Protected: Best of Blog: One is the Loneliest Number…
Yes, I was looking at swimsuits on the Land’s End website today. I have a complicated history with swimsuits. I have avoided wearing them for the most part. Additionally, swimming bothers my eczema. But my skin is doing much better on this wheat free diet and I have dreams of getting a hot tub in the back yard. By summer, I will have a permanent right breast, too, instead of my empanada-shaped temporary one. Woo hoo!
I know that breast cancer changes a lot of women’s view of their own body. We tend to dwell on the negative aspects of loss. They are real, don’t get me wrong. I have to say, though that I like my new outlook on my belly fat (hey, you are going to be transplanted north in 6 weeks) and the fact that I am kind of looking forward to swim suit season, even though I am unlikely to have a backyard hot tub or go to the tropics any time soon.
It’s just good to be looking forward to another season with all of my surgeries behind me. And I do feel better in my body. I eat well, I exercise, I meditate, and I see all of my wonderful care providers. The fact that I have not been reduced to a pile of tear-soaked rubble makes me feel powerful and strong from the inside out.
So yesterday was my day of hapless mess-ups and feeling bad about how disorganized I feel. Right after I posted, “Chaos“, I had more. I realized that I’d forgotten about another patient appointment that I’d neglected to cancel for my sick day. Luckily, I realized this fact 45 minutes before the actual appointment time. I jumped into the car wearing jeans and no make up and got to the appointment about 30 minutes early to regroup. At least I had showered that day and was wearing clean clothes, which had not been true the prior two days since I was convalescing with my cold.
Do you know how I forgot these two appointments? Remember when I went all Golem after losing my my schedule for a single day because my smartphone got wet? But in that day, I scheduled several appointments, which I had to record elsewhere while my phone was drying out on its little bed of rice. When my phone came back to life, I know I went through my notes to make sure that all of the new appointments were recorded on my now alive phone. Since checking this again, I discovered that I did update my schedule correctly every day between 1/14 and 3/11 (the date of my surgery) except for one date. Yes, that date would be 1/14, the day I tried to take off as a sick day.
I’ve decided that all cancer patients deserve a personal assistant to help them maintain their schedules, especially if they are the schedule keepers at home and at work.
As you know, I was pretty bummed and overwhelmed yesterday. But I rallied. Tomorrow is another day. This morning, two families showed up to see me at 9:30 am! My schedule indicated that one family had arrived 24 hours early for their appointment. I felt terrible. I figured it was my fault since I have been so discombobulated. I apologized. Fortunately, the mom knows about my health status so she didn’t yell at me or anything. I was very apologetic. They are coming back tomorrow.
I knew that the appointment had been scheduled by email. I wanted to see if I had made the error, in which case I would discount my fees for this family.
To my astonishment, I saw that I had sent not one but two emails saying that the appointment was for tomorrow and I also confirmed that this was the date the mom had requested for the appointment.
Phew! It is a little lame to be so happy about this. But I will take whatever slice of sanity I can get.
Protected: Chaos
Yay, my fever broke yesterday! Besides being distracted by the image of a broken fever (such a curious idiom), I am feeling a lot better today. I have a lot more energy and my body aches are gone. I will take it easy today, not to worry. I have had many relapses in the past by powering up for full speed ahead too soon after getting through the first part of a cold.
I hope all of you are well during this cold and flu season. This year’s flu is pretty bad. I’m glad I took that flu shot last October when my oncologist offered it to me. But I promise to go back to my Howard Hughes ways!
Every other Thursday, I have a new little routine of doing a couple of hours of my business paperwork at the local coffee shop, Bird on a Wire. I was there two days ago. The baristas were both sick though not coughing on things. They were just congested. However, this should have been enough of a hint for me to high tail it out of there. (I am usually the Howard Hughes of avoiding illnesses. As a child psychologist with a private business, if I can’t work, no one can cover for me and plus, I don’t get paid.)
To the left of me, seated about 7 feet away was a regular customer. She is there every time I go to the coffee shop in the morning. I can tell the community at the coffee shop means a lot to her. Now she was coughing up a storm and exclaiming, “I just got this cough yesterday. I think I have a cold.”
This is when I was hijacked by hubris. I thought something along the lines of “I am pumped full of vitamins and good food. I walk three miles a day. I am strong. I a wonder Wonder Woman!”
So I stayed in the coffee shop.
This morning I woke up with a headache and a cough.
Fortunately, my hubris was not as Icaris proportions and I’ll live to learn from this experience, congestion and all.
When I am particularly stressed, I can have anxiety dreams. One theme is “bad guys chasing me.” Those are pretty darned easy to interpret, even for a cognitive-behavioral therapist who is not into dream analysis. Safety fears are old hat and very common.
Another theme is anxiety about professional competence. This plays out in two possible scenarios (a) I find myself back in high school because I really didn’t graduate (but I still have a Ph.D.) or (b) I find myself in college because I really didn’t graduate (but I still have a Ph.D.) These dreams often end with my saying to myself, “Why am I worried about this? I have my Ph.D. and psychology license, which allows me to work.” Then I feel much better. Then it magically turns out that I was mistaken about not having graduated from high school or college. See, I even do cognitive therapy with myself in my dreams.
Since my breast cancer diagnosis, I’ve encountered a third theme of anxiety dream. In these dreams, I find that I no longer live in my home but have moved somewhere else. It’s sudden and I’m not on board with the decision but it is too late. Last night I had the same dream. We moved to a pretty fancy house with two swimming pools. (In other dreams, there’s often a hot tub and in another we moved to a house on a river.) At one point the house changed so that it was part of a shopping mall. I was walking around the new house, orienting myself to it and I ended up in the shopping mall. I quickly got lost and ended up out of the mall and wandering around a city that was not familiar to me. I couldn’t get a cab or bus to take me home because I hadn’t yet memorized my new address. When I looked for my phone to call home, I kept finding phones in my purse but none of them worked. At one point, it started snowing and I was walking around with no coat. If this dream had a resolution, I don’t remember it.
I know where I am. I know where I live. I’m not going any where.
I’ve been struggling with water, the gift of life, aqua, good ol’ H2O.
There was leaky pipe in my office last Saturday, which would have created a deluge had my office mate not been there to see it so a plumber could be called to fix it.
Yesterday, as usual, I went for my three mile long walk. It was rainy, which is not unusual for this time of year. I donned my Gore-Tex armor, which has served me so well-Gore-Tex hat, Gore-Tex hiking boots, Gore-Tex parka, Gore-Tex boots, Gore-Tex pants.
If I lived a considerable distance south of these parts, I might even call myself a Gore-Texan. The rain at night, lasts a fortnight (clap, clap, clap, clap). Deep in the heart of Gore-Tex!
I came home from my walk, my boots squeaky, my socks soggy, and soaked through my coat, insulated long-underwear shirt, t-shirt, and bra! Only my Gore-Tex pants managed to maintain my faith in the magical rain shedding powers of Gore-Tex.
I took my smartphone out of my ZIPPPED Gore-Tex parka pocket. Uh-oh. It was covered in water. The screen was flickering! I quickly turned it off and opened it up. It was wet on the inside! I dried it off but being fool hardy, I tried to turn it back on even though my brain was telling me, “Leave it off and call AT&T.” It turned on but was frozen on the “Samsung” boot up screen. So I turned it off and broke it down again.
“My precious! My precious phone! My extremely complicated work, medical, family, personal life calendar is on there! The names of all of the new patients I will see between now and March 5th are on there!”
“Golem, I feel your pain,” I thought to myself. “I am a psychologist. I am not addicted to technology. I am an excellent problem-solver. Get a hold of yourself, woman!” I took a deep breath and called AT&T.
A very sweet technical support rep named Shannon answered. “Oh, I just did that. I was so worried. I keep EVERYTHING on my phone. Surround your phone with rice to get it to dry out. Leave it for at least a day. I’ll call you tomorrow and see how you are.”
Shannon has felt Golem’s pain as well. I confirmed with her that if the phone didn’t dry out, it was curtains for the information on my phone. (And yes, Google is supposed to automatically back up my calendar but that stopped working and I’ve been procrastinating about figuring out a fix for that problem.)
“My precious! My precious! God, you can take my breast but not my SMARTPHONE!” I was again, I’m afraid, losing some perspective. So I then imagined the Albert Ellis section of classic 1960’s psychologist training film, “Three Approaches to Psychotherapy“, also known as “The Gloria Films”. Gloria, a real person with real life problems, agrees to be taped seeing three super famous clinical psychologists (Fritz Perls, Carol Rogers, and Albert Ellis), one at a time. Pioneers in fields can be kind of extreme. The Gloria films illustrate this quite nicely. By the time I saw the film in the 90’s, it was for historical purposes. The film served up unintentional hilarity with a side of guilt since Gloria was a real person with real problems. They were not getting addressed.
So what does this have to do with my meltdown about “My precious”, you may ask? Albert Ellis was a brilliant psychologist who developed Rational Emotive Therapy (RET), which is the foundation of modern cognitive therapy. The goal of RET is to use reason to reduce psychopathology. However, Ellis did this in the absence of stuff like, you know, demonstrating empathy and establishing rapport. He also had a rather distinctive nasal northeast accent. Combined with his lawyerly therapy style, it was pretty funny. “I can see that your situation in inconvenient, but it is not terrible and awful.” Or my favorite when Gloria puts her self down and he responds by telling her that if she makes a mistake it does not make her a “no good-nik”. The sight and sound of Dr. Ellis trying to use 60’s-era hip slang was double hilarious. Check it out for yourself here.
“Elizabeth, your anecdotes require too much exposition! What does this have to do with your phone?”
Thank you, patient readers. Basically, I tried to reason with myself as I often do, but this time I remembered Albert Ellis, and it made me laugh.
That pulled me out of my tizzy and I went about recreating my schedule, piecing it together from memory, emails, and other non smartphone dependent methods.
Today, I took my phone out of it’s rice bed and it awoke!
Thank you, Albert Ellis. Yesterday was inconvenient and more than a little stressful but it wasn’t “terrible and awful.” I hope you forgive me for laughing at you and for being able to do a dead-on impersonation of you. You were definitely not a “no good-nik.”
This is your brain on breast cancer-mush. This is what the part of your brain that is still working has to say to the rest of the brain to keep it going, “Mush, mush!”
I got through the day. Tomorrow I am bringing a sled and a full team of Huskies and Malemutes.
Cancer treatment is kind of like racing the Iditarod but not as cold and with fewer furry animals. On the other hand, cancer treatment takes way longer than 9-15 days.
The most Iditarod races won by any one musher is five. Susan Butcher won the race that many times along with five other athletes.
Women and endurance. We have a lot of it and good thing, because we have much to endure!
Mush, mush!
Out into the fields of frozen white! We can do this!
I have a wonderful support network, including you lovely folks who read this blog. And by and large, I have experienced very little unwelcome advice concerning my breast cancer treatment. Very little. Much less than I expected.
There is one little arena into which some unwelcome advice has crept. I have gotten some negative feedback about my choices regarding breast reconstruction. A couple of voices have opined that I should skip reconstruction. I’ve also fielded the opinion that I should opt for an implant rather than a TRAM surgery (transplantation of belly fact and some abdominal muscle to make a new breast) because the former is a simpler surgery and the latter involves a more major surgery (abdominal and breast).
While I haven’t been floored by the opinions and no one has been super insistent, I would be lying to say that they didn’t bother me. I did examine the part that bothered me to make sure that I’m not doubting my own decision. I concluded that based on the information I have now (since I can’t predict the future), I made the best decision for ME. Also it is a little extra annoying when the opinions have been stated AFTER I’ve already done a number of steps, including two surgeries, which are prepping my body for the TRAM surgery. If I had chosen an implant, which I think is a fine option, by the way, I would have had different procedures done.
We are fortunate to have a number of options regarding breast reconstruction. All of the options have major pluses and minuses. Not all of the options are available for every breast cancer survivor due to finances, particular breast cancer treatment regimen, body weight, smoker/non-smoker etc.
My personal opinion is that there is no perfect solution but there are a number of alternatives, often more than one of them being satisfactory for a given individual. But the ultimate choice is individual so folks, if you would kindly keep these typically well-intended opinions to yourself, we breast cancer ladies would be much obliged.
P.S. I know that I have also lost 31 pounds since May. My plastic surgeon assures me that I still have enough belly fat to make a new breast. Yay, belly fat!
My Eyes Are Up Here 