Mini-break

After I met Pete for the first time and fell hard for my blonde Kanye, I asked our mutual friend, M, whether she thought he would be interested in a busted dame like me.

I was already in love, but one giant indicator was telling me to run far away: he was just that very second getting out of a long-term relationship with someone who liked to kayak as much as he did. I was about as outdoorsy as Zsa Zsa Gabor, without the wealth or good manners with police officers, and I had never been in a relationship that lasted longer that a Daft Punk song.

"I think Pete needs a little time to figure out who he is," M said wisely.

She was right, but another thing I'm no good at is being patient, so I damned the torpedoes and continued to flirt with my future boyfriend. 

After a few cutesy lunches and walks around our mutual workplace in Burnaby, Pete was inspired to lend me a book of Vancouver walks with his name and number written inside the cover and then waited for me to figure out it was a silent invitation and not an indication of his fear of having his precious guidebooks ne'er returned.

More than 13 years later, I'm still mad about the boy, and want to hang out with him every day and go for long walks.

Pete took some time off this week because we haven't had any extended opportunities since my re-diagnosis in February to just be, sans kids. No cancer shizzle. No schmoop. No talk of what kind of stripper he'll marry if I can't crush this thing as expected. Not that we deteriorate into that stuff on the regular, but sometimes, between the kids and his work and the general running of our lives, we have to cram in a bit of everything in the couple of hours we steal for each other at night.

With entire days to fill with just hanging out, I forgot about il cancro. Like, almost completely at times. 

It generally never goes away entirely, which I don't mean to make sound dire, but when you're trying to be badass, you have to be diligent, which means staying well is always top of mind. I don't wake up crying into my Holly Hobbie pillowcase or go to bed depressed, but on most days, cancer is an agenda item that I'm ticking off over and over again, and it gets a bit much.

The respite with Pete has been glorious, especially since I've been feeling completely fantastic for the first time in months. We lunched, shopped, walked, talked, cooked, cleaned, watched ridiculous Italian travel shows, and just generally enjoyed being boyfriend and girlfriend.

I also fell in love again for the 20,000th time, in a slightly different way that can only come with the shit we've been through together. 

But more than anything else, I lived like a person without this blasted disease. Thanks for the mini-break, Mr. P.

Signs

Frances has been up to her old tricks lately, waking up in the middle of the night to tell me she's scared, or has to pee, or remembered that she forgot to pick up a quart of milk, a stick of butter and a loaf of bread.

I try to be as polite as possible during our 3 am meet-ups, peering over her upper bunk with half-opened eyes, shivering from her stand-up fan and just generally drunk with drowsiness and trying to get the whole transaction over with before my body realizes it's upright.

As a result of these nocturnal interruptions, evenings have been sleepier and mornings tougher to take.

Last Tuesday night around 9:30, I was ready to catapult the kids into bed and fall asleep to a good foreign home-buying show when Stella passed me a note that said:

I feel adventurous tonight and want to go for a drive in the dark before bed. Pleeeease?!

I couldn't resist.

We all hopped in the car - the girls and I in jammies and Pete in more civilized shorts. It was getting cold so I pulled on my giant hoodie with "Bad ass" on the front, put on my purple librarian glasses, washed off the eyebrows and let my patchy brush cut fly free through the open window.

We no sooner turned the corner when I saw our next door neighbours' chihuahua being walked by a stranger. I peered into the woman's face and realized as we were passing that it was the Loch Ness monster of our neighbourhood: my oncologist. She looked at me, I looked at her and we stared at each other like we'd never met.

Even though Dr. A lives just up the road, I've seen her only twice before - once when she was driving down our street in her old Honda and once when she was dropping off keys next door so my neighbour's mother could house sit for her while Dr. A went to Palm Springs.

Each time, seeing her was like seeing a teacher outside of school: surreal and awkward.

Shortly after this, we drove up to UVic and promptly got rear-ended while we waited to get onto Ring Road. Pete and the new driver exchanged heated words while the the dude refused to admit he hit us, so I did what I do best and stepped in.

I emerged from the passenger side, in full jammie'd, badass, glasses, patchy-haired glory and said, "Are you REALLY denying you hit us? I felt it, my kids felt it, my husband felt it..."

The driver looked me up and down for a second and said quickly, "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry."

Then I realized I looked like the perfect cancer patient, deserving of your sympathy and pithy inspirational quotes, not the badass I thought I was. Ugh.

The next morning I was beat and decided to sleep in an extra 30 minutes. By the time I got gussied up to go on my walk, a whole different, more intense breed of people was out on the streets instead of my usual sleepy compadres. As I pulled Lucy close to me, balancing a full bag of dog shit and making room for a couple of focused Oak Bay runners with their black lab, I looked at the man's face to say good morning and saw it was my plastic surgeon, Dr. T.

I get it, universe.

With the runway leading to my PET scan now littered with rose petals and set to the latest Euro-pop and just the right shade of orange lipstick, the sight of two of my major medical team players plus my fear realized that I look more patient than model badass these days are all signs that I can't let up on the road to breaking up with my cancer boyfriend forever. I need to work, bitches.

I've had a few moments lately, as my hormones come back into circulation, when I've thought, "can I just have a day when all this shit is not so bloody top of mind?!", but the woman who thinks those whiny thoughts is a damn baby.

As the incomparable Kate Moss said, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels... or something, something, cancer sucks, something, something, don't lose focus.

Numb

I got a curveball yesterday when I met with Dr. A.

I had aced my side effects test with the nurse during my pre-cycle 6 consult but just after she told me she wanted to clone my blood (except the cancer part, peut-être), I told her my neuropathy was progressing.

Neuropathy is nerve damage in your extremities from things like diabetes or chemo, and over the past month or so, I've been noticing tingling in my toes and fingers... not enough to keep me from jammin' on the 6-string with my garage band, but enough to notice when I tie my runners too tight or wash dishes in hot water. 

The way the cancer docs see it, a little nerve damage is okay, but if it gets to the point where you can't do up the pearl buttons on your cardigan, the chemo drug causing the neuropathy must be shot down from the Empire State building.

In my case, it's the Coke Classic of chemo drugs - Taxol - that's doing the damage. It's also responsible for the other typical side effects, including my teenage skin, eyebrow removal, loss of taste and digestive woes. It's the drug that takes the longest to infuse, the one I need to pair up with a bump of Benadryl and a steroid, and the one I actually feel going into my jugular during some sessions, filling me up with a sick, poisonous warmth.

When Dr. A came in the room after the nurse had left, she said she was concerned about the neuropathy.

"We've been very aggressive with your unusual weekly treatments... we took a big chance with you and you've handled it all very well, but this is a judgement call now. There's no real evidence that 8 cycles is more effective than 6, so I recommend we stop the Taxol now."

"Um... I haven't started the sixth yet..."

"Oh... let me look back at things here." Flip, flip, flip goes my giant binder of all things cancer.

At this point I'm thinking Dr. A needs to get to her French chateau, stat. Or at least get a proper assistant to brief her before every appointment. And when I see I weakness, even outside my area of expertise, I get all control-y and assert myself more than usual.

"I feel quite comfortable going ahead with the Taxol to complete cycle 6," I said in all my infinite cancer-trained wisdom. "The neuropathy isn't that bad and I'd like to see this through."

Dr. A got that faraway, focused look on her face, smiled a bit and nodded at absolutely nothing, like she was listening to my 6-year old yammer on about how some dogs are brown, but others aren't. We sat in silence like that for an awkward 20 seconds. 

"I recommend we stop the Taxol now," she said.

Apparently, the nerve damage can continue past the last session, and she didn't want me to turn into a 42-year old with completely numb hands and feet, so the risks outweighed the benefits in her mind. I could have pushed, but I had nothing to offer up and this is Dr. A's only wheelhouse. She knows chemo like no other doc. I couldn't take that away from the little lamb. So I relented.

This means that beginning today, my chemo consists of two drugs, not three. It also means chemo moves from weekly to every three weeks. No nasty steroid and Benadryl side effects, perhaps a growing of caterpillars over my eye holes and an official move to phase two of my treatment, a whole three weeks early.

It seems fitting to insert a gigantic "YAY" here, but like everything in cancer land, a girl needs to take a moment to process and get out of the numb state of a curveball first. 

Chemo is like a safety blanket - albeit one that stinks like shit and slaps you across the face when you're not looking - but a safety blanket nonetheless. Taxol, which comes from the bark of a yew tree, is one of the only proven drugs used to treat metastatic breast cancer that's been around for decades. So it's a jerk, but it still mops your floors. And now our relationship is over for good. 

I'm still in for several more months of chemo, but dependent on how today goes, the side effects may be minimal. And if the PET scan in August shows good news, I will move on to phase three, where the chemo-lite continues but I move onto more dignified conversations about radiation and surgery.

Fuck it. Let's give this unexpected news a big "YAY" for now. I'll move on from the relationship and figure out a way to reverse the neuropathy, even though Dr. A said, with a touch of medical smugness, that nothing helps and only medication can address any pain. 

When my garage band goes big, the good doc will get front-row seats, so she can see my fingers happily bleeding and gets the spit flying from my microphone as I swing it all Joey Ramone stylez. 

In praise of 42

Esquire says this is the year of the 42-year old woman. Praise be. If this undisputed fact can counteract the horribleness that people (like me) born in the year of the rat are going through in 2014, even better.

The big problem with Esquire’s claim, other than the obvious sexism and general bullshit of the mag, is that their 42-year women look like Sofia Vergara, Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Garner and Carla Gugino. All symmetrical babes, to be sure, but in the same bodacious, traditionally feminine kinda way. Boring.

Listen, I love curves. I love long hair. I love appropriately drooped (or not) breasts. But madre de dios, I’d love to see a wider range of woman encouraged to show up in wet dreams.

I turned 42 last Friday and have skin like a teenage boy, a sparse buzz cut that releases hair on the regular, like a Charlie Brown Christmas tree, no eyebrows, one tit, a boatload of scars and a body more like an H than an 8. And despite the eye-opening days of early Women’s Studies classes, trading my thigh-high socks for Fakenstocks to really deconstruct all that gender shizz while sitting beside the white guy in the dreadlocks with the soul-searching demeanour I wanted to smack off his face, I’m still working on figuring out the femininity question.

The fact that I’m even thinking about something relatively nuanced like femininity and not maudlin garbage like death by 43 is score one for my state of mind lately. Between the chemo side effects, I’ve been feeling great, especially upstairs, but it's been a conscious choice after a period of self-inflicted hibernation.

I’ve been waking up at 6 am to walk (even this morning, the day after the end of chemo round 5), I’m off white flour and all non-fruit forms of the crack known as sugar (that's a whole other post) and am just generally feeling entirely hopeful and grand about life.

So I uphold Esquire’s assertion that 42 is the absolute shit. I’m not represented in their list of babes, but I feel more like myself today than I did back when I rocked the F-cups. I still hate the pitying looks from strangers when they put 2 and 2 together with my missing eyebrows, lopsidedness and Sluggo hair, but I care less about perception than I did 20 years ago. And I have zero desire to return to the university me, trying to figure out whether it’s ok to look like a ho-bag and study the history of feminism at the same time (if I knew now what I knew then, I’d keep the thigh-high socks a little longer).

Even if I’ve been looking more like David Bowie lately than a parasol-carrying babe, I’m praised often by my live-in boyfriend, who may be sucking up, but I don’t care.

And maybe the whole point of this exercise is that my girls will grow up knowing a woman who looks a tad strange but manages to walk tall despite it, can squash rogue cells with her every fibre, make a mean chicken Milanese and argue the panties off anyone who dares cross her. It's a small percentage of womenfolk I'm influencing, but that uni degree is finally coming in handy.

Cramming

Since my very first deadline, back around the time Xanadu was born and I was wearing the shit out of barrettes with ribbons attached, I've been a crammer. I get all serious like in the days or hours before the thing is due and spend the rest of the lead up doing something more fun, like looking at the room and seeing it needs sweeping.

I can't really blame this one on my parents, but maybe it has to do with birth order and my two older brothers; getting either "oooh, you'll do very well then!" or "oooh, we better watch out for you", depending on which one of them I mentioned to my teacher at the start of the school year. I needed to strike out on my own - to not be the smart, kind one, or the sporty, sassy one, but to be the one who kept you on your toes, always guessing.

Actually, I've done my own 30-second psychoanalysis on this one. I was terrified that if I put too much work into something and did a mediocre job, that my sense of self would be shattered. If I did everything last minute, and got a decent mark, I could always tell myself that if I'd tried harder, I could've joined the 100% club. Classic fear of failure stuff.

Now I'm in the 6-week run up to my second PET scan on August 27, and I had a moment last week of realizing I was doing the same fucking thing I've done all my life. I was doing most things half measure and planning everything for "after chemo", like I was a normal, healthy person who had all the time in the world to figure this shit out.

Sure, I'm walking almost every day, eating better than I ever have and trying to reduce or rather differently process stress, but in the serious scheme of things and the spirit of wanting to live forever, I'm still dabbling. I'm still often behaving like I've had a first-time, early stage cancer diagnosis or worse, like a woman who switches to almond milk because her girlfriends said it was "sooooo good for your skin."

I have aggressive cancer, and I haven't been aggressive enough.

Last week, the heart test results gave me some control back and on Friday, my lack of real dedication hit me like a big crashing wave. I had Pete beside me on a walk along Turkey Head to reflect my jumbled state and we came across a park bench with a memorial dedication for someone I knew, also born in 1972, who died in a motorcycle crash several years ago. I was humbled.

Since then, I've felt renewed. I've got 6 weeks to study for this PET scan and not only am I already deep into the run-up, I'm ready to get the gears from all of yous for a less-than-stellar outcome. No more cramming.

Also, I look like an androgynous imp these days and those Xanadu barrettes would NOT go with my new faux hawk.

Stronger

I hate to admit that cancer has the power to give me my highs and lows, especially when I'm more of an in-the-middle type of girl, but I had a smack and a tickle all in one go today, c/o the administrative side of the disease.

I had my three-month echocardiogram on Friday, with the kids holed up in the waiting room on iPads while I had suctions stuck to my torso and an ultrasound wand slipping around my heart. At last check, in March, my heart showed some deterioration from the Herceptin the last go-round, so Dr. A has been ever-vigilant about ensuring I get no further damage this time.

We started our appointment today with her looking with concern at my test results and telling me there has indeed been degradation. She read out the results word for word, which is very her and was uber helpful, because it contained a lot of cardiologist lingo that made me drift to Tuscan sunsets and the perfect Chianti.

She recommended I see another cardiologist and that we eliminate the Herceptin and Pertuzamab for tomorrow's start of round five while everyone figured out what the fuck to do with my ancient heart and its failure to cooperate. I was focused on the delays all of this would cause and started to sink into the practical, but depressive acceptance I've come to know well.

But because I also take great joy out of annoying my oncologist, I started to ask a bunch of questions until eventually she looked down at my giant cancer binder with confusion and said, "I think I may have the wrong report." Then she leaped out of her chair and stormed out of the room, leaving me to ponder how much shit whoever handed her that report would be in.

Ten minutes later, she returned, red in the face. "I'm so sorry. Someone handed me that report and it was from your last test in March. I'm very very sorry."

"No worries, doc," I said. But I didn't say "doc" because I'm not from the 1950s.

As she promised to call me later with the actual results, the actual results suddenly knocked on the door and handed themselves to her.

She read them quickly and then smiled her little chipmunk smile and exclaimed, "Oh! Your heart has improved! That's very unusual."

Yeah, bitch, cuz I be walkin' 5 km a day since April. That's why your little test was no match for my gigantic heart (actually, I think size and actual hearts are not good bedfellows, but whatevs).

So despite the machine gun blasts of chemo every week, I'm stronger than ever.

I felt like that Wildling giant from GOT. I could pound logs into the frozen ground!

Rather than ask her if I could go away on an international trip in September, I told her the plans were set. She wrote down the dates and she said she'd be close by, in the south of France, at the exact same time. And she said it in such an encouraging way that I got the feeling if I phoned her all panicky because of some cancer question in the middle of my squid ink pasta in Venice, that she'd gladly take my call in her chateau.

We came to a new understanding today, Dr. A and me. She's capable of making mistakes. And I am capable of annihilating this cancer so hard, they'll have to come up with a brand new word for me.

Forgetful

I'm getting forgetful.

Don't call on me if you need someone to phone in an emergency or play $25,000 Pyramid. Unlike the affliction where you can't remember who played the mom in Family Ties, regular, useful words like "tent" or "door" or "fugly" have lodged themselves in a part of my brain that is no longer producing enough new cells to keep the flow going.

This is annoying for a person who likes to think she writes. I wish the forgetfulness would settle in other regions of my short- or long-term memory. Like that time I danced for hours with someone I thought I had recently gone on a date with, only to realize it was a different guy. I don't need that one anymore. Or what about when I thought I was ordering "that donut thingy" in the window of a Turkish cafe and was then presented with a plate of shaved, unidentifiable meat that I had to eat in shame. That one can go, too.

Actually, what I'm needing a big break from these days is my bloody self. I've been stuck in a bit of "I'm sick of cancer" ennui recently, and it's not attractive. Sometimes a girl just wants a day where everything doesn't have to have meaning or self-improvement purpose. Like getting teary at my favourite escapist living abroad TV show because shit, man, I'll never get to go there. Or projecting into the future when my daughters could produce or adopt some little sprites and not experiencing the rush of loving kids who didn't come from my immediate womb.

Listen, I know there's a chance I could beat this cell division business for realz, clean up my act and live to be 100 with the help of good living and good drugs. But the reality is, probably not. And I know that any living human could be gunned down, run down or smashed by a falling frozen hunk of airplane toilet sludge at any moment of the day. Life is short. I GET IT! But before cancer, those possibilities were whimsical, not at the front of my brain every single day.

It's even difficult to do unusual things for me, like go to Diner en Blanc, without assigning some kind of bucket list cliche to them instead of just experiencing it.

One thing that's moving me outside the realm of maudlinville is planning our trip in September. We've chosen Italy, because it was the place I would most regret not bringing my kids to if I kicked it in the near future. But beyond that initial morbid thought, the trip is completely impractical, which I love.

I could find out some bad shit from my echocardiogram next week. I could find out some bad shit from my second PET scan in August. I could find out some bad shit if this chemo stops working. It's all entirely possible and a completely idiotic state to be planning an international trip around. But I don't care. I'm done with letting my cells determine my fate.

So we're leaving on September 26 and going to San Gimignano, then Venice, then Rome.

And despite my objections to the cliches of cancer, this one is a bit of a bucket list destination. Besides counting half my self as Italian (sometimes it's the top half, sometimes the bottom), when I was 22, donning Bjork buns and in Venice with my cousin Tasha and her boyfriend (now husband) Dave, I promised myself, sitting in Piazza San Marco, gazing up at the pink lights in the square and hearing  three different string quartets playing to the lap of waves in the Grand Canal that I would come again when I was madly in love.