Queasy

The last few days I’ve had an on-again-off-again ache in my stomach. It feels acidic, ulcer-like. Sometimes it swells and blooms into a wave of nausea. Two days ago it grew very strong and I vomited most of the meal I’d just eaten. Last night it happened again several hours after dinner. I didn’t have much in my stomach at that point, so I stood over the toilet drooling and dry-heaving until it passed. In both instances, it passed pretty quickly.

Big question: Is it the drugs or is it the stress? (Or maybe the cabbage salad I’d eaten both days?)

Footnote: I met with my doctor earlier and told her about the vomiting. She had my latest lab report in front of her and was about to ask me if I’ve been nauseous. The labs showed an elevated level of pancreatic enzymes, “a touch of pancreatitis” which can cause nausea, especially from fatty foods.

In addition to the cabbage salad, I had spare ribs both days. I cook them on the outdoor grill with nothing on them, so a lot of the fat drips off, but they are still a fatty cut of meat.

Mystery solved.

I’m at the Cancer Center for the last of my four initial immunotherapy treatments. In three weeks I’ll have a scan, and see my doctor a couple of days later. Then I’ll be free of medical appointments for three whole months!

In late October I’ll have another, more meaningful scan, and a maintenance infusion of Ipilimumab, and that will be the schedule from then on: treatment and scan every three months as long as my doctor and I want to keep it going.

In truth, I feel very good. I like the idea that my own immune system is doing the heavy lifting; I’m not being force-fed poisons that kill everything in sight and suppress my immune system in the process. Chemotherapy is hard to endure; this treatment is much easier on the system and much easier to live with.

Chance encounter

I was at the Cancer Center on Friday for blood work and a urinalysis. After the phlebotomist drew blood, he handed me a plastic cup and I went off to the bathroom to fill it. I sat down, my mind wandered, and all of a sudden I realized I was still holding the cup, but I’d peed in the toilet!

I then had to sit around drinking water and waiting to fill my bladder again. As a result, I missed my train back to Westchester by a couple of minutes, and trains only run once an hour in the middle of the day. So I found a seat in Grand Central’s food court to catch up on some client work, berating myself for such a boneheaded move, until….

I caught sight out of the corner of my eye of someone carrying a bicycle downstairs, headed toward me. It looked like the one my client rides to the office, I thought. Then I looked at the person behind the bike and sure enough, it was him.

We chatted for a few minutes, and before he ran to catch his train I said, “Let me leave you with an idea: Is there any way I can put in more hours for you? The last year has been hard on me with all the cancer stuff I’ve had to attend to. I need to increase my income."

“You mean an arrangement to work twenty hours or so for a fixed amount? I’d really like that,” he said. “I could offload a lot of stuff to you and have more time to work on the things I’m supposed to be doing.”

His problem is that the company where he heads the small IT department has invested in a custom web-based project that’s overrun its time and budget and hasn’t started making money yet. The company's owner has instructed everyone to scale back expenses.

“Let’s talk about it when you come in next week. I’d like to figure a way to sell the idea.”

I was so jazzed when he left. The encounter felt like a sign. I’ve been going to this client site only once a week lately. I like going there. The man I work with, the one with the bicycle, is bright, an eager learner; I've taught him a lot about Visual FoxPro and he likes what I do for them. But once a week means I have to pick up dropped threads of thought every time I go back. The consistency of twenty hours would make me more valuable to them. And it would make bicycle-man more valuable too; it would free him up to be a more effective IT visionary.

Plus, it would nearly triple my billable hours there. It would go a long way toward covering the expenses I’ve been struggling with.

I hope we can work this out.

Disrupted patterns

I’ve always been a good sleeper; rarely had any trouble falling asleep, and mostly slept through the night. These are exceptional times.

In the last year I’ve had many instances of waking at 4am or so. The thoughts and anxieties that wake me make it difficult to get back to sleep once I’ve had four or five hours sleep.

Lately I’ve gotten into a terrible pattern. It’s almost every other night that I can’t fall asleep at all. Sometimes I get up and read or try to work. Or I just lie awake listening to radio news (sleep-inducing noise) until about 4am. The next night I’m so exhausted I sleep through the night. But being depressed, I then may sleep for ten or more hours. The next night it starts again: I can’t fall asleep.

I’ve always been an avid eater. I’ve heard that some people lose their appetite when depressed, but that was never me. I’ve mostly used food to curb anxiety.

Not now. Now, food holds little appeal. I eat less and rarely get pleasure from it. The only satisfaction comes from knowing I made it through another day and managed to feed myself.

Stress may be more devastating than cancer. I wonder what it’s doing to my health.

Itchy

It’s been a bad month. I haven’t posted to the blog and some of you have gotten in touch with me when you noticed. It’s just been a bad month.

It took a couple of weeks to shake the virus, fever, and fatigue from the beginning of June, but it’s gone and physically I’m okay.

My new treatment comes with rash and itch, particularly on my arms, but sometimes also on my neck, thighs, shins, and feet as well. The rash looks a bit like the goose bumps you get when you’re cold, not red until I scratch myself raw. The itch appears to be independent and comes and goes from somewhere underneath my skin. I try to keep my hands away, but once I start scratching, it feels like I’ll have to rip my skin off to get at it. Sometimes I wake at night and find myself scratching; it’s a bit easier to control when I’m awake since I always have lotions, gels, powders, and creams nearby. The topical stuff works for awhile.

But that’s just the physical. I have much bigger, more humiliating problems that make me want to hide and stay away from everyone. Cancer and the economy have taken their toll on me. I’m facing a devastating financial meltdown that has me terrified, extremely stressed, and yes, depressed.

I spoke with a financial counselor yesterday. He pointed out the obvious, what I’ve been avoiding for months. My income simply doesn’t cover my expenses, let alone pay back the greater and greater debt I’ve incurred attempting to keep afloat. He advised me to contact a bankruptcy lawyer familiar with the regulations in my state in order to explore my options. I will do that. However, in my readings about bankruptcy and discussion with the counselor, I’m concerned that following that route will introduce as many or more problems as it promises to solve. Without going into long, drawn-out detail, my income, though insufficient to cover my basic expenses, may be more than the law allows for me to qualify for bankruptcy relief.

I feel terrible. I feel like a failure. Feeling like a failure is counter-productive, at best.

This is a very difficult post for me to write and make public. People I’ve confided my situation to keep reminding me I’m a survivor; they say I’ll get through this. That may be, but for now I feel like I’m being flushed down a drain. I have more energy than I’ve had for most of the past year, but now I need to use that energy to figure out whether and where and how to move before I lose my house outright. It’s particularly difficult to go through this crisis without a partner.

Encore

I’m sick again.

I was feeling particularly fatigued last week, so emailed my doctor on Friday and asked if this could be from the medication I’m now taking. “Anything’s possible,” was her email response. That night I had fever of 101.3.

On Saturday, I woke with normal temperature, but it climbed to over 101 again by afternoon. The same thing happened Sunday and again today. I was in email contact with my doctor every day, so she invited me in to run blood tests and cultures this afternoon.

So far there’s no indication that it’s anything bacterial, but she started me on a proactive course of antibiotics to fend off upper respiratory or other infection.

As I was leaving her office I said, “I won’t hug you. I don’t want to spread anything around.”

“It’s okay. I never get sick,” she said.

“Neither do I.”

The irony wasn’t lost on either of us.

Airtime

The interview with Dr. Jay Adlersberg of WABC's Eyewitness News will air on television this afternoon about 5:50 PM. Don't worry if you miss it when it airs. If you go to the Eyewitness website afterwards and click on "7 ON CALL" on the left, you'll see a list of broadcasts from the past couple of weeks. Each of Dr. Adlersberg's pieces has a transcript and a video, though it appears there's a delay of up to a day before the video gets uploaded. The starting timestamp on most of the videos is 5:55 PM, though some start at 5:54.

I don't know what happens to a piece when it scrolls off after the list fills up. I don't know if the link remains active even though you can no longer see it to select it, but I hope to find out later this afternoon when I try to link directly to yesterday's oldest piece.

In any event, I will post the direct link later today. I'll add it to this blog post, and hopefully it will remain active after its two weeks of fame is up.

The interview was fun to do. Dr. Adlersberg spoke with me, with another patient, and with our oncologist. They shot a lot more footage than they need, since each of the health broadcasts gets edited down to about two and a half minutes.

P.S. The melanoma piece is now up on WABC's website, video and all, including a really ugly set of pictures of melanoma lesions. The picture you see when you click the link and first go to the site is not in the video; it's my treatment nurse starting my IV.

A life measured in Cuisinarts

As you may know, I'm currently enrolled in my second Gotham Writers' Workshop class; I started Memoir Writing at the end of April and I'm loving the experience! My latest homework piece is about something that happened just last week. It's a bit long, so I'll forgive you if you don't read to the end. But if you do find it interesting, know that I'm posting it here as a thank you gift for all who have encouraged me to write. The assignment was to write about a mundane task while thinking about something else...

~ ~ ~

I hear the familiar rumble of the garage door opening as I place the food processor on the counter and plug it into the wall socket. The act sparks a memory, as it always does, of my first Cuisinart nearly thirty years ago at a time when such machines were the new, exotic tool-of-choice for a growing population of food-sophisticates. It was a gift for something I can’t recall: Mother’s Day, birthday, Another-day-of-being-in-love Day.

“I’ve wanted one for so long. I love it,” I gushed. “Maybe someday you’ll meet a man who’ll buy you one.” I made the ridiculous comment to my daughter who looked on dispassionately.

“I’ll buy my own,” she retorted, putting me in my place and glancing with scorn at the gifter, her soon-to-be stepfather. At nine years old, she was more of a feminist than I was!

That machine went on to prepare a huge number of meals, both festive and mundane. Years later I gave it to my daughter after repairing its burned out motor. The new Cuisinart I got to replace it didn’t log nearly as many hours. My marriage was deteriorating by then and I lost interest in cooking, perhaps as a symbolic reflection of the bigger picture. Later on, I was happy to leave that second machine behind in the detritus of divorce. I was looking forward to a new life, a new home, a new Cusinart; and this one I’d buy myself.


My daughter enters the kitchen from the garage and we hug. The potatoes are washed and cubed; the onion, egg, and flour are all laid out, ready to combine into my favorite comfort food. This daughter, now approaching twenty-five, is the product of that second marriage (and first Cuisinart). She has just flown in from the west coast and we will have a brief visit together before she heads off to visit her boyfriend in Pennsylvania.

“I’m making potato pancakes.”

“Latkes, yum. Do you have applesauce?”

“No, but there’s sour cream in the refrigerator.”

You wouldn’t know from the nonchalance of the conversation that we haven’t seen each other in six months. It’s always the same with this daughter: she walks in as if she’s never been away. Her life has taken its own direction, but her energy instantly fills the house. Even when she was in high school, when she and her friends drove themselves everywhere and every minute not studying was filled with social gatherings; even then, her essence warmed the house though her physical presence was often elsewhere.

“When I was in high school, I grated everything by hand," I mused. "That was the only way to do it then. The onions always made me cry, and little pieces of skin usually found their way into the batter. I’d try to grate down to the last little bit and my knuckles invariably got in the way.”

“Yewww.” Is she sympathizing with my long ago injury, or expressing vegetarian distaste?

By this time the pancakes are sizzling in the cast iron frying pan I’ve had forever. I stare across the table at her beautiful face and see my features accented by her father’s coloring: dark curly hair and dark, sparkling eyes. It’s an exotic combination that fooled people into thinking she looked like him, but I always knew better. When I got tired of verbally pointing out the similarities between us, I laid out proof in the form of a collage: three pictures, three toddlers – my daughter, my husband, and me – all around two years old and looking very much like siblings.

It took many years to unravel so much overlapping sameness into three such distinct lives. My husband and I had been together for nearly twenty-five years and my daughter was just starting high school when we finally decided to divorce. He wanted the house and I wanted my life, so I bought a nearby townhouse and set out to start over. My daughter devised a schedule where she would spend half of each week in either house, and insisted we adhere to it religiously. She and I fashioned my new house into a home together and refrained from introducing her father into it. It was the same when she was with him; she needed to keep us physically divided in order to process the emotional split, even though he and I remained co-parents and even friends.

Every stage of life has its own challenges and rewards, but that period when the separation was new and I wasn’t yet an empty-nester was and remains very special to me. My career blossomed, my relationships with both my daughters flourished, and my sense of independence became a source of joy for me as I set out to try new things. Life has become more difficult since then – no straight lines, I keep reminding myself, but sometimes I wonder if I can continue to remain up to the challenge.


“Thanks for the pancakes Mom. They were delicious.”

“Have a safe trip sweetie. Hugs to Luke,” I say. “I miss you already,” I think, as she drives off, leaving behind a swirl of years in her wake and tears welling up in my eyes.