Archives for category: Feelings

Ah, to be 16 again

July 13, 2013 //

Last week I had one clinic day (Monday), followed by six days of painting and redecorating my private practice office. My daughter was also gone on a band trip during this time. So this week has been about transitioning back to my normal roles and routines. It was really hard, much harder than I expected. My brain was fragmented for several days.

Even more distressing was the fact that I felt really anxious and unsure of myself outside of work. This was particularly difficult socially, especially with my cyber friends. Cyber relationships do not have the same familiar codes and handshakes on which I gauge other social interactions. My cyber buddy, Greg Smith, wrote about the limitations that electronic communication put on his “Spidey Senses” in navigating his interactions with patients via Skype. He is an emergency department psychiatrist who practices telehealth in his job to provide consultation to patients who live far away from services. (As an aside, although my psychology practice is in Seattle, a “little big city”, the majority of my training was done in rural areas. Access to care is a major big deal.)

Earlier in the week, I found myself anxious that I’d written the wrong thing to one cyber friend or worrying that another cyber friend thought that I was a creepy stalker because a compliment I’d paid to her did not seem to go over in the way I had intended. I worried that I was being too flirtatious with cyber friends, male and female. I thought about what I might do to repair relationships that may have been damaged by my electronic awkwardness.

I have not felt that way for a VERY long time. What the heck is going on? I’ve had cyber buddies for awhile now and although I am sometimes frustrated by the limitations of this form of communication, there are benefits as well. When I write, I can communicate without interruption, for one. That is a major gift to me in this time of my life when some level of introspection is needed for health and healing. But I do miss the body language, tone of voice, or even hearing any of my cyber buddy voices. And I know in my own communications, the parts of me communicated beyond the words that I write or by my smile in the photos I post, are lost.

Last week, I dredged into some painful past experiences to write the post, Predator, about my own experiences with sexual harassment as a teen and how they relate to the sexualization of breast cancer. If you’ve read the post, you know that the experiences I wrote about are very typical for women my age and most of the experiences still occur with girls and women today. The post resonated with a lot of women and I was very glad to have written it. I also suspected that it would help me integrate the vulnerability I have felt as a breast cancer patient to another time in my life when I felt scared and vulnerable.

I knew this would be a hard post to write and even waiting until my mother went on vacation to post it. I know that by the time she comes back home and reads it, I would have processed through the hard emotions and she would not have to worry about me so much. She had already suggested to me a couple of posts prior that I needed to take a break and write something light and/or funny. It’s hard to see one’s child in pain, even when she is 47 years-old.

Writing the post was harder than I expected and was like taking a time machine back to the worst parts of my adolescence with the extra layers of breast cancer and being a mother of a vulnerable teen girl.

Actually, let me put it this way. It was like being 16 again.

There are folks that rhapsodize about their youth and feel that they have lost something. Don’t get me wrong because I had a generally happy childhood and adolescence, but I am happy where I am. I have never had a stronger combination of individual, familial, and professional satisfaction than I have experienced in middle age. Emotionally, I feel so much more solid, as well. And this is not because my life has been easy in middle age. It is a benefit of maturity. My parents are very happy people who love their family, friends, and each other. They help me look forward to my future, should I be so lucky to live a long life.

Back to being 16 again. Do you all remember what your teens years were like with your peers? I don’t know about you, but although I had good friendships, they involved a frenzy of unnecessary activity. Worrying, “Did I say the right thing?” “Should I have said that?” (That was a popular one for me. I am loud and chatty.) “Should I have looked at him that way?” “Did I hurt her feelings?” Then I would go and try to repair things. Later in my life, a good friend would characterize my repair attempts as, “Elizabeth, you flail.” Now she has more of a passive, slug like coping style but in respect to the situation she was describing, I was totally and completely flailing when I should have been leaving things alone.

These days, I typically feel solid as a communicator. There are parts of me that can be perceived as being “too much” (see “loud and chatty”, above). This was particularly true in the past. I have learned to be myself with confidence and I think part of what bothered people about the big parts of my personality was the anxiety and lack of confidence that were sometimes underneath. Now I get a lot of compliments about my loud laugh and I can tell from patients and their parents that for the most part, they enjoy the fact that I am a happy person, eager to help, and a lover of my fellow human beings, especially the small ones. But I also know when I need to scale things back and tone them down. It’s a dance of a sort and in my profession, I am usually extremely good at it.

To be 16 again, was no fun. I saw Rebecca, my psychologist yesterday. The session may have only lasted an hour but by the time I left, I’d aged 31 years.

So cyber and face-to-face buddies, I am ready to play like a grown-up again.

Photo by Aaron Eidinger, 1983-ish. I am 17 or 18 in the photo.

Tags adolescence, anxiety, Breast Cancer, coping with breast cancer, cyber friendship, Friendship, friendships between bloggers, growing up female, sexual harrassment, social anxiety, social communication

Categories Feelings, Mindfulness, Parenting

Friending and Unfriending

July 11, 2013 //

Yesterday, someone told me that she’d had a strange man ask her to be a Facebook friend. She accepted the request and then he told her that he was in love with her, would always be true to her, etc. I was quite surprised to hear that she had not unfriended him but had decided to stop responding to him and was convinced that he would get the message.

PEOPLE WHO TELL YOU THAT THEY ARE IN LOVE WITH YOU AFTER NOT EVER MEETING YOU ARE NOT VERY GOOD AT GETTING MESSAGES!

But that’s not really what this post is about. I started thinking about what it takes for me to “unfriend” someone. I’ve only ever unfriended one person on Facebook. Let’s call him John Doe. He was a very quiet boy in high school. I didn’t really know him. I do remember that although he did not attend my 20th high school reunion, he contributed a write-up to the reunion book. His contribution was written in rather child-like scrawling script. He wrote about his cat and how pretty “Suzy Cheerleader” was in high school. It struck me as being a little stalker-y, but I suspended judgement.

Nine years later, he asked to be a Facebook friend. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. On the same day, we had the following conversation:

JD: “I am John Doe from high school. Do you remember me?”
Me: “Yes, I remember you.”
JD: “Are you single?”
Me: “No, I am very happily married.”
JD: “Do you ever talk to Suzy Cheerleader?”

I opted not to respond and quickly unfriended him.

But I have also had times in my life when I’ve unfriended face-to-face friends. It has been rare but it has happened. The first time was a college friend. Initially, she told me how wonderful I was, how interesting I was, yada, yada, yada. It was a bit much but I thought she was thoughtful, smart, and fun. After a year or so, she became very critical of me. In retrospect, it was likely just because we were young women and because we had become roommates. She had a slow way of moving and speaking. She was large, standing at six feet. I was comparatively small, quick, and intense. She complained that I turned pages too quickly when I read and that I bounded out of bed too happily each morning. The criticisms became more so over time and honestly, I don’t remember them. But I did not like the juxtaposition of being idealized followed by lots of criticism. Neither extreme set well with me. I actually broke up our friendship formally, like one would a romantic relationship. It felt so justified at the time but later I regretted it. A mutual friend called me several years ago to invite me to his wedding at the last minute. My former roommate was officiating at the wedding. I could tell he was trying to get us “back together.” I had a schedule conflict. We are now Facebook friends but I have not yet reached out to her. I don’t exactly know what is holding me back from doing so, especially.since I think I made a mistake by not trying to work out the friendship. We were just teenagers when we shared a dorm, after all.

I had another friend in grad school. My husband and I were friends with both he and his wife. They divorced. We had planned to stay friends with both of them. But things got a little weird when the husband accused me of thinking and doing things that I had never done TO ANYONE, least of all to him. I understand that he was hurting and feeling judged. But he was pretty nasty to me and I was going through a difficult pregnancy. My husband and I parted company with him. I sometimes wonder what his life is like these days but I do not regret our decision.

A final individual is someone I’ve avoided since 2007 because I am ambivalent about our friendship. We used to work together as researchers. Promises were made about a job opportunity on a grant application on which she was a principal investigator. I left the research group when my own grant application was not funded on my third submission. I increased my private practice. I later heard that my friend’s grant had been funded but no one called. The promises that were made were very concrete and expressed with certainty that they would occur. I figure that it was assumed that since I had a small private practice, which could be expanded, that I wouldn’t want to continue with the research opportunity in the grant. I also figure, although it is highly speculative, that there were thoughts that the money that had been set aside in the grant to pay my salary, might be better spent in another fashion. On top of this, a co-investigator had called a meeting to discuss a paper on which I was first author, without inviting me to the meeting. It was my thinking that my friend should have (1) talked to me about whatever change happened with staffing on the grant and (2) that she should have given me a heads up that there was a meeting on my paper. I had done fine work on the paper and ultimately, I ceded first authorship, but found a home for the paper in a very good journal. All in all, I felt that my friend had been disloyal. I didn’t talk to her about it because it was true that by that time, that I had moved on. I didn’t want to work for a friend. But I wanted to be able to make the decision myself. But what was I going to say? “You promised me you’d offer me that job. I wouldn’t have taken it but I’m angry and hurt, anyway.” I also understood that because of her degree, she can only be a researcher. She doesn’t have the flexibility that I have. But it didn’t feel good and I’ve been on the fence about the friendship, waiting for my attitude to change. I am almost ready to attempt to repair the friendship, but not quite.

I think in 47 years, I’ve been pretty friendly. I don’t like losing friends. My breast cancer experience has been a time of strengthening some of my long-term friendships and a number of new friendships with blogging friends. The nature of blogging friends is unique and unlike any other friendships I’ve experienced. Some day I’ll blog about that, I suspect. But in the meantime, please know that if you are one of my face-to-face or blogging friends, you are precious to me now and I hope in the future, as well.

Tags Friendship

Categories Feelings

Predator

July 7, 2013 //

I grew up in a loving household, in a good neighborhood, and went to good public schools. Despite this, as an adolescent girl, I became quickly and keenly aware that part of being female was being prey to boys and men.

I went to middle school in the late 70’s. Like many teens, I had an ugly duckling/swan transformation. As a 7th grader, I was considered to be rather homely. Boys fake-flirted with me to humiliate me. They treated me like I was stupid. By 8th grade, I had undergone a bunch of pubertal changes, lost weight, grew several inches, and got fashionable. But it didn’t matter whether I was pretty or not. That school was an incredibly humiliating place for a girl. Walking the hallways was like running a gauntlet because boys hands would be groping everywhere and I mean everywhere in what seemed to be full view of teachers. Not one of the adults did a damn thing about it.

The summer after 8th grade, we went to a Seafair (Seattle’s summer-long festival) parade. One of the Seafair clowns, a GROWN ASS MAN, picked me out of the crowd (did I mention I had just finished the 8th grade?) and gave me a sloppy kiss full on the lips. I tried to make a joke to regain my footing and recover from the confusion and humiliation. He made some mildly sexual comment. That was my first kiss, by the way.

When I was a high school freshman, I often walked the mile between my bus stop and home by myself. There were other kids in the neighborhood so I don’t know exactly why I walked alone so frequently, but I did. On more than one occasion, a car would pass, come to a halt in front of me, and open the door to the passenger side of the car. They were strange men waiting for me to get into their cars with them like this would be something I would want to do. I would freeze and I remember being afraid to walk past that open door. After a bit the door would close and the car would drive off.

When I was in the 10th grade my history teacher, who was at the time THE SAME AGE AS MY FATHER, engaged in some super creepy behavior with me. Whenever we had independent work time, he would sit on top of the desk in front of me and stare at me. Occasionally, he would try to start up a conversation. I hate to be crass but feel compelled to point out that when he was seated this way, his crotch was right at my eye level. I argued with him about one of my grades once and he looked a little desperate, as if he were somehow losing me. He put his hand on my shoulder and told me that he loved me. I told two teachers and a guidance counselor about this. I was told that I had misunderstood what was fatherly concern. My peers teased me and told me that I thought everyone was in love with me. I felt ashamed and didn’t tell my mother about this or any of the other middle school and high school incidents. I would learn later in my life that my mother would have likely kicked some ass and taken names on my behalf. That’s because my mom did kick ass and take names on my behalf but that’s an incident that I’d rather keep private at this time in my life.

These events were creepy and felt clearly wrong to me. But there were many other experiences with peers that were far more confusing. Some of my male peers could be disgusting one moment and sweet another moment. I dated very little in high school but I did have one little “fling” at music camp when I was 15 years old. The boy was smart, funny, and at times, sweet. At one point he characterized the appearance of my legs as “good for spreading.” I can’t remember the context of this comment except that there were other kids around when he said it. I made out with him anyway, in the kind of barely PG-rated way that a 15 year-old girl “good Catholic girl” would do.

This is the world of females, when being sexually desired is mixed with degradation. And I would clarify that it is the world of straight females but even non-heterosexual girls and women are subjected to expectation from many boys and men that they exist for male pleasure and domination. What a way to tarnish healthy sexual development. What a way to make it feel wrong and dirty.

Why do I tell you about my life experience? Is it because it is so unusual? No, I describe my experiences because I think they are close to the typical female experience. Actually, my experiences may arguably be better than the typical female experience. Tellingly, I took myself off of the dating market until college by having crushes on boys so shy they’d never ask me out or boys who I would later learn, were gay. And I went to a high school where being a smart, outspoken girl meant a death knell to dating. I kept my head in the books. I decided when I was 12 years old that I wanted to get a Ph.D. I was lucky enough to have academic skills and support that I could leverage, to build this future for myself.

Last week, I learned that Larry Flynt and his “gentleman’s club” put on an event called “Flight of the Ta-Tas”, a topless skydiving event to benefit Living Beyond Breast Cancer (LBBC), an organization devoted to women and men who have had breast cancer and later developed metastatic cancer. As it turns out, LBBC’s logo was used to promote the event without their permission. They did not sponsor the event. To read more about this, Knot Telling wrote an excellent series of posts about it as well as communicating directly with LBBC about it.

But let’s back up a second to Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler Magazine. The first time I learned about this magazine was when I saw this 1978 cover.

But look at Larry Flynt’s quote on the side, “We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat.”

Oh wow, Larry Flynt was speaking up for women. He was trying to help! You buying this because I’m sure not. When one looks at the context of this statement, the context of all of the degrading photos of women in Hustler not to mention the juxtaposition of this quote with an image of a woman in a meat grinder, the real message is as clear as day.

Sexism has long been protected by ignoring context. That is why I’ve told you about aspects of my life. And no, not all males are exploitative of women. And not all women allow themselves to be exploited. I am talking about culture, the group. And as a group, girls and women are subjected to sexism and it hurts.

Yes, I can see a specific instance where going topless skydiving might be a positive experience. But done within the context of the sexism that pervades our culture as well as the culture that trivializes and sexualizes breast cancer because it involves “boobs”, “The Flight of the Ta-Ta’s” does more harm to women and girls than it does to help by raising money for a worthwhile cause. A lot of people may think that I’m making too much out of this, wasting my time and energy. I mean LBBC would get a big check if they chose to accept it, right? Let me ask you this. Would the same rationale apply to a black face/minstrel show to raise money for the NAACP?

Larry Flynt, I’m not taking the candy you offer me to get into your car. Keep your money. We aren’t going to sell ourselves, other women, or our daughters.

Tags Breast Cancer, coping with breast cancer, Feminism, Flight of the Ta Ta's, Larry Flynt, raising girls, sexism, sexual development, sexualization of breast cancer

Categories Feelings, Parenting

What things cost: Letting go

June 30, 2013 //

As a child/adolescent psychologist, I work with a lot of moms. They often express feelings of guilt for their children’s challenges. I often respond by saying, “You have the rest of your life to feel guilty as a mother. Save some for later.” This statement usually gets a laugh and often the guilt although not gone, is small enough for us to move forward in our conversation. It is often, however, not so easy. People get stuck. Even psychologically solid, reasonable parents can get stuck on guilt. Several years ago, I worked with a wonderful mom of a very young child who was showing signs of significant developmental challenges in multiple areas. She had professional experience working with children and was acutely aware that her son may have handicaps that would greatly change the future possibilities in his life.

Although there was no evidence that she had done anything to contribute to her son’s difficulties and further, it was yet unclear as to whether his difficulties would be short-lived or chronic, she felt guilty. She felt guilty and stuck. During one session I asked, “What do you think you are getting out of this guilt?” She looked at me understandably with a confused expression. I went on, “It may sound backward but sometimes people hang onto guilt because it gives them a sense of control in situations in which they feel totally out of control. We cannot have guilt without a sense of power, even if the power we feel is to harm.”

She was dubious but I had planted a seed. She came back a week or two later and basically told me that she had thought what I had said made no sense but upon careful reflection, it actually made sense. It was a turning point in her grief process.

Guilt is blame turned inward. It can also be turned outward. In Atom Egoyan’s 1997 film, The Sweet Hereafter, a town grieves for the loss of a busload of school children in an accident. Ian Holm plays an attorney who travels to the small town to file a class action law suit against the bus company. He has his own grief back story, which is his adult daughter’s drug addiction. Holm’s character tirelessly pursues blame. Someone must be responsible for the tragedy. That someone must pay. Things don’t just happen. They happen for a reason. He was going to find the reason at all costs. I won’t spoil the ending for you but let’s just say that letting go of blame and accepting the loss of control is a major theme of this film.

As for myself, I have had issues with letting go of anger. There is a release that comes with losing my temper and in the moment, it feels good. But because I am at heart a peacemaker and an empathetic person, I feel regret at having hurt other people, especially my husband. My anger is usually rooted in anxiety, anxiety that a problem can’t be controlled or solved. Anxiety that my house will never be an environment that I can control and make a sanctuary. Fears that my cancer will return. Fears for my family, especially my teenaged daughter. I have fears of not being a good enough psychologist when my patients are having particularly treatment-resistant struggles.

Most people would consider me to be a very disciplined person. One exception to this has been my life long struggle to eat healthfully and to exercise regularly. I love food. I am an excellent home cook and I love good restaurants. I love to eat a large amount of food. The act of eating is an amazing, highly enjoyable, sensory experience. It is also a wonderful social experience. And I know when I am overdoing it and often in my life, I just keep eating. And at these times, it seems too hard to put the time into preparing healthy meals. Quick and easy is convenient but not nutritious. The rest of my health suffers and I just don’t feel as good during the non meal parts of the day. It also feels good sometimes, not to exercise. “Ah, I can just sit here and rest.” This is particularly true when I let my work and family life burden me. I work too many hours at work and at home, doing things and worrying about people. I am tired and I feel that I deserve to rest even though I know that I deserve the kind of treatment that promotes good health. But like many caretakers, I put my self-care low on the priority list even though I have counseled countless moms to avoid this. But putting my health at lower priority made my daily to-do list shorter. It made it seem like I was juggling fewer balls in the air. It was a false illusion.

In my 20’s, I gained and lost the same 20 pounds over and over. By my 30’s and 40’s, I have gained and lost the same 40 pounds twice. Right now, I have given up the convenience and the joy of eating to the point of indulgence for healthier foods. Yes, it is work to plan my meals, to make entrees ahead and freeze them in reasonably-sized portions. I take the time to make sure that I always have healthy vegetables on hand. I love vegetables and you know what, eating a large volume of vegetables is actually good for me. And I’ve gotten so that I look forward to my daily 3 mile walks. The key for me was realizing that I was self-employed and could therefore set my own hours! I am better at exercising in the morning and had been trying to add it to the end of long clinic days, which didn’t work at all. So, I just started seeing my first patients at 9:30 am instead of 8:30 am. What a rut I was in to not think of that solution years ago!

Letting go of these things has required patience, which does not come naturally. But I have grown and changed over the years. I have learned to manage my anxiety pretty well and with my mindfulness practice, I am learning to practice acceptance and further, that acceptance is not the same as doing nothing. It is not accepting that can spin me in circles, feeling like I am doing something but getting no where. Endless anxiety and anger can be a trap where you expend so much energy that it feels like you are doing something productive and your are not. And as a person who has been clinically depressed twice in my life, I can tell you that the helplessness and hopelessness of that passive state is one of the loneliest places in the world. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that I have not been near that place for over 10 years.

It can be hard to let go of anger, of grief, of impatience, or anxiety, of sadness, of guilt, at the point when I need to move on. Emotions are vital to our lives, even the “bad” ones. They motivate, protect, and educate us. But they do not always work in a healthy way with our thoughts and behaviors. I know that I will be working and reworking this balance for the rest of my life. I try not to think about how things “should” be in respect to things over which I have little control. I got breast cancer when other people with similar lifestyle and risk factors did not. I got it when people with more risk factors did not. Disease is part of the natural world and it doesn’t make sense to me to be mad at the universe. That just doesn’t work for me and the cost is too high.

We all have to make our own paths in life. In my life, I feel pretty unstuck right now but know that the cost of each day is a different set of gains and losses. Yes, I have lost the illusion of control but I have gained so much. I write this to reflect. I write this to remember the peace I have in my life at this moment.

I let go to gain freedom. I let go to go on.

Tags Breast Cancer, Coping with cancer, grief, Marriage, mindfulness, Parenting, self care, wormen

Categories Feelings, Integrative Health, Mindfulness, Parenting

What things cost: The road not taken.

June 27, 2013 //

I’ve written a couple of posts lately about how much things cost ranging from Botox to Lupron to high school year books. My last post was short, a bit flip, and on the humorous side. Shortly after I wrote it, I read this amazing post on Not Down or Out. I complimented Cheryl on her post and much to my surprise, she said it had been partially prompted by my “what things cost”-themed posts!

I’m not saying that I’m never deep because I know that’s not true. But I threw off those posts about costs and didn’t really think about them that deeply. So I started thinking about costs a bit more, relating them to my own cancer experience as well as of those about which I’ve read.

Breast cancer treatment costs a lot. We lose things we would have preferred to keep such as money, time, a sense of safety, taking our health for granted, relationships, a brain that works properly, and last but not least, body parts. We gain things we’d rather not have like nausea, fatigue, weight, neuropathy, hot flashes, aches and pains, and grief. Everybody’s experience is a bit different and for each individual, the experience can change over time.

Putting aside the fact in our lives as tainted test tubes, we don’t know for sure whether each ache or pain or other side effect is really due to cancer treatment. (Okay, I know some of them are pretty obvious, but generally speaking, we don’t always know.) But we do know our current day to day experience and what we like and don’t like about it. And a good number of things that we know about are costs of having cancer and having been treated for cancer.

What we don’t know are the costs of the roads we have not taken. Those of us who had surgery for DCIS will never know if left untreated, whether it would have become invasive or not. And those of use with early stage invasive cancer, don’t know what our outcomes would be if we’d foregone all or a portion of treatment. Finally, those of us with metastatic disease will never know if we chose the right balance between strategies to extend life verses those that preserve quality of life.

Instead, we must make decisions based on our understanding of research on assessment and treatment of our particular diseases, our other risk and protective factors, our personalities, what is important to each of us, and what is not important to each of us. And we must try to make well-reasoned decisions, accounting for all of these factors, while under incredible life stress. Not to mention the fact that we all have people who love us and depend on us. There are costs to family members and friends. As my friend Nancy says, “This disease has tentacles.”

And how many assessment and treatment decisions have each of us made in our experience with cancer? Tons, right? This means there are many paths not traveled. To really understand the costs of our decisions, we would need to be able to live many lives, each based on a different set of decisions.

We’ll never really know because each of us have just one life to live. I often write about my own decisions, “I made the best decisions I could based on the information I had at the time.” It may sound kind of nerdy but it frees me from a good deal of “what if” kind of thinking. I try not to dwell on the costs of the roads I didn’t take. I will never know what they are and to do so would have me walking in circles instead of pursuing the path I chose.

Tags Breast Cancer, coping with breast cancer, healthcare decision making, treatment side effects

Categories Facts, Feelings

Bittersweet Discovery

June 22, 2013 //

I was looking through the photos on my phone when I ran across this one:

Ollie, enjoying a sunny spring day, out on the deck.

This photo was taken just a couple of weeks before he became very obviously ill. He was greatly enjoying the new deck. He his tail does look narrower toward the base. Ollie had been pulling out his own fur, something he’d never done before. I don’t know if this was related to the metastatic cancer or whether it was coincidental.

Ollie was an indoor cat up until last April. We live near a major street and I was afraid that he would be run over by a car. The rest of my family felt differently. We loved him but he had a lot of anxiety problems, which resulted in his spraying all over our house for years. And no, our house does not smell like cat pee but it has taken a lot of work to keep it from getting that way. He was also aggressive to visitors though the sweetest cat to us. Ollie had a lot of personality but I know that other families may have taken him on a long drive to the country or euthanized him. I am not a person who always wants to have a pet. I had held off for years before meeting Ollie in Eastern Washington. He was a stray, adorable, and I didn’t want him to be coyote food. My stance is that once we committed to having a pet, we committed all of the way. When someone rather pointedly asked why we didn’t get rid of him, I said, “We don’t kick members of our family out for mental illness.” Little did the person who made the comment know that this policy was also working in his/her favor.

While I was home from TRAM surgery, I must admit that the first time Ollie pooped on our bed, it was less than charming. He did it again only a few days later. I remember letting go of the fear of trying to protect him from everything at all costs. I relented, “Okay, we can let Ollie go outside,” I told my husband. Being an old cat, Ollie stayed pretty close to home. He mostly stayed on the deck or sat on the stair railing on the front of the house.

Miraculously, as my husband had predicted all of these years, Ollie stopped spraying. He acted much less anxious. My husband was right. I was wrong. (I figured that once he got a whiff of all of those other cat smells out there, he would get even more paranoid.)

However, as I described in a recent post, Ollie was killed by a car. And this was only two months after I’d agreed that he could start going outside of the house. So I was right, too.

But when I look at this picture of our beloved pet sunning himself, I can help but think we did the right thing. We didn’t know it at the time, but his body was full of cancer and he would soon stop eating and fall over every time he tried to jump up onto a table, because he no longer had the strength that he had had only a couple of weeks before.

We were both right. Yes, that can actually happen in a marriage.

Tags Cats, losing a pet, TRAM breast reconstruction

Categories Feelings, Flora and Fauna

Summer Solstice–It’s about time, Northern Hemisphere!

June 20, 2013 //

Today is the summer solstice. Hooray! This summer is met with particular eager anticipation because last summer with the Summer of Surgeries. This summer, I will have no surgeries, knock on wood. Now fall of 2013, will likely be a different story but whatever “work” is done will be minor. No more major surgeries on the known horizon.

So, in honor of this occasion as well as it’s personal meaning to me in 2013, I would like to post a few photos that show resilience. Let’s call them my Timex photos. All of you resilient readers and bloggers out there, we take a licking but we keep on ticking.

This is a photo taken after the weeding party, during which the evil plant-engulfing wireweed was removed. See the small shrub that was uncovered? Yeah, well I can barely see it. It looks like a bouquet of brown twigs.

Here’s what the bundle of sticks looks like today. It’s alive, it’s alive! Like a phoenix that has arisen from the ashes!

Speaking of a phoenix, here is the phoenix I bought John for Fathers’ Day made by Cedar Moon Studio (available from Etsy.) This Phoenix rose from the ashes of an old plastic pink flamingo yard bird, that was re-purposed into this magnificent creature.

Click here to see more transformed pink flamingos.

Tags Coping with cancer, Gardening, phoenix, rebirth, resilience. breast cancer, summer solstice

Categories Feelings, Flora and Fauna

Protected: Best of Blog: Men of America–You Have Been Punked!

June 16, 2013 //

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Tags Best of Blog, Body image, Breast Cancer, dealing with breast cancer, Humor, Mastectomy

Categories Best of Blog, Facts, Feelings, Silly

What things cost

June 14, 2013 //

I know I have been ranting lately about the cost of things–my Lupron shots (thousands of dollars) and my daughter’s school year book ($70).

So I thought I’d take a step back and stop ranting about how expensive things are.

Now I have a rant about how cheap something is. That something is a shot of Botox!

I passed a sign in my neighborhood advertising for $13 Botox injections!?!?!

If I wanted to become wrinkle free with injections of botulism, I want the expensive kind. Cheap botulism sounds kind of scary, like a long forgotten science project in the back of the refrigerator. I’m wondering if the clinic makes it themselves in the back room. (Note to self: If this business ever tries to expand their line of products to home canned produce, don’t buy any.)

Okay, wait a minute. Their website says “$13/unit.” I imagine that if you only need one unit, you don’t really have a use for Botox.

Order has been restored to my mind.

Tags anti-aging, beauty, Botox, Random silliness

Categories Feelings, Silly

Best of Blog: Righty Needs a New Name

June 13, 2013 //

There was about a month-and-a-half between my right side mastectomy and the placement of the tissue expander. Consequently, I lived with an “unleavened breast” for a good while. I needed some humor to help me deal with the state of my body. So I wrote, not one, not two, but three blogs with joke names for my breasts. Looking back at this, it seems a bit absurd. But it did help get me through a rough time. Honestly,

I originally posted Righty Needs a New Name on 8/28/13.

For some reason, I am finding a need to refer to the right side of my chest as something other than “surgical site.” It’s going to be several weeks before I start the temporary inflation process with the tissue expander so a name would be handy. And yes, I could stick with “righty” but that implies some kind of symmetry with “lefty”. A few ideas of various levels of quality:

The Tissue Formerly Known as Righty
Breast-to-Be (I kind of like this one. Maybe a friend will throw me a shower before surgery. Yay, presents!)
Vegetarian Sweater Meat
Ugly Duckling (Some day it will turn into a bee-you-ti-ful swan.)
Breasterpillar (Some day it will turn into a bee-you-ti-ful breasterfly.)
Puppy Pupa (continuing with the metamorphosis theme)
Empty Jug
Sad Sack (waah!)
Berefticle (waah!)
Scarla
Storage Chest
Bosom in Waiting
Breast, in Space Saver Mode
Unleavened Breast
Late Bloomer
Bosom’s Buddy
Fixer Upper
Do-Over
The Start of Something Big
Under the Shoulder Boulder Holder

The next day, I had still not gotten this out of my system and I posted, The Name Game (Continued).

Okay, so my cousin, Beth got me thinking about coming up with names for both righty and lefty. They are a set of a kind. So here goes, my stream of consciousness. As I did yesterday, I will add more as inspiration arises:

Boob and Boo Boo
Scooby and Scrappy
Lefty and Lucy (inspired by John’s suggestion “Righty Tighty and Lefty Loose-y”, which is backwards, unfortunately)
Benjamin and Button
Mammy and Mummy
Party and Pooped
Ta-da! and To-do
Zan and Jayna (The Wonder Twins, suggestion thanks to Lisa)
Waggy and Baggy
Jiggly and Scraggly
Lennie and Squiggy
Herman and Pee Wee
Judy and Punched
Hit and Miss
Denver and Phoenix (Okay, a little obscure but think about it and then groan.)
Teton and Won Ton
Ham Bow and Big Ow
Yin and Yang
Mickey and Mini (spelling intentional and I hear you all groaning.)
Bonnie and Clyde
Cupid and Psyche
Ernie and Bert (Okay, this one makes no sense but made me smile so I’m keeping it.)
Lilo and Stitched
Oscar and Felix
Simba and Scar
Wow and Ow

On 8/31/13, my parents got into the act so of course, I posted it in, Name Game-Part III, A Family Affair.

So my mom has been dying to come up with a name to contribute to the name game. Earlier today she told me that she didn’t think she could think of something because because she “loved me too much” and didn’t want to make light of my cancer.

Oh how the love has faded because, drum roll please…, she has contributed:

Liv and Let Live

My dad, not to be left out and offering a mechanical interpretation:

Built and Re-Built

Both of those ideas made me laugh aloud after a very hard day. So I guess they love me a lot after all.

Tags Breast Cancer, Coping with cancer, Humor, Mastectomy

Categories Best of Blog, Feelings, Silly