This seems better than "Winter is coming!" I have yet to see this season's episodes of Game of Thrones and wonder if permanent winter has come yet to the kingdoms. Back to the present though~~it is a rainy Saturday in June so a perfect opportunity to write blog posts. The first one today was an update for Dick's continuing adventure on our catamaran, Van Kedisi. https://sailvankedisi.wordpress.com/2016/06/18/french-polynesia/
Tuesday evening my friend Suzanne and I depart for Papeete, Tahiti to join Dick and Rick onboard Van Kedisi for two weeks of adventure. It will be interesting to see a totally new place where relatively few people I know have ever gone to.
Breast cancer has been on my mind this week as two friends started treatment for recurrences yesterday. One woman is from our breastcancer.org 2012 chemo group who was with so many of us in Las Vegas in 2013. The other was in our Cowgirls versus Cancer retreat in Montana in spring, 2014. We hold them in our hearts even from afar. Our amazing massage therapist from that retreat was diagnosed with breast cancer not long ago and she has gone through the chemotherapy part of treatment so far. My BIL, Wilf has had two surgeries and chemotherapy for colorectal cancer diagnosed with one of those simple stool sample tests last fall. Thank goodness he did do that test even though for him at the time, it was routine with no expectation of cancer. He will do 4 months more of chemotherapy once he recovers enough from his April surgery. He and my sister Kathryn continue to amaze me with their positive outlook and resilience.
As is comes up to almost 4 years since I found my infamous lump, life goes on of course. Briefly, the same old cancer take-aways persist but none of them life threatening, just annoying and daily reminders unfortunately as without them I think I could forget that this ever occurred. I think I must write a post about breast cancer and aging, since often the lines are blurred on which causes which symptoms.
Depending on who I ask~~physio, massage therapist, breast surgeon, plastic surgeon, GP, or others who have similar treatment, I get many different answers or rationales for the ongoing irritants. My right scapula has been popping out and along with shoulder pain and weakness plus the cording under my arm it is clear that the symptoms are related to surgeries and radiation. But osteoporosis has affected my shoulder joint and is this due to aging or the drug I take against recurrence? Ha! Of course no one really knows. But my MT did say one day, that people of a "certain age" can have shoulder problems like this. Very diplomatic! But other professionals say radiation is the main culprit, the original scar from my lumpectomy has caused the cording, yes it is the drugs I take, nerves were cut during the mastectomy and/or lumpectomy thus the scapula popping out and so on. The good news is that yoga, walking, lots of range of motion exercises and my wonderful massage therapist and physio help and there is nothing dire going on.
I have been on a waitlist since last May for a revision that may help. My plastic surgeon says he can cut the very hard cords that disappear under the lumpectomy scar though I am aware that more surgery can cause additional scar tissue but hey I think I will give it a go. I have gone from #26 to #19 on the waitlist in the past 6 months so it is not imminent anyway.
I did have an incisional hernia repair in April which was totally unconnected to cancer and that was successful. I had to kick back with no yoga or exertion for a month but that was OK too. Lots of time for thinking and reading and movies on Netflix. Thanks Andy for that!
In the last post I referred to my chickens. While I was recuperating from the hernia repair I was witness to our broody hen Laila's instinctual need to be a mother. It made me think back to the beginning of this chicken hobby of mine and it does relate directly to my time of BC treatment though I had never really realized it.
In the fall of 2012 while I awaiting the pathology from my lumpectomy, Dick found himself a project~~why not build a 5 star chicken coop? Though the family seems to think it was my idea, I have never really believed that. But I am glad. Dick built a masterpiece and nearly broke his back in the process as he fell off while putting on the roof and landed on his drill which hit the ground first. He was badly shaken, grey and bruised and as luck would have it, Karalee Greer who is a physio just happened to be here. She took a look at him and with ibuprofen, an ice pack and instructions to lie down for the rest of the day, I went off to the art gallery as planned with Susan Penner. I called several times to see how he was but no answer. Of course, once we left he went back up on the roof to finish the job!
Chickens did not appear that fall as chemotherapy followed by all the other nasty treatments and surgery took precedence. However the following summer when Dick was off sailing across the Med and Atlantic, Andy and I picked our first young chicks. Of course I picked a rooster and have done so more than once since they do look more attractive than hens. We did end up with a couple of lovely hens, Eva and Fluffy and though they are no longer with us, my hobby has expanded and looking back to when Dick built that coop, I am grateful for the way it evolved into caring for them and forgetting often about my healing self.
Laila went broody in March. This is something that happens to a few hens and often it is impossible to break this trance like state that has them sitting on a nest 24/7. I was going away and hoped that she would be broken of her broodiness but it was not to be. Lori, our tenant got her 6 fertilized eggs and on April 15, 5 adorable chicks were born. I was captivated and spent much of my recuperation watching the interaction between mom and chicks. I know a lot more about chickens than I had ever anticipated and can see that I would never have made a good farmer~~just a few chickens can be a lot of work! But thanks to Dick it has been amazing therapy.
This will not be the end of the story though. Laila went broody again last week and is sitting on 6 more eggs but not at my house. She is with a wonderful family who also took 3 of the chicks. I am off to Tahiti on Tuesday night and broody hens need lots of attention. I do get Laila back though as well as "pick of the brood." We are allowed 4 hens and no roosters in Vancouver and I currently have 4 hens and 2 chicks who look like they will be hens. But we do have a big lot and so far there is lots of room. The good thing too about chickens is that they are dispensable~~either other chicken lovers take them or they can end up in the pot. One of our young roosters did become coq au vin made by Lori and enjoyed by Dick and her. I am not into eating my pets!
The one thing that I am not doing this year is trekking in Nepal. I am sure I have at least one more trek in me and am contemplating Mustang (Lo Monthang) next May if anyone is interested.
Much love to everyone who has any sort of cancer or is recovering from or living with someone with cancer or who has a friend or friends with cancer. It is not easy but it is possible to have fun and keep on trekking!
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Saturday, March 12, 2016
2016 AND LIFE IS GOOD!
So far this year I have been trying to keep up with the Van Kedisi blog. Many of you know that my husband Dick sailed from Bodrum, Turkey to the Barbados with different crew in 2013 when I was recovering from all the breast cancer treatments and surgeries. This year he has been heading west since January 29 from Curacou to the Panama Canal with friends. I am actually checking a web cam that supposedly shows them transmitting but the resolution is not big but I will keep checking as I write. That blog link is: https://sailvankedisi.wordpress.com/author/sailvankedisi/
The crew is changing with the friends who did the first leg departing tomorrow and the new crew, already on board heading across the Pacific.
On to my own blog~~I have not written since October but I would like to explain why I am not crossing the Pacific myself on Van Kedisi. Breast cancer can, even three years post mastectomy and chemotherapy (radiation ended in June, 2013) can still present challenges. Since diagnosis, I have made decisions about open ocean sailing for myself based on BC. Perhaps if I had started out with Dick from Turkey in the spring of 2013, I would have appreciated a different adventurous challenge. Since that was impossible at the time and there has been ongoing treatment and the medical protocols that go along with my type of cancer, it is not as if I can just take off. No doubt I could have planned my medical schedule to cross the Caribbean but somehow I felt I wanted to be on terra firma at least for now. One of my good friends and I plan to fly to Tahiti in June to spend a couple of weeks on VK and I know there is still an option to sail from Fiji to New Zealand. Our son Steven plans to sail from Tahiti to NZ and our other two kids have already done legs~~Mary from Mallorca to the Canary Islands and Andy crossed the Atlantic.
As it has turned out, I have appreciated the opportunity to be on my own and in fact have found it really satisfying in many ways. It has been a very long time since I have had so much time to do what I want whenever I want to and to spend time with old friends and some new ones too. It has given me time to journal and explore not just each day as it comes along but to think about my life in the past, present and future. I was surprised to find how liberating that has been and continues to be.
Having the opportunity last summer to do the 7 week "one on one" Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy course at the cancer agency gave me new tools to work with. I learned that I do not have to erase sad or anxiety driven thoughts from the past but I can relegate them to the past when they come into my mind. They do not define who I am now. This liberation has made me much more aware of how much sadness but also joy there is in the world and we can choose to view events in our life differently if we want to. Reaching out to others is healthy and beneficial for me but also for others I interact with allowing a greater appreciation of both people I already know but also for strangers I approach say at yoga, or on the bus or while walking down a main street.
I am feeling positive even though the drugs I take to keep recurrence at bay have those pesky side effects I have referred to before. The cording in my axilla area persisted and by December there was a new one, large and tight, along with the other twinned ones. I sent a plea for advice to my medical oncologist and got a referral back to my breast surgeon who I saw in early January. She thought it was likely a capsular contracture of the breast implant. I made an appt. to see my plastic surgeon but there was a two month wait. Meanwhile I also sent out emails for advice and was lucky to get an appt. with a registered massage therapist who specializes in post breast cancer treatment as well as pre and post natal women and her practice is in a midwifery center so always pleasant to visit. I was fortunate that she took me and then only because one of my BC buddies told her what it looked like. I have now seen her 4 times in the past two months and it is like a miracle. With myofascial release the big one has disappeared and the other two are softening.
While at my late fall medical oncology appt., I mentioned that I was having a lot of pain in my low back area. The bone density test from the summer showed further osteopenia but she wanted a bone scan done to rule out metastases. The one thing about having had cancer is that often we are booked sooner than later and I had the results just before the NY. The results were good in that no further cancer but the degeneration and osteoarthritis looked worse. I saw an endocrinologist who specializes in bone disease in January and they do their own bone density test. It was a very thorough visit and the end result was a decision to start on yet another drug called Prolia or Denosumab which is given subcutaneously twice a year. It is a monoclonal antibody and will not go into detail but suffice it to say that it should help the bone loss caused by Anastrozole, the drug I take against recurrence and which blocks estrogen, thus the osteoarthritis. The best news is that at the San Antonio breast cancer conference in December of 2015, a 5 year study shows that this drug may in fact also protect us against recurrence. Time will tell.
As always, exercise is the best remedy for everything, at least in my estimation. It also creates those endorphins to make us feel better! Yoga also works and so I feel good, take the meds knowing that they do have side effects but also may just protect me from much worse.
I am off to the Netherlands in a week for a 10 day holiday. It is hard to believe, but I will be meeting up with 6 friends from our Aramco days, all British though one lives in Delft. I will not see them all at once but some in Amsterdam and some in Delft. I had KLM points to burn and though most people are heading for the sun, I am excited to see the Netherlands in early spring~~daffodils, tulips and old friends~~what could be better! Life really is good andI look forward to more of 2016. I feel fortunate, that is for sure.
Lori, who lives in our basement suite, reminded me that I did not mention our chickens. I now have 5 young hens and as of last week, all are laying. Dick built their 5 star coop just before I started chemotherapy in the fall of 2012 and though we did not actually get chickens until the next summer. Andy and I chose badly and we got a few roosters. But we ended up with two hens back then. One of them now lives with Dick's wine kit shop owner, Cheryl and the other died. Last summer though the idea of having more birds became a reality and though we again had a few rooster issues I am happily the "mom" of 5 different breeds of chicken. It has become a bit of a passion for me and I have books, belong to a couple of Internet chicken groups like "Canadian Mother Cluckers" and am constantly amazed by the behaviour of our flock. They each have an individual personality and that old adage of the pecking order could not truer! Next up may be bee keeping as it looks as though a master bee keeper thinks I may be serious enough to teach.
I believe that the passion for learning about and keeping chickens and perhaps bees later this year, is something that not only interests me but allows me to learn quite easily, not always the case with the effects of memory and attention loss after chemotherapy.
One more thing~~my concerns about climate change have not waned and as I get older and know there is no knowing about the future I am no longer hesitant about what I will do to protest pipelines in British Columbia~~it will be over my dead body.
The crew is changing with the friends who did the first leg departing tomorrow and the new crew, already on board heading across the Pacific.
On to my own blog~~I have not written since October but I would like to explain why I am not crossing the Pacific myself on Van Kedisi. Breast cancer can, even three years post mastectomy and chemotherapy (radiation ended in June, 2013) can still present challenges. Since diagnosis, I have made decisions about open ocean sailing for myself based on BC. Perhaps if I had started out with Dick from Turkey in the spring of 2013, I would have appreciated a different adventurous challenge. Since that was impossible at the time and there has been ongoing treatment and the medical protocols that go along with my type of cancer, it is not as if I can just take off. No doubt I could have planned my medical schedule to cross the Caribbean but somehow I felt I wanted to be on terra firma at least for now. One of my good friends and I plan to fly to Tahiti in June to spend a couple of weeks on VK and I know there is still an option to sail from Fiji to New Zealand. Our son Steven plans to sail from Tahiti to NZ and our other two kids have already done legs~~Mary from Mallorca to the Canary Islands and Andy crossed the Atlantic.
As it has turned out, I have appreciated the opportunity to be on my own and in fact have found it really satisfying in many ways. It has been a very long time since I have had so much time to do what I want whenever I want to and to spend time with old friends and some new ones too. It has given me time to journal and explore not just each day as it comes along but to think about my life in the past, present and future. I was surprised to find how liberating that has been and continues to be.
Having the opportunity last summer to do the 7 week "one on one" Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy course at the cancer agency gave me new tools to work with. I learned that I do not have to erase sad or anxiety driven thoughts from the past but I can relegate them to the past when they come into my mind. They do not define who I am now. This liberation has made me much more aware of how much sadness but also joy there is in the world and we can choose to view events in our life differently if we want to. Reaching out to others is healthy and beneficial for me but also for others I interact with allowing a greater appreciation of both people I already know but also for strangers I approach say at yoga, or on the bus or while walking down a main street.
I am feeling positive even though the drugs I take to keep recurrence at bay have those pesky side effects I have referred to before. The cording in my axilla area persisted and by December there was a new one, large and tight, along with the other twinned ones. I sent a plea for advice to my medical oncologist and got a referral back to my breast surgeon who I saw in early January. She thought it was likely a capsular contracture of the breast implant. I made an appt. to see my plastic surgeon but there was a two month wait. Meanwhile I also sent out emails for advice and was lucky to get an appt. with a registered massage therapist who specializes in post breast cancer treatment as well as pre and post natal women and her practice is in a midwifery center so always pleasant to visit. I was fortunate that she took me and then only because one of my BC buddies told her what it looked like. I have now seen her 4 times in the past two months and it is like a miracle. With myofascial release the big one has disappeared and the other two are softening.
While at my late fall medical oncology appt., I mentioned that I was having a lot of pain in my low back area. The bone density test from the summer showed further osteopenia but she wanted a bone scan done to rule out metastases. The one thing about having had cancer is that often we are booked sooner than later and I had the results just before the NY. The results were good in that no further cancer but the degeneration and osteoarthritis looked worse. I saw an endocrinologist who specializes in bone disease in January and they do their own bone density test. It was a very thorough visit and the end result was a decision to start on yet another drug called Prolia or Denosumab which is given subcutaneously twice a year. It is a monoclonal antibody and will not go into detail but suffice it to say that it should help the bone loss caused by Anastrozole, the drug I take against recurrence and which blocks estrogen, thus the osteoarthritis. The best news is that at the San Antonio breast cancer conference in December of 2015, a 5 year study shows that this drug may in fact also protect us against recurrence. Time will tell.
As always, exercise is the best remedy for everything, at least in my estimation. It also creates those endorphins to make us feel better! Yoga also works and so I feel good, take the meds knowing that they do have side effects but also may just protect me from much worse.
I am off to the Netherlands in a week for a 10 day holiday. It is hard to believe, but I will be meeting up with 6 friends from our Aramco days, all British though one lives in Delft. I will not see them all at once but some in Amsterdam and some in Delft. I had KLM points to burn and though most people are heading for the sun, I am excited to see the Netherlands in early spring~~daffodils, tulips and old friends~~what could be better! Life really is good andI look forward to more of 2016. I feel fortunate, that is for sure.
Lori, who lives in our basement suite, reminded me that I did not mention our chickens. I now have 5 young hens and as of last week, all are laying. Dick built their 5 star coop just before I started chemotherapy in the fall of 2012 and though we did not actually get chickens until the next summer. Andy and I chose badly and we got a few roosters. But we ended up with two hens back then. One of them now lives with Dick's wine kit shop owner, Cheryl and the other died. Last summer though the idea of having more birds became a reality and though we again had a few rooster issues I am happily the "mom" of 5 different breeds of chicken. It has become a bit of a passion for me and I have books, belong to a couple of Internet chicken groups like "Canadian Mother Cluckers" and am constantly amazed by the behaviour of our flock. They each have an individual personality and that old adage of the pecking order could not truer! Next up may be bee keeping as it looks as though a master bee keeper thinks I may be serious enough to teach.
I believe that the passion for learning about and keeping chickens and perhaps bees later this year, is something that not only interests me but allows me to learn quite easily, not always the case with the effects of memory and attention loss after chemotherapy.
One more thing~~my concerns about climate change have not waned and as I get older and know there is no knowing about the future I am no longer hesitant about what I will do to protest pipelines in British Columbia~~it will be over my dead body.
Academy awards night~~can you imagine this as the Danish girl, played by Eddie Redmayne?
Blue, so named for her blue eggs and head of the pecking order
Charlie, next in the pecking order and up on our deck for a visit
Charlie, next in the pecking order and up on our deck for a visit
Last week, the first day we had all 5 hens laying
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)