Mark is facing his own journey and his does not seem to have an end to it.  I choose to 'hold my face up to the light even if for the moment I cannot see' (Bill W.)  I MUST believe more deeply.  Yes, I am a little bit afraid tonight.  I think because I don't have a whole team of doctors and nurses telling me what to do or where to go on a daily basis.  I truly am back in the saddle again....however I am sitting off to the side of the saddle about ready to fall off. HA!

I sound like Chicken Little don't I?  I do feel better that I got to sound off and spill some of my guts here.  2012 - you are a welcome sight for these tired bones (how's that for a little drama?)

Happy New Year all!  God is forever good and faithful! Amen? 

Port removal( feel free to click on any picture for a closer look);)

I was a nervous wreck this morning but a very quiet nervous wreck.   Thank you very much :)  The very thought of being in the same doctors office where I had my horrific experience with my biopsy earlier this year, struck sheer terror in my being.  I don't think I was even this nervous for my mastectomy (s)! The younger of the two nurses put some blue patch thing on me and I asked her if that was a pain patch and she said "no, it's the ground."   Me thinking to myself....'isn't a ground necessary when there is electricity involved!'...yep.
The numbing stuff was quite stingy painful and apparently very fast acting because it seems to me that Dr. W started carving on me immediately. Then when Dr. W would cauterize whatever he was cauterizing, he would ask me if it hurt....uh, no.  I think I could smell burning flesh but that could have been my over active imagination.  Nurse Laurie would dab, dab, dab, and tried to keep smiling but I am certain that I could see a look of  - OMG this is awful!  Mark kept chattering away and I found it very distracting and a little bit (ok, alot ) annoying.  If he had not been holding onto my leg, I am sure that a few times I would have kicked him in the chops...sorry Lord, forgive me.  The younger nurse left the room in quite a hurry and when asked where she was going she said 'out'.  Hmmm, wonder what she saw that made her leave.  Mark tried to explain and I don't think I would want to see what he saw.   Dr. W is such an awesome doctor.  I am very grateful for him and his gift.  I am even more grateful for pain/numbing medicine

It is all over now and am a little sore but the healing is taking place and I will be back to my new 'normal' very soon.  I  got to keep the port and I sent a picture of it to Summer so she can post it on my blog...yuck.  But it is fascinating how I had that thing in my chest for 10 months!  Summer said, "it's purple like a purple heart for courage" .  Nice, I like that.

No  more cutting on this poor old body anymore.  I have no more foreign objects to be cut out!

Merry Christmas to all if I don't get to blog before Sunday.















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Monday Monday, so good to me (tra la la)

Woke up a little nostalgic today.  I think that is the word for the 'feeling' that is going on.
I am finding that I am beginning to border on hypochondria in my thoughts....and I hate that!   I took my compression sleeve off last night and I immediately felt a pain shoot up between my shoulder blades!!!! OMG is that a blood clot racing through my arteries?!  Is this a heart attack?  I thought women don't feel pain when they experience a heart attack!  OMGosh, I better go sit down so I don't drop to the floor and hurt myself...please don't let me feel pain before I go home to be with you Father.....and on and on it went for quite awhile!   I never mentioned it to Mark because he might make me go to the hospital and 'they' might tell me that I AM HAVING A HEART ATTACK!!!! HA!   Night time is awful for me....the mind is really like a dangerous neighborhood.... I finally took my meds and went to sleep...and I woke up this fine Monday still here on planet earth ;)  Like my friend Kay says, "spring broke-no clang clang"..... that's me on occasion.

 I am delivering cookies to Peace Hospice for the cookie plate party that they have every year.  They need around 120 doz. cookies!   Whit and I baked cookies yesterday .  It was quite fun for me because I felt so normal making rosettes and visiting with Mark over the mounting pile of yummy little delicacies. 

God has so richly blessed me and now I am praying for a sound mind.  I wonder if that is the chemo and radiation working its way out of my system or if I am just getting a little bit koo koo?  Either way, I know that God did not give me the spirit of fear and that is what I am fighting now.  Or at least I was last night....gee, that was quite the battle.



 

AND I"M DONE!

My morning started out like all of the other mornings that I have to get ready for radiation.  I really had to 'grease' myself up this morning  because I am quite well done under my left arm and chest.   I wondered how our skin can stand all of that 'heat' and still stay on my body?  Who knows what my internal organs have gone through.   Mark dropped me off at the front door (as he always does) at Sletten and I ran into someone that would not normally be there!  AHA! I WAS RIGHT!  There was something in the wind!  Mark denied that the girls had anything planned when I asked him this morning but his eyes said other wise.  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed some balloons BUT I did not notice that it was my little Autumn holding them....Oh my goodness...then I noticed friends and family all in a bunch waiting and smiling like they had really pulled off a great secret :)   I hugged all that I could before I ran into the 'holding tank'.  OMG,OMG don't let me start crying NOW!!!!!
I got called for my turn and I could feel my tight upper lip start to give up the ghost.  The girls that run the radiation thingy were all commenting about how awesome it was that my family and friends were there to hear me 'ring the bell'.  When a patient is finished with the last treatment he/she is taken to a sort of waiting room that has a bell on the wall with a plaque that reads " Ring this bell three times well it's toll to clearly say, my treatments done, this course is run, and I am on my way."  We read it out loud which is not a problem since I  DO know  how to read :) but I have great difficulty reading with a lump in my throat the size of my fist.  Many tears of joy and relief and who knows what else.  
Actually the tears started to well up while I lay on the table with the girls measuring the exact spot for the beam to zero in on.  My face has to be turned to the right (don't know why) and I have to lay very still so there was a pool of tears in my left socket being kept there by the bridge of my nose!  Please God PLEASE do not let me move and have them radiate the wrong spot!!!   Lots of hugs and tears and misty eyes after I got off of the table.  I will miss these girls just like I missed the oncology staff when I was going through chemo.  
I feel like a little bird that has been booted out of the nest and I am feeling unsure of who knows what.  I feel like my old hard shell , my only protection, is gone and I don't care who sees or knows  ... are you ready for this... How free I feel!  It has been an incredibly tough journey but it has been a journey that has taught me things that I would not have learned any other way.  How great is our God?  The pruning was necessary I know (but did you really have to take the boobs God?) HA! 

I have felt every range of emotion that is humanly possible over the last 9 or 10 months and I am physically exhausted yet somehow energized like I have never been!  Gratitude is not really the right word but I don't know of any other way to express this sort of out of body feeling.   I think that the Lord really is carrying me at this moment.   It is sort of like when mom died with me holding her hand 7 years ago...I did not want to talk about it because it was so special with the presence of God right there with us!  I felt that I would lose the awesome feeling if I shared it with someone that would doubt.  No matter,  I know that God is real and that He was with me every step of the way.  He kept whispering ' Do not be afraid'....and I KNOW that was real.

You know He is real too don't you?  That's why you were praying for me :)  Thank you and may the Lord richly bless all of your lives. 

I don't know if I will continue to blog but I probably will.  There is always something to chat about...right?! 

Just some thoughts....

I have been sitting here thinking about what it is that I am feeling....it is the evening before my last radiation session and I am sort of numb.  I feel a little nauseous (which is sort of a daily thing as of late) and I wonder how long it will be before I feel 100%.  Maybe this is 100% !

I can hear Mark puttzing around in the kitchen doing what ever it is that keeps him busy and I can faintly hear Logan and Julianna upstairs playing and laughing.  

There is something healing about the laughter of a child.  Sometimes they are belly laughs and sometimes just pure joy in life!!!  Makes me smile just thinking about them. They  are so real!  Last night I was visiting with Autumn and she very calmly told me that her daddy was pooping!! HA!  TMI Dana? Now blog-land knows that you poop!!!! Eeeuuuwww!

I spent several hours totally by myself at Set Free  this morning and it was a breath of fresh air.   It is totally a no-brainer 'volunteer job' but it is exactly what I needed.  It was me and no one else for a couple of hours!  Just me and the Lord and bags and bags of donations ;)  The broom and I kicked up quite a dust storm as I cleaned and prayed quietly  ( Sometimes not so quietly).  I tried to only give thanks and not ask for anything .  That is harder than it sounds.  
Greedy bugger that I am....

Tonight I give thanks once again for all of you that have been so faithful in lifting me up in prayer and for those of you that have blessed me in ways that only you and I will know about (and of course God knows too) .

I came home today and already the cards are coming in...   So thoughtful.  Mark and I were sniffing as I read  them to him.   


I think that I will get ready for bed....so tired. Mark is already sleeping! It feels like it should be at least 8:00! I will let you know how tomorrow goes. 

Booster update and # 31coming up!

Wow! Can you believe it?!  This Thursday is my last day of radiation!!!  The booster has definitely been doing something to my skin....I am getting a boost of radiation on the whole left side (scar)  My under arm is very dry and my skin  feels like it wants to crack.  Mark and I keep applying aloe gel to the area and it seems to be working like magic.  I believe that the Lord has everything to do with this ;)  

Yesterday in the dressing room I met a lady with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and she was sharing with me that it looked like 'it' had returned.  We had a great visit until I realized that Mark had been waiting for me outside...oops.  I didn't rush her though.  We wished each other the best and blessed one another.  I did not even ask her name and she did not ask me mine...but we 'knew' one another. 

Mark and I have become mall-walkers after our radiation.  We had a huge laugh while we walked yesterday making it nearly impossible to walk for a few minutes.  Long story short....He turned one way and I turned the other and we slammed into eachother.  I felt my glasses crack a little at the same time that the base of my neck did.   I didn't think we were walking fast enough to cause much damage but I really did think that my glasses were going to slide right off of my face. It felt kind of like when you see people walk into a glass door....that is what I think my face looked like...squashed!!! HAhahahaha! 

Gotta go get ready for my microwaving.  Thanks for all your prayers! Thank God for laughter :)

My last Friday

Today is my last Friday for radiation!!  Something weird going on with my eyes.  Can't make out some of the words on this blog.  Kind of like a delayed reaction to what I am typing.  OH OH.  Will have to mention it to the radiation people this morning.

This morning is my first booster day.  I asked why I was having this booster and they said that it will zero in on the scar where they removed the tumor because if there is a re-occurrence of cancer it will most likely be there.  Oh ok.  

Yesterday we (Mark, Summer and I) went to our first diabetes class.  Very informative.  One of my friends from Lewistown sent me some books on diabetes and I am all set up for a great 'read' :)  (if I can see;)


The day before yesterday we got to sit and visit with some dear friends and we had such a great time laughing and laughing.  We had not seen Tom since all of this excitement has been going on for me so he did not recognize me with white curly hair.   The look on his face when it registered that it was me was priceless.


Well Flashlights, keep lifting me up in prayer please.  There is an aura like something or other going on now but I can at least see the words as I am typing them.  No head ache just visual disturbance in the perimeter of my focus. 


Will let you know how the booster goes. 


Blessings and love to you all.