Posts Tagged ‘breast cancer tips’

Ann’s Diary: Angelina’s Decision

One of the hardest things about this cancer journey is realizing my immature behavior. Please know I am not proud of what I’m about to admit. And understand that I write this down for the world to read if only to look at it myself and try to understand it. And that’s just so that I have a shot at getting passed it and through it, so that I can stop feeling like this…

I’ve had numerous people ask me what I think about Angelina Jolie’s decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy because she has the gene that predisposes her to breast cancer. And I have to tell you each and every time I get asked it’s all I can do to not say “Who cares?”

Now of course I don’t truly feel like that about Angelina Jolie.  I wish her health and hope always, as a woman. As a mother. As a wife, as a daughter…etc. What’s truly going on for me is this: I feel angry about the world’s attention to a starlet who has every opportunity to tell her story, via a New York Times Op-Ed piece, interviews that will definitely be coming on Oprah, and every single magazine cover in the market today including TIME magazine. I am jealous and upset at the attention her “brave” choice–that’s what the headlines are calling it–is getting.  And why is that?

Because: this whole thing crashes up against the reality of my life as it is now. I’m a nobody who can’t get even one speaking engagement unless I happen to be receiving an award at the event.  I’m a person who’s been forced to make dozens of “brave” choices for the last 9 years and it’s all I can do to update my website with photos of me and 6 local girl scouts. Meanwhile, Angelina Jolie makes a non-life-threatening decision based on personal medical history and the spotlight shines on her in ways I would give my teeth to have. And what’s ahead? I’ll call it now: Angelina Jolie will be deigned the “woman who helped save millions with her “brave” decision” to remove her breasts and have them replaced. And I’ll be lucky if the folks at the dry cleaners give me back the right shirts.

I know life is not fair. I know it’s not important to be a celebrity. I know this is how society works–what glitters gets attention. And I realize I have helped hundreds of folks in my own small, tiny, itty-bitty  way–and with luck I will keep doing so for many years to come. But I am inwardly outraged at life as it is playing out now in the cancer headlines and it has nothing to do with Angelina Jolie the future cancer survivor.  Many will listen to her story and read it and absorb it and maybe duplicate it–and save their own lives.  Bravo!  I am thrilled! How could I not be–it’s exactly what I’m doing.  But damn, she sure jumped waaaaaay ahead of me in the make-a-difference category.

So if you ask me about Angelina’s decision to take off her breasts prophylactically and I reply thoughtfully, “It’s her decision. I applaud anybody’s choice to get to their own path of health,” just smile and believe me.

And I will work hard to start to believe me too.

Posted May 20th, 2013 by
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Ann’s Diary: Spinning Out

Some days I swear I’m moving backwards in time.

I don’t mean health wise–as in when I was cancer free and never dreamed I’d get it.  That would be a nice problem to have–but no..

I mean emotionally.

Lately I have been strangely pubescent in moods.  I’m fine.  Then I’m sad.  I’m happy.  Then I’m upset.  At whom is usually the other crazy thing–at people whom I love and who love me.

People who have been nothing but generous and kind, thoughtful and helpful.  Folks who have my best interests at heart 24/7 who, if they knew they’d offended me, would be devastated.  I look at these folks and think, “Ann, all is well. There’s nothing wrong here. It’s just your life. Your life is f-cked up with this cancer and you can’t possibly expect smooth sailing all the time.”

And I reply, “I know, I know–but why can’t I stop feeling like crap?”  And I say back, “I don’t know but get a grip.  You must.  So maybe your peeps make minor verbal faux pas’ that they don’t know bother you.  Tell them and they’ll stop.”

“No, I can’t,” I retort, mad at me for not understanding this cancer space I’m stuck in that forces 95 percent of this awkward, awful headspace into my brain. “I can’t say anything because a) I don’t understand it myself and b) if I try to explain then my pals will walk on egg shells around me afterwards, worried they’ll mess up.  I can’t have that–that’s like another kind of cancer, a social cancer, where you’re something nobody wants to be around.”

“Alllrighty then,” I stare at myself, one eyebrow up and the other hovering over my other disbelieving-what-it’s-hearing eye. “I think you need to take a holiday. Step off, step out–get away from yourself for a while.  You’re going crackers.”

“Yeah, that’s genius,” I think sarcastically.  ”Thanks for the hot tip. Like I didn’t know that.  I came here for answers.  You don’t have answers, you have observations.  I already know I’m spinning out.  I need help to slow the hell down.”

“Well,” I say out loud at me, taking stock in the fact that I’m actually talking to myself–”if I don’t have the answers, who does?”

Of course there is counseling. Of course I will figure this out, eventually.  But lately, this maze of myself has been a hard puzzle to move through–and that’s where the conversation ends today.

And that’s where it begins all over again tomorrow.

 

Posted May 13th, 2013 by
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Ann’s Diary: Yoga Miss

So I didn’t make it to yoga today, like I’d hoped….but not for the reason you might think.

I didn’t go because I was in the company of two amazing friends who’d traveled thousands of miles between them to come visit me and bring me their best wishes of health and support. And I was blown away not just be their clear desire to help me feel better amid this metastatic breast cancer bull sh-t; but also by how wonderful I felt just being in their midst.

Chris, Jen and I grew up together; back in the 1970′s when hanging out meant bell bottoms, Nikes, Danskins and spoons-in-dirt for backyard toys. We had no internet, no cell phones, no texting, no computers–hell, I barely had a bike, since I had to wait for a sibling to outgrow his or hers until I got it.

We did stuff on weekends that was all our own: we made up plays.  We acted out shows.  We did a rousing rendition of “Three Billy Goats Gruff” that knocked the Neighborhood Labor Day Picnic of 1972 on its backside.  We marched in town parades dressed like colonials in 1976. We bought lime rickeys at the Center Dairy Bar and watched “Creature Double Feature” on rainy Saturday afternoons with our hands in front of our faces in case something freaked us out.

We shared schools, snacks, pets and parties. We went trick-or-treating dressed like tigers, gypsies, ghosts and maids. Our parents threw cocktail parties that we went to–because they were out in the collective back yard with the sun shining and we could play and listen and laugh along with the grown ups.

We share memories: I remember the night their grandfather died on Christmas Eve.  I went to the junior prom with Chris–wearing his mother’s dress. I had my first hair style “bun” made my Jen’s mom. And I still can’t watch “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” because of the creepy child-catcher hide-and-seek game that we made up and played in my parents’ dark basement.

As adults, we grew up and away from each other–only connecting on random home-for-the-holidays when one of us would be out walking and see the other one coming from a distance. The “oh my word, how ARE you?” would open up the back story of our childhood and eventually we’d be talking old school, thrown backwards 2 or 3 decades to the days when knocking on each other’s back doors’ was the beginning of a weekend’s worth of non-electronic adventure.

A few weeks ago when I got Chris’s text I thought I had been mis-texted:  it said, “Jen and I want to come and visit you on April 1.  And this is not a joke!” I looked at the number a few times before I realized it was my old pal, visiting his sister and wanting both of them to come see me.  I couldn’t believe the effort they wanted to make.  I was humbled.  And happy.  And having been down cancer’s road once already I knew enough not to put up a fuss.  ”Yes!”  I quickly typed back.

And so they came.

Which is why I was not in yoga today.  I was not down-dogging myself into a peaceful zen room of hope and love this morning as I face my new cancer battle.  But I was in an equally wonderful place: ensconced in a comfort zone that comes from the good fortune of growing up on a street in a small town with kids whom I always loved to be with and who always loved to be with me…

..and apparently, still do.

 

 

Posted April 3rd, 2013 by
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Ann’s Diary: Yoga Fail

I remember the day news anchor Katie Couric looked into the camera on the day she’d returned to work after losing her husband to colon cancer and said something like this:

“And to all of you who endure inconsolable loss and stand gaping as the world keeps moving on without you I say this: I understand.”

That was 15 years ago, and today not only do I remember those words, I live them.

This morning I was ready for yoga.  I haven’t done it since the “big news” of my brain/liver/lung metastatic breast cancer 3 weeks ago–mostly because I haven’t had the time. I was on that treadmill of “what do I do NOW” and busy getting it done. Now that I’ve done the brain radiation, the port, and am on chemotherapy round 2, I was ready this morning to get back to 9 a.m. yoga.

But driving there, I got in a tiff with someone. Then I got bad news about stuff on the homefront. NOT medical. But personal stuff–you know, in the running-of-the-house-and-family category that encompasses but is not limited to bills, kids grades, broken appliances, etc.  Or as I like to call it, the” we-know-it-doesn’t-matter-in-the-scheme-of-things-but-day-to-day-you-can’t-avoid-it-in-real-life”–

until you get a diagnosis like mine and that entire category of life blows up.  Paying off a credit card bill is not as important to me now as planning a family vacation–which puts yet one more emotional divider between me and the non-sick world.

So back to yoga–

there I was, trying to get into the class, but dealing with this “day-to-day” junk that was important and not important at the very same time. The yoga instructor said “grow your breath” but mine stuck in my throat.  She said “jump to the top of the mat” and my feet dragged like logs. “Think of someone you need to forgive” but there were too many choices in my head and I was the biggest one. Then I started feeling sorry for myself. That is the classic sign for me to abort the mission. If I’m going down that road I know I’m losing ground. I rolled up my mat and left the class. No yoga today.

I had prepared myself for possibly leaving yoga but not for emotional reasons. I thought the chemo might make it tough to stand the high heat in there. But It was heat of another kind–the unexpected–”the head trip of life as a woman who may or may not see her kids graduate high school”–that’s another way to put it–that got me. I drove away cursing.  I had so wanted to do yoga.

But as Katie Couric so prolifically said to “me” all those years ago, regardless of my situation life will go on around me–even as my world spins in and out of control.  Some days I’ll handle that motion, and other days I won’t.

Here’s one thing I know: there’s a yoga class next Wednesday at 9 a.m. with my name all over it.

Posted March 27th, 2013 by
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Ann’s Diary: Advice From An Angel

I was just sitting at the grave of my friends’ son who died slipping off a ski lift chair just a year or so ago. He was 7.

I was at the cemetery because I’ve been feeling over the last 5 days that way too many people in my immediate world are assuming I’m going to die from this latest twist in my metastatic breast cancer battle; in my lungs but also now in my liver and brain.

In the 5 days since I found out this news I’ve had my ups and downs, picking at the flower of fear like the daisy you hope will tell you someone likes you: “He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not” or in my case, “I’ll live, I’ll die, I’ll live, I’ll die..” For me, I always land on the good petal–the one where I do well with treatment and look forward to Christmas dinner with my family and friends.

But over the last 24 hours I’ve been knocked to the emotional floor by folks who are my friends who are thinking the bad petal is the given: that I’m not gonna do this.  That I am gonna die–Like soon. As if I’ve already been through the treatment and it’s failed. I gotta tell you, they’re freaking me out.

So why did I go to a graveyard?

Because whenever I walk across the dewy grass to the cemetery spot where JH was laid to rest in December of 2011, I feel a strange sensation that’s both horrible and comforting: I feel like he understands my position.  Who else but a little child stolen from life after only 7 years could, if he were here, look at me and say “believe me, Mrs. Paige, I get it.  This stinks. Makes no sense. I get you.”

In my mind  if not in my soul, right now I desperately need to be with someone who knows life isn’t fair and doesn’t need to say that to me: he represents it.  And somehow for me when I stand there and weep to his gravestone– a gorgeous block-shaped, buffed, black piece of marble with the etchings of a bear and skis on it, I feel supported in my confusion by a little angel who in the 7? 10? seconds it likely took for his life to fall from the sky may have very well felt the exact way I do: “What the heck is going on?”

I actually spoke those words out loud today as I stood rearranging the flowers by his carved name, crying fearful tears. I was mumbling like mad, “Do these  people around me know something I don’t? Am I a fool to believe I can do this?” I could see his little face captured in his last school photo smiling to me like “Yeah, who knows. Isn’t this rich? Who would have thought life would put us here like this?”

I can’t define it any more than to say that having someone–even in spirit–make me feel like I’m not crazy, nor am I dead (yet)– lent me relief that I desperately needed.  And JH knows more than my feeble brain can tell me because I’m still just a human while he’s now part of God’s world—the Infinite Universe- where man and Science and Journals of Medicine don’t hold the answers to why people die.

Now JH knows why we die, when we die–the “real” reasons, not the “because the meds didn’t work” or “because he ate too much fried food”. Or my favorite, the “everything-happens-for-a-reason” earthly bullshit answer everyone gives when they have no other explanation of the frightening realites of how cruel life can be.  Let’s face it, everything happens for a reason until your 2nd grader falls to his death skiing on a blue-skyed, bright sunny day:  after that, nothing makes sense or happens for a reason in this world ever again.

I don’t want anyone to be standing at my grave weeping to me in a year; but at the same time I have to realize that I have no control over that. And thought hard to swallow I have no control over  what people are saying and fearing about my cancer now. I do know this: that may be their reality, but I can’t let it be mine.

What I do have control over is my attitude. I’ll have good days and bad days, that I realize. But I control one thing and one thing only: my outlook.

As I left JH today, I kissed my hand and laid it on top of  his gravestone. And I couldn’t stop myself, still frightened and insecure about my future, to out loud ask him one more thing–  ”Is it over for me, is this it, is this the end?”

Like a whisper in my ear I felt an answer inside me that I had been feeling a few days ago but recent fear had squashed it down to nothing:

“Who knows. Nothing’s a guarantee. No one knows yes, no one knows no.” As I took one last look at that bear and skis on JH’s gravestone I heard one last thing: “But what else can you do but try?”

 

 

 

Posted March 10th, 2013 by
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