Month: March 2016

Mixed Emotions Club

Mixed Emotions Club

Yesterday was my very last chemo session (!). I hope hope hope it is my last ever. But harsh as it is/was, I am glad it’s a treatment that exists, and a series of types of treatments that are constantly improving through research. Because even if it is my own last-ever (crossing my fingers for the next three years!), many many more people will continue to need it and be helped by it. People all around us that we love.

I am still kinda in a weird emotional limbo about it. I’m relieved (especially because the double-dose regimen change shortened the total time by so much), but as I get ready to give myself my last bone-marrow-boosting-shot, I’m still not really ready to feel celebratory as much as relieved.

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AMAZING custom jacket (my name is even embroidered on the front!) designed by one of my favorite illustrators, Tuesday Bassen, that some incredibly rad girl-gang pals got for me a couple of chemo sessions ago (thus the tree – it’s put away now, I swear!) It encompasses my heart and gut’s feelings these days, and I’ve finally gotten to wear it on a few sunny walks w/Sparky this week!

 

Although I’m gonna get to see some much-loved ladies over the next couple days, so that may make me feel more celebratory. Yesterday and today, the only thing I have an incredibly strong urge to do is to go sit quietly by the river. Once it stops raining, find me somewhere along the Huron. I used to have this old red t-shirt that said “always a river,” and I wish I still had it.

For now, I am simply exhaling and feeling a little bit of extra peace.

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familiar style/familiar name * last day of chemo

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Yesterday, while waiting for treatment, I went to visit my favorite piece of artwork in the cancer center — a print by the great Ann Mikolowski. It’s a print that I’ve written about privately, but am not ready to share until it feels less raw — a print that has been what I return to, my refrain, throughout the last four months. I think a lot about the Great Lakes and  the ocean and waves. Which, being a long-ago English major, could simply just be the theme of “transformation” sneaking its way in somehow. I don’t know.

I’ll get all the fun side effects this week, but I am already relishing that those may be close to over. After that, I’ll get a few weeks of space to recover from chemo, starting radiation mid-April, going through June every weekday. Still a bit heavy-duty, but not as systemic, thankfully, as chemo.

 

Last night, Jeremy was watching videos, and this one came on. One of my favorite Joy Division songs, and yeah, I admit it, it made me cry — but with hope and with much, much feeling for the whole wide world and how connected it all is, and so very many other things that I can’t even process into words yet. Be kind to each other, friends. Your kindness to me means something every single day.

I have been thinking a lot about why I have harkened back quite a few times to earlier years — to being 18-23 or so — but not even in an overtly nostalgic way. I have some ideas. I’m writing about it to try to figure it out, but in that revisiting (and in the sorting-through-old-stuff that only being house-bound can spark!) I came across a rather emo poem I wrote when I was 19/20. I mean, it’s cheesy, but not bad for a 19 year old! It seemed appropriate, like maybe I was writing it to future-me…

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Loving each and every crocus I see reaching up this week… ❤

 

 

 

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Heavy Music, Lighter Times

I hadn’t listened to Heavy Cream’s Super Treatment in a minute, and was suddenly in the mood for it during my chemo sesh today.

All the songs are making me wanna drive around with the stereo cranked. So heavy, like these songs should be. Thumbs up to Ty & the band for producing something that sounds nice and thick and heavy but still snotty and defiant.

Jeremy keeps old Bang! mix CDs hanging around, and sometimes one will be in the car. I love how they are little time capsules of the things that he’s/we’ve been listening to or loved at a particular point in time. Since we’ve been together for almost the entire life of The Bang, 14+ years, there’s a lot of time with touch points in that music.

This last week, I was listening to one that happened to include Joan Jett’s version of Shout — kinda the only version of Shout that doesn’t make me feel like I’m at a wedding reception (way to be, Joan). It’s not like, my very favorite song ever or anything, but I like hearing some different energy in the vocals, and I had totally forgotten it existed.

Hearing it was a welcome jolt and also hearing anything related to The Bang was bittersweet as I had more mixed feelings than I’d expected about the fact that last week, the guys moved out of what had been The Bang! Studio for many, many years. The studio was where I celebrated my 30th birthday. It was something that enabled the crew to built giant sets. I spent some happy time there with staple guns, glue, PVC and paint. I stored merch there for the job I had before going back to grad school. It was a place of grand possibilities, and we finally got access to/could afford it after a LOT of hustle and watching J and the crew build sets and paint outside/in a windy carport in terribly cold weather for a few years.

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A lot of stuff happened there. A lot of friends found space to make music and do things there. I sang backup on a song about pizza, even. It had a good run.

I feel like I’ve been in a sleepy, occasionally frustrated bubble zone for the last two months. Having to settle for mostly sleeping and jotting things down in notebooks for later, catching little moments of the way my brain and energy usually work. I am still myself, but I am a version of myself that is so inward-turning and bit-by-bit and unable to sustain extended focus that it’s hard to recognize it. I’ve always really prided myself on my focus and tenacity in all sorts of situations, but sometimes those qualities have to be set aside for a little while.

80% of the time I’m accepting that this is the way it is now, and the other 20%, a gut level reaction, one that can be accepted but not eliminated by resting, meditating, yoga, and other healthy things… that other 20% of the time, I want to scream and run and dance and jump up and down. I want to crank the stereo and drive with the windows down. I want to turn up the volume on my amp and play along with a song just because it’s fun, not ’cause I’m any good. I want to work on projects and most of all make things. I want to have the actual energy to talk to people and really, really listen and make a plan or two I don’t have to hedge because I might need to cancel.

Those things are still a little ways off, but today I got pretty badass news, befitting of spring, that that horizon is much, much closer than I thought. 

I thought I had 3-4 more sessions of chemo and then radiation. Today, in an act that feels like spring mercy (but is really just based on solid oncologist knowledge and the fact that blood cell nadir was reached a few weeks back), my oncologist went through everything and told us this is my SECOND TO LAST chemo session.

I’m ELATED. This doesn’t mean that the next few days post-treatment won’t hurt or be kinda difficult, but it does mean that mentally, I’m more ready for spring and for change.

Weirdly, I feel more allowing of myself to rest knowing that there is a timeline for the tiredness getting less and less. I don’t know what that phenomenon is, but it’s a thing. I’m totally ready to accept that I only have so much hibernation left. And the fact it’s less than I thought catapults me much farther forward. I thought I was just at the halfway point from our conversation two weeks ago (granted, the visit two weeks ago was kinda bonkers because of the power outage/no computers thing), but I can’t even quite describe the type of relief I feel at not only moving along, but being farther along that I thought. Definitely feels like a sort of grace.

 

We could still use a little bit of a hand with meals through at least the early part of radiation. It will still take awhile for me to be able to cook more (though I made a couple meals during my pause from chemo). Everyone has been so, so very generous so far, so no pressure, but if you want to take some weight off Jeremy and I, there are a few more meal-help sign-up days open through early May.