cancer – day 66
Wow, I haven’t worked in the same office as other people in, gosh, more than five years. It’s different! Not that I’m here every single day (well, ok, I was here every day last week), but I certainly work from here (Mark’s house) more than from my Volcanoville home these days, and this office is now better equipped than my home office (due in large part to the fact that they have a cable modem here instead of satellite!). On the other hand, the view at my home office remains unrivaled . . .
My workday habits haven’t really changed except that I tend to eat more healthily. Well, sort-of, last week we had leftover hamburgers for lunch one day with some hot queso & tortilla chips that I’d brought down from my house that week. And here I am getting grief for eating it (the queso), “you’re the one with cancer!” Puh-leese, if having tortilla chips with queso once in a blue moon is what gave me cancer, I’ll eat my hat! But, credit is due, we haven’t even gotten completely into the whole health thing but I’m already eating more whole foods & organics and all that, and more regularly, and I don’t think I’m even losing weight anymore. That was a scary realization in May, that I’d lost 20-some pounds in a couple months, but I remember one oncologist (the radiation guy, I think) telling me that weight loss is not altogether uncommon in newly diagnosed cancer patients with stress and worry and distraction. Heck, some days I even ate breakfast because I was hungry for it instead of being told to eat, and that’s a huge improvement over my past habits of working at my desk without even standing up until after noon . . .
OK, but today I pretty much didn’t do the healthy thing except that we went for a walk at lunchtime. It didn’t occur to me to have breakfast because it was such a busy day of model testing (ugh, now that’ll make you cross-eyed, looking at spreadsheets full of data all day long), dinner tonight was pizza, and other than those two breaks to eat, I’ve been working all day and evening. About 9:30PM I realized I hadn’t even gotten up from my desk to brush my teeth today! Embarrassing to admit, but truthful. (And yes, my teeth are minty-fresh at the moment, thank you very much.)
I got to talk to Artie’s mom when she called today, I always seem to miss her calls so that was good. She reminded me again about how so many people are praying for me and sending me all their great intentions, and she firmly believes that has contributed to my good recovery status so far and the possibility of not having to do chemo. It’s an amazing thing, the power of intention. I have this cool nine-hour (ok, it’s cool to a geek like me) DVD movie about quantum physics, and part of it is about the power of intention, and there are these really cool photographs of water molecules and how different they are (beautiful, or ugly) after having some specific intention focused on it for some period of time. Interesting stuff.
Apparently a lot of people are reading my blog . . . I must have gotten a dozen e-mails and text messages the last couple days from people telling me to hang in there and call or write them if I needed to talk (not that there’s much to talk about, we’re waiting for the test results and that’s frustrating, not much discussion to be had, what I’ve really wanted was to just be alone and not hurt anyone by lashing out at with frustration). My favorites were from Mike and Phil though, just little messages saying things like “hang in there kiddo, there’s a lot of people rootin’ for ya.” Simple support, but it was just what I needed, you know? Not that having so many people raising their hands to offer up a sympathetic ear like this weekend is a bad thing, of course that’s wonderful. I am pretty surprised at that though, actually. Not because so many people want to be there for me (I can’t even count how many people have done that in the past two months), but that so many people are reading my blog, and are actually up to date! I can hardly even do that! I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails from people offering up contacts of breast cancer survivors too, and counselor-types, and then there’s the counselor with the medical center who calls me, and a counselor with my insurance company who calls me, and breast-cancer survivors who have written to me directly telling me their survival stories which are really inspiring, and Mark . . . lots of people to talk to when I need it, and here I don’t feel like I have anything to discuss. I mean, it’s the wait itself that’s frustrating and causing all this anxiety, not the possible outcomes, and I don’t really know what to talk about with people who offer for me to talk to them about the cancer or treatment or anything. Of course, if I’m journaling and blogging, obviously there must be some part of me that “needs to talk” if only to myself.
Ha. People must find it so amusing when I journal myself in a circle like that.
Tomorrow is Mark’s birthday. I left a little hallmark card on his desk this morning, sort of a it-doesn’t-have-to-be-your-birthday-to-get-a-card cute kind of thing, and tomorrow . . . well, the world will have to wait until tomorrow night to find out what’s in the box that was delivered for him today from ThinkGeek (one of my favorite engineering geek websites), and what’s going on for his birthday. (Well, besides the little weekend in Vegas that I think I’ve already written about).
Oh, and we got my fish on Friday: Rerun, Opie, and Crystal. I’ll have to write about them another day when I haven’t been staring at the computer screen so long.