Team DeAnne

Summer’s here, and I’m not!  It seems that I’m only home long enough to mess up my house, then sleep, then go out for more fun!  I scarcely even think of cancer these days…except for when I have to put on my darn wig. 

Yes, the chicken feathers are getting darker like my old natural hair color, but they are still so short. 

But yesterday I did actually go out of the house sans-wig!  An old friend is still in town from last weekend’s reunion, and she and I and her two children met two other old friends from school and rode canoes down the Russian River.  There was lots of splashing and looking at wildlife and generally having a lovely time.  Cancer is so much a thing of the past! 

The Tamoxifen turned out to not be such a big deal!  Chemo did wierd things to my system, leaving me with the occasional hot flash.  When I’d asked the oncologist what to expect, he said the hot flashes would probably get worse.  (Oh, no!  It seemed that I was getting them on the hour already!)  After a day or two on Tamoxifen, the reverse happened!  They didn’t go away, but they became less frequent, and not as terrible.  So there!  AND!!!  I’ve got my eyebrows!  Huh! 

I remember back in January, before I began the chemo, I went to the UCSF Medical Center/Osher Integrative Clinic to meet with notable and famous oncologist who also happened to run the Integrative Clinic.  I wanted to talk to this head hancho, because I was trying to build my case against taking chemo!  I figured he’d know alot about other ways to successfully treat cancer without resorting to toxic medicines.  If I could get him to say I wouldn’t benefit from chemo, then the other doctors might listen!  But he listened politely and thoughtfully for a while, read my charts, and told me that I could eat all the kale and blueberries I liked, but if I had microtumors hanging out in a bone or an organ somewhere, those veggies wouldn’t be any match for it.  Then he gave me a ton of good info. on what to eat, which supplements to take and when, how much green tea to drink.  He assuered me that I could AND SHOULD continue to run as much as I felt able to.  (All the better to sweat those toxins out!) He assured my mom, who is always a bit skeptical of me and my crazy running vegetarian status, that I was on the right track, and that she should drink more green tea and cut out dairy and meat, too!  Then he said a shocking thing: that I’d be wise to learn to embrace the experience of chemo.  (What the ——-?!!!  No way!)

Well, I tried to embrace, but I’m still always going to be a bit adversarial toward the illness that could have been the end of me! Also, I don’t like taking medicine, adding substances to a system that felt like it was finally starting to work well.  But for any of you ladies out there that might have to be on Tamoxifen for a few years, take it from me:

IT’S NO BIG DEAL!!!  And if it helps, roar about it, or find someone close who will let you complain for a while until you get over the worrying!  ROAR!

My side effects have been non-existant, and several other people I know say the same thing about their treatment.

Now I’m off to the gym.  Still no upper body weights, until next week or so.  But I’m in the process of relaiming my life from cancer, and so I guess I’ll have to reclaim my body as well, even if it’s one limb at a time. 

Bottom line:  There totally is life after cancer, even though I didn’t really believe that until really recently!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.