Checking In....

It's been quite a week....On Monday I woke up not feeling well.  I got James to school and made it back with Katie and her and I were hanging out on the 4th floor and I started to really feel bad.  By the afternoon I had full blown stomach flu complete with chills, fever, body aches and major dehydration.  Lovely.  Jay came home at 3 and insisted on calling my oncologists nurse.  Once she returned our phone call, almost two hours later, I was fairly certain I knew what she was going to say, come in to the hospital.  By this time, it was almost 6pm and James had a school play that he needed to go to.  I decided to send Jay with the kids to the play and I would find a friend to take me to the hospital.  About 15 minutes later, Jay returned with the kids, as James got sick in the car.  I finally called uncle on the situation and did what anyone does when they reach the end of their rope and don't know what to do- I called my mommy.  So, new plan.  Jay would stay home until my mom got to my house, and I would find someone to take me to the hospital.  Once my mom got there, then Jay would come to the ER to take me home.  So, that is what we did.  Thank you to my friend Haj for answering my call and taking me to the ER.  Thank you to my mom for getting to my house so quickly.  Jay got to the ER after I had been through triage and in a room, with an IV going and my port accessed.  They took lots of blood to test and gave me some compazine through my IV to make me feel better.  They took my blood pressure and heart rate.  Based on my very low blood pressure and my very high heart rate, they admitted me for severe dehydration.  About midnight I made it up to the oncology floor.  After that, things just seemed to get worse.  Every blood draw came back deficient in something. Magnesium, potassium, and finally iron.  I got about 6 bags of saline, a couple bags each of magnesium and potassium, and finally two blood transfusions to raise my iron count.  With each blood draw my white blood count kept reducing so first I was keeping my Wednesday chemo appointment, then it was moved to Friday, and finally it was cancelled.  On Thursday morning, Thanksgiving, they came in and drew my blood about 5am in prep for early rounds.  Finally, everything looked okay, and although my doctor said that if it wasn't Thanksgiving, she'd probably keep me one more day, she let me go home.  Yeah!  So, what I thought would be a few hours in the ER turned into three days in the hospital. 

Thanks to my mom who took care of James all day Tuesday, and stayed to clean and get the house in order until Wednesday afternoon.  (Luckily he didn't get too sick and is back to his normal self.)  Thank you to my mother in law who came over on Wed afternoon to watch James and Katie so Jay could get things done and come visit me at the hospital.  And a big thank you to my sister in law and brother in law who had James and Katie Wednesday night, all day Thursday and Thursday night.  I am sure they  had a super fun time with their cousins and a nice Thanksgiving with the Harris and Mitchell families. 

I am still weak and kind of achy, so I still resting and sleeping a lot.  I am hoping to be back to normal by Saturday or Sunday. 

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!  I am thankful for all the love, prayers, support and concern from my friends and family. 

Bee Movie

The Oak Park Women's Guild held a fundraiser in my honor today at the Lake Theatre in Oak Park.  We saw the Bee Movie.  It was very cute.  It was also Katie's first movie in a movie theatre!  I think her favorite part was the popcorn.  Thank you to the Oak Park Women's Guild ( www.oakparkwomensguild.org ) for holding an event in my honor and thank you to all of you that attended.  I am very touched by the outpouring of support I am receiving from family, friends and the community. 

Update....

So I had my first treatment last Thursday.  It went ok.  It is a longer process, the medicine drips in for more than hour.  Halfway through I started to feel nausious.  Not good.  By the time I was done on Thursday it was almost 5:30, my mom and James picked me up and I came home, ate a little bit and went to sleep.  I didn't wake up until almost 12 hours later.  On Friday I felt nausious and tired, but not as bad as I did on Thursday night.  By the evening though, I was feeling pretty good.  This medicine is again cummulative, and I am hoping that the medicine's effects don't get much worse as time goes on.  But I will deal with it if it does. 

Saturday I felt well enough to venture back to the gym with Jay and the kids, hadn't been there for 5 months!  We then went to lunch in Des Plaines at the Choo Choo Cafe- one of James and Katie's favorite places to eat.  They bring your food to you via train car.  Sunday we went to church and James to Sunday School, and then in the afternoon we went to family swim at the gym.  It was fun but the water is so cold!  They need to turn up the heat on that pool.  All in all it was a nice weekend.

Today I went to the gym again.  Figure I may as well use it while I am feeling good.  It is surprising how good I feel, on good days.  I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrors a few times while working out today and at first I didn't recognize myself.  I feel like my outside doesn't match my inside.  After I finished working out I was going to shower at the gym, but I haven't figured out how to do that there just yet.  I don't want to scare anyone with my bald head and scarred up body.  When Katie and I were getting ready to go swimming, I was trying to quickly take my hat off and put my swimcap on while no one was around.  Do you know that it is very difficult to put a swim cap on a bald head? Well I didn't either, until I tried.  I ended up picking it up across the room where it landed after it shot off my head.  And of course two girls about 12 walked in while I am standing there with a bald head trying to wrestle this cap on my head.  Great.  They handled it pretty well though, better than I probably would have at 12. 

After the gym today, I picked Katie up from Kid's Club and she wanted a bagel.  So, we went next door to Bruegger's and got her a blueberry bagel- her favorite.  It was so much fun to just sit with her and watch her eat and talk with her.  She is just so sweet and is turning into such a big girl.  What a blessing it was to just sit and enjoy Katie. 

This weekend is the Bee Movie fundraiser that the Oak Park Women's Guild is holding in my honor.  I am truly touched by their thoughtfulness and hard work in preparing this fundraiser.  Here are the details if any of you find yourself with a free morning this coming Saturday and want to join us at Lake Theatre 1022 Lake Street, Oak Park.  Doors open at 9:30....

James the Musician / Performance Artist...

Okay all...

One of James' favorite toys is Kari's iPhone.  Mostly he play games on it, but he really likes to play with the voice recorder.  He had the idea yesterday to grab the guitar that Rob & Audrey have him for Chrstmas a few years ago and record an unplugged session. 

Here is his first piece titled "Tribute to Mommy". 

The second one is a little more avant garde.  It starts off as an instrumental then morphs into a psychadelic, guitar-smashing climax.  He left the piece untitled.  You can hear it here. 

Enjoy!

Jay

T'was the Night Before Chemo...

So it is the night before my next round of treatment begins... the last night of my break.  Jay came home from work, we had a nice dinner then he bathed and put Miss Katie to bed and took James downstairs to watch videos on how things are made (the kid is going to know more than me in about 5 seconds if he keeps this level of curiosity up) and I decided to take a bath.  A nice long bath with the jets on and a Lush bath bomb.  I even took my book that I'd forgotten I didn't finish with me.  And I finished it.  After I got out I realized that I had spend more than an hour and a half in the bathtub!  It's amazing I didn't shrivel up.  But it was wonderful and I feel ready to take on tomorrow and the next 12 weeks.  I have enjoyed my break and found it so easy to shed the daily ritual of shots and medications.  I even started feeling really good and getting energy back. It is surprising how quickly you can fall in and out of a routine.  I'm glad for this little break as it helped me realize there is light at the end of this year long tunnel, and I will eventually return to my old self.

The book that I finally finished was Eat, Pray, Love, and no, I haven't seen the movie yet.  But I did enjoy the story about finding yourself and some wisdom that I can apply now.  The last paragraph of the Final Recognition and Reassurance (I always read the acknowledgements) particularly hit home for me.  It says "In the end though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives.  In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices."  I keep saying how I can never repay everyone for their kindness and generosity, but I can promise to pay it forward.  While I continue to pledge that I will continue to be community service oriented and stay involved in the activities and organizations that I am already a part of, I felt a relief almost in reading this paragraph.  Relief from the realization that people are not helping me because they expect me to pay it forward, or pay it back one day, or anything else.  The miraculous scope of human generosity is helping me and my family from the goodness of their hearts. 

Funny Story Sidenote:
Funny story about the Lush bath bombs that Jay will tell you if he ever gets a chance, he thinks it's hilarious.  The first time we went to London was the summer we got married.  It was a fabulous summer.  I ended the school year about the middle of June, we got married June 29th, we went to St. Lucia for our honeymoon for a week, came home for about two weeks and then Jay had to go to London for business so I went along.  I had this Lucky magazine that I brought along with me as it had a whole shopping section about London and all the places you had to visit.  Lush was one of them.  Turns out we did not stay in London proper, but were about an hour and a half or so outside of London, in Swindon.  Minor details, right?  Not a lot of shopping in London, when you are really in Swindon.  Anyway, we spend the week in Swindon and took the train into London for the weekend.  Now I was going to get to do some shopping! My new husband, wanting to be supportive of what I want to do asks where I want to go.  I say Lush!  He says where is it, so I show him the map in the magazine.  Turns out it's in Covent Gardens (I'll never forget it because it is a beautiful place) which is nowhere near where we are on the tube, but Jay figures it out and we eventually get there.  We find Lush, I am super excited, we go in.  Jay spends about 30 seconds in there before his allergies go haywire and he has to run out, leaving me, the overspender/shopper to fill my backpack to the brim with Lush products.  45 minutes later I emerge, backpack heavy with all the cool stuff I have purchased.  I declare I am done and we can now do whatever he wants to do.  So, we hop back on the tube to go see all the touristy things in London we wanted to see.  For the rest of the weekend we pass literally 15 Lush's.  They are like the Walgreens of London.  They are everywhere.  With each passing Lush, it gets more hysterical and Jay makes the joke, look honey, there's a Lush, I am so glad we rode on the tube for 45 minutes to find that one Lush that exists in London.  To which I point out the magazine didn't say there were multiple locations.  The punchline to this whole story is that at the airport coming back home, we are wasting time while we wait for the plane, and yes folks, there is a Lush in the airport.  I lugged around 15 pounds of bath products for an entire weekend, when I very well could have bought them at the airport.  I did the only thing I could do.  I went in and bought a few more and stuffed them in my carry on.  A few years later, Jay and I went into the Oak Brook Marshall Fields to do some shopping and guess what they had? A whole Lush shop. I promptly pointed out how cool we were because not only did we know about Lush before it came to the states, but we had gone out of our way to visit one in London.

Lesser of Two Evils... and Lessons...

Cancer is evil and a lot of the time I feel like the choices I have to make are not really choices.  They are picking the one that I feel is better at the time, or picking the one that makes me feel better mentally, but not necessarily physically.  For example:
-Chemo.  To imporve the odds of 10 year survival it was recommended that I undergo chemo and radiation.  Seems like a nobrainer right? Pick the chemo and radiation.  But then you get this super long list of side effects and they are pretty scary.  Then you get the lesson about what chemo does.  It's posion that is pumped into your body to destroy any free cancer cells that are roaming your body.  But it destroys them along with the good cells in your body.  It's like turning the light off in a room by blowing the room up.  You are destroying a whole lot of good stuff too. 
-What kind of chemo? So now I have decided that I will do the chemo, regardless of the side effects, and then they ask me if I want to participate in a research study.  My first reaction is no, I want standard drug care that others with my type of breast cancer get, but then they share the study with me.  It is nothing new drug-wise, the drugs are standard, proven cancer drugs, but the way they deliver them is what is different.  There are 4 arms of the study and I would be randomized into one of those four arms.  So instead of doing 6 weeks of standard chemo, I could end up being randomized into a group that takes up to 29 weeks to complete.  I decide to do the research study as it is drugs given over a longer time that will increase my odds of survival, and of course I get randomized into the longest study.  Good in that I get the longest treatment possible, bad in that it will take me so long to complete treatment.
-Reconstruction.  At the time of my double mastectomy the doctors did not recommend doing reconstruction since I needed to undergo radiation, so I got expanders put in.  Good in that it gives me the ability to stetch my skin and get the surgeon skin to perform the reconstruction, especially if radiation destroys some of the skin, but bad in that these things are uncomfortable.  They are not me so they do not move and stretch with me very well.  They make sleeping on my side difficult, and they make laying with my children difficult.  It hurts when they rest their heads on me, but it is a hurt that I endur as it hurts too much mentally to not cuddle with my children.  It's also hard knowing that when the reconstruction surgery is done, I will have another 6 weeks of not being able to pick up anything heavier than a gallon on milk, and again relying on people to do a lot for me.
-Ports.  I got a port put in so that I wouldn't destroy the veins in my left arm, the only arm that blood can ever be drawn from, or blood pressure taken from, because of the number of lymph nodes taken from my right side.  Seems again, a no brainer to have this thing inserted into you so that blood draws and chemo infusions are easy, but no.  It is a bumpy thing that sticks out of my upper chest and itches and causes pain at times.  It shows with most of my shirts, it made me sick when it was put it, will probably make me sick when it is taken out, and when my kids accidently elbow me in it, it hurts.  It is also on the side that I hold my kids when I carry them, so it gets bumped and elbowed a lot. 
-Hair.  I miss my hair.  I knew my hair would fall out and I thought I will be ok with it.  In the grand scheme of things, this is not the worst thing that is happening to me and it will grow back. Plus, not shaving my legs will be kind of a nice break.  Well, as is the norm, nothing is normal or pedicatable.  While all the hair on my head fell out, I do have a little stubble on my head, just enough creep me out when rub my head.  My eyelashes have just about all fallen out, my eyebrows are very thin, but still hanging in there, and the hair on my legs, it's still growing, slowed down considerbly, but I still have to shave. 
-Expense.  Cancer is expensive and I am fortunate in that I have a lot of very generous friends and family that have organized fundraisers in my honor. As much as I appreciate and need this kind of help, it is very hard to accept.  It is hard to accept help when I have always been able to provide for myself and now I can't.  I can't work with the treatments and the side effects, and I regret stopping teaching sometimes because now I would have insurance and a job to go back to when I felt better.  However, I would not have had the experiences with my children that I have had the last 5 years staying at home with them.  Plus, who is going to hire a bald person that looks sick?
-Help.  People have not only been kind in donating and fundraising for me, but they have also been so kind in making meals for my family, taking my kids on playdates, taking me out and cheering me up.  It's so wonderful that everyone is so generous with their time, treasure, and talent, but sometimes it is so hard for me to accept- especially when I am the one who is used to giving and not recieving.  Sometimes people drop dinners off and I feel so guilty, like I really could cook a meal, and then a break happens and I realize just how bad I have been feeling and just how much I really did need those meals as it would have been very hard for me to shop and prepare that food for my family.  It's also hard since I know that I will never be able to repay everyone for all thier kindness, but as I have said in the past, I will continue to pay it forward whenever I can. 

But having cancer has taught me a lot of things, and has given me a lot of gifts.  Weird sounding huh? But other than your wedding, have you ever stood in a room full of people who were there because they truly cared about you and are ready to support you? I have. And it was wonderful to know that I have so many people that are there for me, not only when times are good, but there to pick me up and carry me through the bad times.  It's wonderful that when I go somewhere, I usually see someone I know and they are asking me how I am doing, how my family is doing and telling me they are praying for me and thinking about me.  When I first was diagnosed I would dread running into people I knew.  Worried they may be thinking that if I was well enough to be out and about, I was well enough to make meals, take my kids places and do the things they were helping me do.  Then I realized that was not what people were thinking and that they truly realized I needed help and wanted to help me.  I also realized I needed to try to continue my every day life as normal as possible for many reasons.  First I told myself I needed to do this for my kids, then it was for me, to keep my spirits up and now it is for everyone.  I want to show myself, my kids and the world that I value the things that I do, how I spend my time is a choice.  Yes, I get the things I need to get done done, the errands, the things around the house, but I also make better choices about what I spend my time doing.  I do things I enjoy along with the things I have to do.  I make the choice to go to activities that are important to me, to see the people that are important to me, as well as to do the things I know I need to do.  Yes, there are things I that I'd like to do, that I just can't.  I am too tired, or too sick, or too busy with treatments to do everything I did before, but I am learning to be ok with that.  I am learning to say no, and not feel guilty about it.  I am learning to not take on so much, to schedule down time with my family, spend time with my friends, and find a way to participate in things that I value, but in a way that I can make sure I am not taking on too much.  When I make a committment to do something, I have to follow through, so I am learning to not over commit myself, something I tended to do before cancer. 

I am also trying to enjoy myself more, and live more in the moment.  I always loved spending time, as well as going places, with my Grandma Kutlzer for whatever we did,  we always had a good time.  I was thinking about her recently and wondering why I have all these good memories of things that were really not that exciting growing up.  I mean, my grandparents took me on a lot of exciting trips, and did a lot of special things for me, but they also did a lot of every day things with us.  I realized that no matter what it was that I did with my grandma, a special occassion or just an every day activity, she always had this smile on her face and this twinkle in her eye.  We could go out to the fanciest dinner, or she could come over for take out chinese on a Sunday afteernoon, and she would have the same smile on her face.  I realize now that she was enjoying herself, truly enjoying herself and that is why she was so happy.  She was in the moment, living, caring and being who she was.  She wasn't distracted with what she needed to do at home, what else she could be doing, or what other people were thinking.  She lived honestly, did what her heart told her was right and cared about people.  She valued her family and her friends.  Had a soft spot for animals, especially strays.  Loved the beach and the water. Cared about people and found happiness in every day activities.  Maybe that is what cancer taught her, and maybe that is what cancer is teaching me too. 

Halloween Fun!

Here are some pictures of Katie and James at Halloween.  Katie was a ballerina and James was buzz lightyear.  We went trick or treating with Caroline and Olivia!

Out trick or treating!

Katie and mommy

playng in Aunt Audrey's witch hat!

Pretty ballerina Katie!

I love my tutu!

Break...

Just an update that I am enjoying my break from chemo and we had a ncie time in Lake Geneva and trick or treating for Halloween.  I will post pix of all of it soon.  Jay is in Vegas for the SEMA show and pictures are on his camera.  Thank you for all your continued support and prayers.