Five Hundred, Twenty-Five Thousand, Six Hundred Minutes

Well, it's been a year ... almost.

One of my doctors told me to watch out for the one year mark. He said that he has seen countless patients who are coping wonderfully just be broken by that first anniversary. Yesterday, I found out what he meant.

We are hosting a memorial service at work this week. It is for an alum who died of cancer. She graduated four years before I did. When I was little, I used to play in her house. She has two children, a son and a daughter. She had breast cancer, got better, and then got sick again as the cancer spread to her brain.

I am in charge of the event. I have been talking to caterers, liturgists, and valet parkers trying to make tomorrow night's service beautiful for the family.

My anniversary is on Thursday.

I expected that this might be difficult, but I did not expect to to fall apart in the middle of Hallmark, yesterday. I guess that I should have asked someone else to go buy the guestbook for the woman who died of cancer. I also did not expect to have a hyperventilating, gasping for breath, face tingling, weak limbs breakdown after I left the store. I'm having a tough week.

I keep having flashbacks to the phone call I took while collapsed on my office floor. I remember throwing pens over my cubicle wall to get Gina's attention as my doctor's voice on the other end of the line became blurry and incomprehensible. I remember Renee coming over with wine and a bottle of margaritas, because she was unsure what to give to a friend who was just diagnosed with cancer. I remember drinking most of that bottle on my own ... and it still not being enough alcohol to lull me to sleep. I remember that Scott was out of town and I he had to take a red-eye flight home because his wife was too sick for him to stay. I remember the horror of the office visit that next morning, hearing words like: mastectomy, chemotherapy and hysterectomy. In the following weeks, I remember my mother's birthday being an unusually somber occasion. I remember Scott needing an excel spreadsheet to keep track of all of my medications. I remember friends coming to visit me in my pajamas. I remember Heather flying in from New York to my bedside. I remember Scott's mother taking care of me, because I couldn't do anything by myself. I remember my children staying with my parents, each lucky to have the other.

I remember too much.

This morning, I was listening to the song Seasons of Love, from Rent. If you've never heard it, I urge you to click here. It's beautiful. Here are some of my favorite lyrics, which brought me to my knees as I listened today.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand

Six hundred minutes,

Five hundred twenty-five thousand

Moments so dear.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand

Six hundred minutes

How do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights

In cups of coffee

In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.

In five hundred twenty-five thousand

Six hundred minutes

How do you measure

A year in the life?

How about love? Measure in love.

It's time now to sing out,

Tho' the story never ends

Let's celebrate

Remember a year in the life of friends

Remember the love!

Seasons of love!

Oh you got to, you got to

Remember the love!

You know that love is a gift from up above.

Share love, give love, spread love.

Measure measure your life in love.

You have walked this journey with me. You held me up when I couldn't go on alone. You shared in the laughter that sometimes seemed the only way to make it through the pain. This has been a horrible year: I was sick; I suffered through many surgeries and heartache; I am covered in scars; I have lost sensation in a significant part of my body and the ability to bear children; Scott and I watched our babies deal with confusion and mourning that should be way beyond their youthful years. It was rotten.

But, I am here. I am blessed and I am loved. I have three doctors appointments in the coming weeks and there is little reason not to believe that I will hear good news at all of them. (Although I think I will always find my good health to be suspicious. A 13% chance of recurrence doesn't feel so little to me.) While I remain painfully aware of what happened last February, there is a lot of good in my life, especially if I measure my life in love.

And if I look at it that way, my life is already very LONG.

Good Doesn't Mean It's Gone

I thank all of you who have been concerned about my results. I promised that I would write about it on Monday, but I didn't ... you may have noticed. I just don't feel like it. I'm in a funk. But, all the results were stellar. Glucose, White Blood Cell Count, Creatinine, Potassium, Sodium, Calcium, Albumin, Lueteinizing Hormone, Follicle Stimulating Hormone, CA 27-29, et cetera, et cetera ad nauseum ... all perfect.

I'm healthy ... and I'm kind of displeased about it. Strange, right? It's not that I want to go another round with cancer, but I feel very ill at ease. The recent bloodwork shows that-among all of the other numbers-there is actually a decrease in my tumor marker. This is good news; it's just not as good as I thought.

I was under the misconception that the tumor marker was a definitive test. I thought that it was sort of like a cancer screen. You know, if the number doesn't spike, then you're healthy. Just to confirm this theory, I asked my oncologist as he was breezing out the door:

ME: "So, what we're looking for as a red flag is the tumor marker, right?"

HIM: "Well, not exactly. Your tumor marker is at 18, which is great. But, it could be 4 and you could have cancer. Usually, it spikes when there is a recurrence, but not always."

ME: "Then, how do we know that I'm healthy?"

HIM: "It's a combination of your symptoms, your blood work and your scans. There is no blood test that will tell us for sure, but the CA 27-29 is the closest that we have."

ME: "Okay. When do I have another PET scan?"

HIM: "We will do another one in a year. Seventy percent of people who develop cancer again do so within the first two years. You're almost to one year, so you can feel happy about that."

ME: Disappointed and sad ... which is the opposite of happy.

If there were something wrong, we could act on it. We could put together a plan and fight. But there isn't anything wrong ... that we have found. As you may recall, it took six months to diagnose the cancer the first time, and then there was uncertainty about the margins after the surgery.

So, I'm not super hip on waiting and hoping. I don't like hoping. I'm an analytical, left-brained person. I like knowing. And what I would like to know is that I can breathe a sigh of relief. I would like to be able to do some sort of procedure that would produce concrete, irrefutable evidence that there is no cancer in this body ... and I would like to do that test every week.

The News Is Good ...

but I have to get back to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, so I can't elaborate.

More tomorrow.

Life is Good

I'm sitting on an airplane typing this ... I guess that is the perk of having a husband who travels so much. Well, the free internet and the free bottle of wine that I just guzzled. I have never had wine on a plane, before. I have also never been on a plane that is so fuzzy and blurry. Strange.

Anyway, I'm here ... taking a break from watching Harry Potter ... on my way to meet my handsome husband in Arizona for our first get-away since D-Day on February 3rd.

I'm pretty excited. We have plans to go to my favorite pizza spot in the United States, read books, sit by the pool, go see the new Harry Potter movie and go hiking. Oh, and sleep. We have plans to sleep.

Because I'm a nut for security, I'm not scheduling this post to go live until we return - just so that no creepers can read it and take the opportunity to loot our house ... again.

But, even taking that into account, I still have a few hours to ask for your prayers. Earlier this week, I went to my least favorite place, Minnesota Oncology, for some blood work. I get the results of those tests on Monday. I'm hoping that the cancer has taken my eviction notice seriously and that there are no attempts to re-infiltrate my body. Please pray for the same.

I'll update after I see the doctor.

You guys are the best.

Liz

Dear ... Everyone Who Wants Me To Do Things

Dear Everyone,

I am tired.

I am very tired.

And I am tired during almost every minute of the day in which I am not asleep.

I try to do my job without yawning and although mornings are often blurry, I don't let my children leave the house with syrup smeared across their faces. But still ... I nap at least three times a week and have contemplated whether or not it would be a misuse of sick time to go home and sleep during the work day.

Supposedly, going under general anesthesia results in several months of fatigue. I went under three times. Menopause causes hot flashes, night sweats and insomnia. Anxiety and depression are known to hinder a good night's sleep. And Tamixofen, the cancer drug that I will take for five years, has tiredness as a side effect. So, I guess this shouldn't be shocking to me.

But it's been eight and a half months! I am a zombie.

Also, I'm sad. And pretending all day that I'm not is exhausting.

To those of you who are wondering if I'm okay, I am. I'm healthy. I don't have cancer. I'm not undergoing any horrific treatments and don't have any surgeries scheduled. But in case you were unsure, it is not very helpful to say: "Are you all right? You don't look good." You can all just stop that. No one wants to hear that they look like crap.

Plus, the next time someone says that to me, I will either cry or smack them. I'm not saying which ... it's a surprise.

Pink Glove Dance - The Sequel

If you haven't seen this video, yet, you should. Click on the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTyIhMLp3FA

Minnesota even has a couple of cameos.

Wishful Thinking

My friend is sick with the stomach flu. Her husband is off on a business trip to a tropical island, which isn't fair in the best of times, but is especially unjust when the one left home isn't well.

In an attempt to repay a tiny amount of the kindness shown to me when I needed it, I took her two exceptional children for the day so that she could sleep.

While I'm sorry that she doesn't feel well, I must confess that I'm delighted to have a chance to have some extra little ones around. I got out the high chair and the pack-and-play and the Baby Bjorn. We pulled out the rattles and rubber blocks. Every room of our house is littered with dolls and markers and toys of every kind. It's very colorful.

All afternoon, the girls have been playing together beautifully. I got to feed the baby a bottle and rock him to sleep in my arms. And it just about broke my heart when I snuck back upstairs and saw two doors closed, each one keeping quiet a room for a sleeping boy.

As I type this, there are squeals of laughter from the three older kids in the playroom -punctuated by an occasional argument - and there is a delicious squawking noise coming from the baby as he crawls around and drools on the floor. I wish that they could stay forever. And as Scott pointed out, if their parents were true friends, they would allow it. After all, he argued, "they can always make more and we can't."

So, I ask you: why did God feel that it was okay to take away my ovaries? I'm really good at being a mother. I could have done it a few more times, quite happily.

No fair.