Category: The Cielem’el Survival & Growth Journal

Wow, 180 days. That’s the six months marker. Wow. Six months of my life (since cancer diagnosis, when life changed), gone. And years of cancer treatment to come. Hard to believe. The universe conspired against us today. We just spent three hours and twenty minutes trying to get a five-minute blood draw. My port doesn’t work properly, it clots. So […]

Preservation The wave crashes, thins, and disappears Into the ocean’s frayA mass of emptiness Waves surge, coalesce, fade Hiding life beneath the surface Protected by the sun’s inability to fathom the depth Into the sand’s darknessCoolingOther hidden treasuresBuried deep beneath the integument Salt remains, dryingThe wave retreats into itself

MONDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2002 3:00:32 AM MST Bloody weekend on County roads.Four killed, many wounded in rash of car crashes in last two days.By Erin SherbertStaff Writer Four people were killed and more than a dozen injured in a rash of traffic crashes in the County over a two-day period. On Saturday, October 19, at about 10 p.m., a San […]

Road Trip! Long driving day ahead of us, about 400 miles or so from Sacramento to Rancho Palos Verdes where we’re going tonight. Quick trip, we’re coming back tomorrow after I’ve had some time to spend at the cemetery. Hold onto your horses, kids, this is the really big nausea/carsickness test!

My hands are really shaky today, I keep hitting the wrong keys and making typos so bad Word can’t guess any words for what I was trying to type. Argh. I’m home in Volcanoville, and realizing that I don’t know my life anymore. I know that new life down in Sacramento living with Mark and being watched over, the life […]

I’ve been gradually catching back on my e-mail all this time, and I finally worked my way back to all the e-mails I got from people when they first heard about my diagnosis, back in May and June. I hadn’t realized how very many people had written to me back then; there were pages of names in my Inbox. PAGES! […]

Last year, a little more than a year ago now, I was in Albuquerque to dance for a West Coast Swing movie that’s going to come out next March called Love ‘N Dancing. While I was there, my dad’s cousin passed away in Phoenix. Since I had driven to Albuquerque for the movie, I decided to drive back via Phoenix […]

With my hands bothering me so much, I really don’t want to be typing (or touching anything), so I’m cheating a little. Back when we were trying to get cancer medical information on my birth family, I had to fill out these forms to get just medical history, which would mean they delete all contact information, or I could get […]

Cue tears from Chainalytics, AGAIN! Chain called my Dad because they want to pay all of Mom & Dad’s expenses for their entire Team Cynthia Miller Atlanta Breast Cancer walk trip!!! So unbelievably generous, I couldn’t help but cry again at how wonderful these people are and how good they are to me even when I’m not even there. I […]

Tonight Mark and I did something we should have been trying to do once a week or at least every 2nd and 3rd week during chemo . . . we went to a friend’s house for dinner. Food and nausea have been a problem throughout chemo, of course. Eating hasn’t been such a terrible problem, but the smells of food […]

So whatever happened with Dr. Lombardi, why was he suddenly gone from Sutter Cancer Center on an unexpected Friday evening at exactly 5PM? Turns out it was administrative politics, and not the kind that increases quality of patient care. Dr. Lombardi was spending TOO MUCH time with patients, and was working long hours every day to see to it that […]

I was so bummed to realize today how very severely limited (as I put on my granny magnifying specs to see the screen) I’m still going to be after the “official” timeframe for chemo is supposedly done. I want to just jump back into my normal of way being and of doing things and here I can’t even type a […]

Did NOT get the google calendar alarms worked out, tried one more fix then went to a backup on my blackberry instead, now some of the google alarms go off twice and some google alarms still do nothing which leaves my blackberry alarm to the rescue. Trying to keep up with all these meds without alarms to tell when to […]

I take it back, we know more today. I got a phone call from Sutter today. Lombardi is leaving the Sutter practice, and they’ve assigned me to a new doctor for Monday. So some doctor who only knows what’s written about me in a chart is now going to be making a decision that will forever affect either my risk […]

So, good news on the genetic testing front! They tested for BRCA 1 sequencing and a “5-site rearrangement panel” and for BRCA 2 sequencing, and no mutations were detected anywhere. Which basically means that I have a normal risk level of a new breast cancer or of ovarian cancer for someone with the rest of my profile (meaning, for someone […]