Infernal Clock

My husband is an early riser. Time was when I used to get up with him, because it seemed so romantic to spend a little time together in the morning. Lately our alarm has two alarm settings: O-Dark Hundred Hour for him, and 6:15 for me.

Last week, after my honey had been gone for 6 days and returned with major jet lag, he set the clock ahead by mistake while setting his alarm. It practically went off before the eleven o'clock news finished. He arrived at work before at 5:15 AM and I was out of the shower by 5:30. We only realized the mistake when I tried to wake our new teenager, who screamed at me for getting her up an hour early. Whoops!

We've had that clock for years and it has always sucked. It's hard to read. The buttons don't make any sense. It's hard to turn off. So we resolved to get a new clock.

Being very type A, the man arrived home with the brand new equipment on Saturday. It's shiny silver. It can recharge my phone. You can set the alarms for a week in advance. It has a remote. He was very excited about it on Saturday night. And being quite the traveler this month, he left for California on Sunday afternoon.

You know where I'm going with this, don't you? My sweet man set the new clock before he left for California, but didn't share that information with me. When it went off Monday morning at 5:15, I was shocked and stunned by its ear drum-shattering shriek and by my inability to turn it off. Then I couldn't get back to sleep.

Later I had my revenge. Once I realized that I could not figure out the remote control, I yanked the plug, confident that Tuesday morning that I would get some sleep. Sadly I was wrong. The clock's brightly lit face might have been blank, but the alarm soldiered on, shattering my nerves at, you guessed it, 5:15. I hit it the same way I did on Monday only to have it fight back – it rang again ten minutes later, just after I fell back asleep. Ok, we're on, you little f*!%$r. I picked up the clock and threw it, still ringing, into my daughter's room down the hall. I quickly closed the door. (She was sound asleep in my bed.)

You'd think that was the end of it, wouldn't you? I could see that this clock is designed for a person way beyond my pay grade. But I had one last trick up my sleeve. I shoved the clock into my linen closet last night, covering the speakers with flannel sheets. This morning I don't know whether the clock went off or not. I was busy sleeping.

What's Next?

The cancer's gone. I finished my treatment about ten days ago and have been given a clean bill of health. I have to go to a couple of check ups in a few months, but have been sent back into the world to live my life. This is wonderful fabulous news.

What's next?

I keep asking myself that question. Before my friends at Dana Farber sent me away, they sat me down to tell me about something called "Ending Treatment Effect." The nurse who described it made it sound something like post-partum depression. Kind of ironic, since the whole cancer trip took about nine months. At any rate, a few tears are normal, but if I find myself hanging out on the couch in my pajamas and crying for days on end, I'm supposed to call someone. So far so good - I'm wearing pajamas only at night.

But I see what they mean. For so many months my life has been defined by appointments and treatments. I've scheduled getting poked and prodded and waiting to feel bad. I've timed my life in the context of how much I can get done during the twenty minutes I feel good. And now I have to go back to the schedule and the me that was before. Except I'm not the me that was before. So what's next?

I don't know. I'm working on making peace with the fact that the next few months, maybe even nine months, will be a work in process, just like the last nine. But one thing I have decided is to pick up one important new habit – going to the gym. To inspire and provoke me in the process, I've signed up to ride my bike in the Pan Mass Challenge. I plan to ride 88 miles on a very hot day in August in order to raise money for Dana Farber. After all, they sent me back out into the world. Isn't it only right that I send something back? And through the process, I hope to find out what's next.

The Chemo 15

Did you know that most people gain weight when they get chemotherapy? I know, all the movies say that you get thin, pale and drawn, but it's a lie. What really happens is that you get puffy and fat. Totally true. Stinks, doesn't it?

Ok, not always true. One patient I know had a horrible time and was so very very sick that she actually lost a lot of weight. She looked fabulous, but it was a heck of a way to go.

So I'm not that girl. I manage to get rid of the sick feeling with crackers - lots and lots of crackers - or maybe a little ice cream or a candy bar. Soup is good - but only if I eat it until I feel full so there isn't any room to feel sick. Pot roast or a little chicken work. So does dry toast and buttered toast. Lots of it. You get the picture.

I look at my bulbous belly with a mix of fascination and horror. I don't think I've ever put on weight so quickly - even when I was pregnant with twins. It is pretty remarkable what the body can do. My own chemical cocktail led me to put on five pounds in just one night recently. It was a crazy mix of fluid and who knows what else, but it completely changed my face.

So I am hoping, actually praying, that all this crazy chemo weight will fall off my body as quickly as it climbed on. After all, I won't need the crackers in a couple of weeks. I might still want a candy bar or two, but I'm betting I'll get my will power back. And hopefully a single chin.

Something New

So I have this cancer thing going on, and I have to say it is pretty much the pits. I'm trying very hard to make lemonade, but some days are very trying.

Earlier this summer, I kept having the thought that I never get sick, that this is so out of the ordinary for me. And then this very wise woman said to me that we repeat and repeat and repeat our life experiences, and then, if we finally get it right, the goddess gives us something new. I'm more into God than the goddess - to each her own - but this thought totally resonated with me. Something new. That's what is happening to me - something brand new. And so I have been trying to keep that in mind as I go through each new experience.

I am someone who loves routine. I am not a person who asks for help easily. If I need help, and I am wildly self-sufficient, I have maybe two people that I will turn to. These last few months I have been completely overwhelmed. Besides the fish and dogs, (the cat ran off when she saw things were going downhill) I have these three gorgeous children to take care of. I decided it was time for something new.

Friends I know wanted to organize meals for our house. Normally I couldn't have stood it. It's too much work - we don't really need it. But the fact is that I do need it. So I decided to look at it as something new. Let people bring food to my house. It won't hurt. They've been bringing dinners now for the past two months that meet our crazy egg-allergy rules. I never would have asked for the help before and I can't tell you how grateful I am to have it.

I cannot drive myself to my chemotherapy treatments. When they started, I couldn't bear the idea of someone that wasn't close to me (i.e. my sweetie) going with me. I didn't think I could be sick in front of anyone. But as it has turned out, people are driving me and it is just fine. I have had someone different take me almost every time, and I have had wonderful days with these fantastic men and women. I am in awe the way they have gone out of their way for me, whether getting heating packs for my arm or running a mile to get me a sandwich I craved. Not a bad lesson in something new.

And then, last weekend, I got the most delightful gift. We had a family wedding and suddenly, as I was on my way to the rehearsal dinner, I felt great. Not simply fine or ok, but really and truly great. And I continued to feel great all through the weekend. Definitely something new!

I'm trying not to think to much about what's ahead, or how all of this is going to impact my family in the long run, but I think we've all got to be better off if I can keep letting go of all the old baggage and keep embracing something new.

P.S. Sorry for the trite little flower picture – I promise to find something with a little more bite when I'm feeling better.

The Gratitude Experiment

As someone who has always been wildly and continuously healthy, I decided that my illness is God's way of giving me the gift of something brand new. Once I started thinking about all of this as a gift, it got me thinking about all the other gifts that have come my way in recent weeks. And thus the gratitude experiment was born.

Sometime each day, especially when it is a day that I feel like crap, I am trying to think of five or six things that I am especially grateful for. There are lots of them – from the fact that my chemo is working to the wonderful dinner someone brought me last night to my beautiful children and the lovely cards and messages that are coming my way. Or the energy that helped me write a new chapter, an incredible sunset, the gentle neck massage I got from my husband and the gorgeous flowers I received from a dear friend. The gifts are everywhere.

In the past, I have tried to remember to be grateful for the things I've been given in my regular life, but most of the time I'm just caught up in the muck of life. So right now, in the interest of doing something new, I am doing the gratitude experiment. I find that there is something incredible about methodically cataloging the big and small gifts received each and every day. My mind gets clear and energetic and I feel especially, vividly alive.

So here's a little gift that I would like to give back to you, in the hope that you won't have to learn this particular lesson in the way that I am. Try the gratitude experiment. See if it works for you. Maybe you could get something out of all this without having to have the cancer - wouldn't that be fabulous? Or rather one more thing to be grateful for?

Curbing My Competitive Instincts

I am a very competitive person. I've learned how to tame it a little bit - so while I don't try to outcook every other dish at the annual teacher luncheon, I can't help taking a furtive look to see how I stack up. (The result of too many hours spent watching Iron Chef.)

But what can I say - I am a younger sister. And one of the curses of being the second child is that you're always trying to do what the older person can do - whether it's walking, crossing the street without an adult, staying up late, or riding your bike to school. The list goes and on and on and on. Trying to do what she can do is programmed into you from the earliest days. First you just want to be like her, then you want to be even better.

It didn't help that I got born into a striving family. I can't remember a time when I didn't know that I would go to college, for example. And it had to be a good one. We heard a lot about the places we could go and the places my Dad wouldn't pay for. Once I actually applied, and really wanted to go to Duke (an approved school) my college counselor told me that out of all the students in my class applying (something like 15) I was the one she was sure wouldn't get in. That made me desperate to go. Luckily, as it turned out, I was one of two who did get in. I was pumped.

So now it's a million years later and I have cancer. I am finding my old competitive thing trying to raise its ugly head. But not in the way you think. It's so insidious. For example, my mother had a very serious stage 3 breast cancer 15 years ago. My instinct would have me be better than her. But I am learning to be very careful in my thinking. It would be very good for her to have the worst breast cancer in my family. She can win. I don't need to out-cancer her.

As they're sharing success stories, people tell me about women they know who have been sick and the size of their tumors. I try to remember that I don't need to have the biggest tumor in the room. Instead, I think about how lucky I am to have a very popular cancer - so many women have it and get cured - and I want to swim in those hundreds of thousands of women who are boringly fine years and years later. I don't want any fancy complications or interesting new diagnoses. I don't want anything rare. Give me an ordinary, run of the mill, easy to get over, lots of research on, easy to remove, tiny cancer. Save that competitive thing for a bake sale. I know, it's still not pretty, but at least no one's health is at stake.

And by the way, years later, I found a copy of my college application and re-read the essays I wrote at 17. There I discovered the secret of my admission. To the question "what will you add to our community," I found that I had the nerve to write that the school would already be filled by incredibly smart, high-achieving brains. So what they needed was somebody interesting to fill out the bottom half of the class - me. I'm guessing that after they fell off their chairs laughing, they said "sure, we'll take her."

My Unexpected Summer

The night before my sweetie and I took our kids on a surprise vacation, I got my own surprise. It was midnight, we were getting up at 3:30 and I wanted to go to sleep. But I couldn't, because the honey was busy doing who knows what with the light on.

So I said to myself, breathe, relax, we're going on vacation. Think about something else. And that's when I decided to do a breast exam. I know, who does a breast exam before going on vacation? Me, I guess. And my surprise was that I found a lump - a big, fat, somewhat hard, lump. I made my sweetie stop what he was doing and come over to feel what I thought I was feeling. We both freaked. And then we decided to pretend nothing had happened. Because we knew that if we stopped everything to check it out, and there was bad news, then there would be all kinds of things to do, and we'd never go away the surprise vacation. One week in the grand scheme of things wouldn't matter. So we got up at 3:30 as planned, woke the kids at 4, went on the vacation and it was truly wonderful. And then I came back to reality.

I have an aggressive stage II breast cancer. In the last seven weeks, my life has completely changed. I strip for anyone. My boobs have been shown so many times that my kids are lucky I'm wearing a shirt. I'm bald and I keep forgetting about it. I am trying to keep my head covered in an effort not to scare small children (or myself, for that matter). It's not elegant or pretty. I have "folliculitis" aka nasty oozing itchy stuff on my scalp which I hope will be cleared up soon with my new potions from Dana Farber.

I have become a champ at taking uncomfortable tests. I thought I was a total wuss. Among the battery of tests I had to go through was an MRI. That's the thing where they shoot you into a tiny dark tunnel.

I really don't like closed in spaces. It's just a little paranoia left over from a summer spent getting stuck in the Brooklyn-Manhattan subway tunnel under the river in a hot, dark, packed subway car. But I'm a trooper when it's a good cause.

I made it through my first MRI by pretending I was having a gentle massage - pretty impressive considering that my boobs were forced down these crazy slots and there were incredibly loud electric sounds every few seconds. (Ok, in the middle I had to stop pretending I was getting a massage and instead imagine being a test subject in a crazy sci fi movie.) I made it through.

But then I had to have a second MRI - this time while lying on my back. Now I'm scared. One of the nurses suggested that I "take a little something" before the test. It would help me calm down. I thought that sounded like a fine idea, so grabbed the newly prescribed bottle on my way out of the house. I first go to my first test of the day, a second biopsy. Waiting with my coffee, it's time to take the happy pill prior to the MRI. I yank the pill bottle out of my bag, ready to get happy. And then I look more closely at the bottle. By mistake, I grabbed the dog's hormone replacement therapy! Cursed canines! They follow me everywhere. But what do you know - turned out they were happy pills.