What is it about hospital beds?

It's been a while since I've written anything here, and it's because it's been a while since I have had any semblance of clarity about things, and believe it or not my latest moment of clarity came laying in a hospital bed again a couple of days ago; no, nothing scary (I assume...), just waiting for the radioactive sugar that they pump into your veins to make it's way through your body before they do a PET scan. It's part of the post treatment monitoring regimen but it can make you downright buggy. Yet in the middle of a somewhat stressful process I found myself in a familiar and vaguely comforting place, lying in a hospital bed... It was a little bit of "wow, I went through a lot of heavy stuff recently" and big portion of "wow, and I went THROUGH it...". I was able to plug back into the knowing that everything is going to be alright, no matter what, an awareness that I had, frankly, not felt in a while. Part of the learning process attached to this disease is trying to find the right balance of how much the consciousness of cancer needs to remain a part of your life. What role should it play? The doctor said to forget cancer, can't do that, but dwelling on it is definitely not good. I don't have cancer, I had cancer. I have to monitor myself to make sure it's not back but just as importantly, I have to work on making sure it won't by taking care of myself in ways that I always failed to before. After being done with all the treatment there's an impulse to completely erase the experience from your mind, to just forget it all, but you can't erase it to the point that you go back to risky behavior, and by risky behavior I mean diet and exercise (or lack thereof). There's a lot of learning to do, and every time you are smart enough to make the right food choice or do something good for yourself in the back of your mind you are thinking "oh right, I forgot, I'm eating this because it's a good anti-cancer food", or some statistic you have read about green tea or walking or eliminating sugar pops into your head, so I don't know how much erasing you can do really.

I trust that there is a happy medium that you arrive at someday, the right balance between remembering and forgetting, a way to maintain the good things that came out of a difficult experience, and a way to trust that just because something bad happened once doesn't mean it's predetermined to happen again. And oddly enough, that hospital bed brought me back to a place that I learned is not all that scary, to the place where you realize you are all alone in an experience, and being alone is OK, because we always are really. Only you on your own can feel what it means to live your life, and really living your life in that awareness is a gift.

A reluctant welcome

I feel like a complete ninny... a couple of days ago I found out one of my friends, a recent friend but someone I really like and know is a solid good guy, has been diagnosed with cancer and I find myself struggling to find something intelligent to say to him. I want so badly to reach out, find the right words and tell him that I know what he's going through but what makes me arrogant enough to be so sure that I do? He sounds like he's doing well with things and is just taking the steps he needs to take right now, what makes me so sure that he is feeling what I felt during my first days? what makes me assume that he even wants anyone to reach out to him? (Boy, hell of a cancer advocate I'm going to be...) I remember the numbness and the loneliness of when I was first diagnosed, I'm not so sure I would have reacted well to someone coming at me with empathy, because, really, is the empathy about trying to make the other person feel better? or about trying to make yourself feel better? is that where I am with this right now, I'm thinking about myself instead of thinking about my friend? I hope not. I don't want to rev up his worries by talking about my cancer, I don't want to be intrusive, I don't want to talk to him about the fact that his disease is highly curable and completely treatable and have that be taken as being dismissive, all I want to really do is help him be at peace with himself, and it sounds like he pretty much is.

But I also bet that I probably sounded like I was doing pretty well those first days too, and I was, given the situation, but I also found myself wanting to run away from my life, wanting to cry or be angry and not doing so because it would elicit more attention from my loved ones and I didn't really want it, I needed to be left alone a bit. I wasn't really ready to talk to other cancer survivors or read triumphant stories, I just needed to let things sink in for a while. But what was a comfort was knowing that if I did have questions or did want to hear someone's story they were there for me, so I suppose that's all I can do for my friend right now...

The minute I first heard the news about him my first instinct was to say "welcome to my Tribe", and I meant it, with all the bittersweet implications that comes with. I meant it as an embrace and I meant it as a message that it's not all that bad being in this Tribe. I do believe that, but at the same time I'd rather not have to welcome any more of the people that I love into it.

So they said it's supposed to be a "Wake Up Call", right?

I guess you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't... you try to look at your life BC and AD (Before Cancer and After Diagnosis, I just came up with that, hmm... not bad...), and you have all these constructs in your mind about how life is different now, and that excites you and scares you all at the same time, and then all of a sudden you come to the sobering realization that your life is exactly the same in too many ways. What happened to the wake up call thing? Last time I saw my oncologist he told me I dodged a bullet, and I know in my heart I did, right then I saw my treatment and prognosis for the gift that it is. I saw that I have been given a new chance at life and I know I will not squander it. The first impulse is to string together a long list of things you are going to do to change your life, things you are going to do differently, things you will NEVER again waste precious time on. And then you find yourself on a Tuesday morning at 11:00 a.m. dragging your butt into another boring day at work, having the same inane argument with someone that you have had 20 times over, speaking empty platitudes to get yourself out of a conversation you'd rather not be having, and giving in to something that is asked of you even though you don't want to do it, simply because it's easier to acquiesce than it is to fight it.

It's hard not to get into an uptight angry state with yourself, not to get all disappointed with how you are failing to make all those life shattering changes, how you're not focused on changing the world- dealing with cancer patients, ending poverty and hunger, educating women, traveling the world, working for women's rights, writing the great American novel, repairing the hole in the ozone layer, LOL... you know, all those things you omnipotently think you have the power to accomplish because you kicked cancer's ass. How could I possibly be wasting my time on all the mundane things in life? And then it hits you- that string of mundane things IS life, and the wake up call comes when you realize that, that being in the moment and living it fully, no matter how familiar or not, no matter how trivial it may seem, no matter whether it happens to be annoying or joyful, that that is precisely what respecting your life experience is about. And I can promise you one thing, if you awaken to the present moment and stop and feel it, it is always ultimately good if you stay with it long enough. I don't mean to sound like some hippy dippy love child or anything, and not to harp on cancer (even tho I guess that it ultimately is the subject of this blog...) but the most intense "in the moment" experience I have ever had was when I heard the words "it looks like cancer", I was swallowed up by the moment, and even if I had tried to escape the moment it was impossible. But conversely it also was the most alive moment I have ever felt because it came with the realization that there will be a time when I am no longer alive. I had no idea where this was going to unravel to, where it would end, but I stayed with it. I have often said that what got me thru things this year was this underlying trust that all is good, no matter what. And now what makes me feel most alive are those moments that I am able to plug into the present, and I have learned to do that more and more often, and it's especially good when you plug into a moment of "mental temper tantrum" and see it for what it is, because it just dissipates.

So, here I thought I was going to write a flip little paragraph on how my life hasn't changed as much as I wanted it to and I go and get all Eckhart Tolle on you. Wow, my life actually has changed, I guess even though I still spend time doing what I don't want to be doing at least now I'm aware that I'm frittering my time away, haha! It seems that a wake up call isn't just a one time deal, there is no before or after, there is only during.

Oh God, I've become the cancer Yoda :)

LIVE-ing with cancer

So I wound up going into "scan land" for the last couple of weeks and found myself avoiding this blog... it's weird, I'm now at the point where I am to follow up by getting a CT scan every three months and a simple blood test once a month, and a couple of weeks ago I got my first one, and also got my first taste of what my life will be like for probably the rest of my life, a taste of what waiting to see if anything is ever going to come back will be like, and to put it bluntly, it's a mind f*ck. My doctor keeps telling me to forget cancer, to stay as far away from it as I can, but so far I just don't know how that's done. My scan initially showed an inflamed lymph node in my chest (WTF?). I had to have a subsequent PET scan which says that I actually have two tiny lymph nodes in my chest which are too small to be diagnosed and which probably means they are nothing at all and that otherwise I'm clean, "no evidence of metabolic activity" in my cells, which is a good thing, no, a great thing. So now that all that mechanical part of life after treatment has gotten under way I'm trying to figure out where my heart goes after treatment. I have been very ambivalent about writing about the scans, first off because the first thought that crossed my mind when the nurse rattled off something about a lymph node and getting further testing was that I was going to disappoint people, people that care about me and were so lovely in wrapping their arms around me when I shared the good news about my prognosis, and I felt that maybe I celebrated too soon and jinxed myself (I know, I know...), in essence I was ashamed that I might be letting people down, I couldn't bear the thought of my family going thru anything else and I was simply afraid.

I'm the kind of person who used to skip any cancer related articles I ever came across in a magazine because somewhere in the back of my mind I thought I'd be calling something bad upon myself by reading them. The kind of person who felt awful and awkward whenever I heard of anyone being diagnosed with it, and was basically very uninformed. But now I don't know exactly where I fit in, I know more about the disease than I ever thought I would and I like to think that I have licked it, so do I stay away from it as the doctor says? or do I follow my instincts in trying to reach out to those in my tribe? I know the American Cancer Society recommends that anyone who has gone thru the experience stay away from volunteering and/or trying to do something related to cancer for at least two years after the end of treatment, why exactly is that? and why two years? that's also the time period where recurrence is most common, do they know something I don't know? is it some kind of twisted evidence that you bring it upon yourself by "dwelling on it"?

Jesus, I just want to be clear headed about things, it's so hard to keep your head out of magical thinking... So when I ask myself what do I know about what I've just lived through, the answer is that I have LIVED through it. Cancer sucks, no doubt about it, but it's not necessarily the horrible automatic end of life as you know it, it's just one of the cards that you're dealt in this life, and you get through it one way or another. And yes, if there's any way that anything that I might have to say or think or feel or do can be taken as holding hand for anyone that has heard the words "you have cancer" then that's what I need to do. I'm not trying to be magnanimous, or trying to be the good girl yet again in my life, I'm just trying to stay real and figure out if I have something to contribute, and that's not so easy to know.

Give me a head with HAIR, long beautiful hair...

Hair is always an issue with women, isn't it? well, I guess it is with men too, after all, its seems that the cure for baldness is like the Holy Grail (I think I just saw something like that in a movie...).

At any rate, hair- I'm in smack in the middle of peach fuzz phase and it ain't pretty. I shed the wiglet and hats that I have been wearing since April while at Omega and am now venturing out onto the streets with my fuzzy noggin exposed for the world to see. I've learned a lot about hair, I remember before I started treatment that the doctor told me I'd lose mine about 2 weeks into chemo and I thought "whatever, that's the least of my concerns", little did I know how much of an effect it has on you. And it's not a simple vanity issue (although I was sort of astonished to see just how vain I could be), the biggest impact it has is that being bald is a constant reminder of cancer. You are no longer able to have it slip your mind, not even for a minute; you catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror or reflection, develop the habit of constantly touching your bald head, your head is incessantly switching from hot to cold, you're putting on a cap to stay warm, yanking it off because you are sweating, you find yourself putting together one odd getup or another before you leave the house, it's all just weird, and what it manages to do is make you feel that much less "you". And then you lose ALL your hair. There are upsides to that one here and there, no waxing or plucking needed, you can save a ton on shampoo, but then there is the loss of eyebrows and eyelashes that makes you look like an alien. I joked with my husband all the way thru it about how I used to used to gauge things by whether or not I was having a good hair day and then it became whether or not I was having a good brow pencil day. Boy, eyebrows... don't get me started on eyebrows, I don't know exactly how I got to be such an expert but I am able to draw a mean eyebrow, I'm an eyebrow virtuoso. I kept threatening to paint them in showing a different emotion every day- the surprised brow, the furrow, the sad droopy brow... and then there is the lovely experience of being out of the house and inadvertently wiping your brow and taking half an eyebrow with you. But I have to say that all those years of reading vapid beauty magazines paid off in a most unexpected way, I suddenly remembered all the tips on correct brow shape and I have to say it helped. When I get the C-Tribe website up and running there will be a link specifically dedicated to eyebrows :) I guess guys are a little out of luck when it comes to brow pencils, but hey, they can get away with baseball caps 24/7.

On a serious note, the loss of your hair looms large during this process, I would advise anyone not to discount the effect. It's another one of those deeply isolating and lonely things that cancer brings with it. Either you cover it up as best you can, as I did until now, mainly in an attempt to not bring cancer with me into every conversation, or you show your bald self to the world, and the world doesn't know where to avert their eyes to quick enough. And your friends will try to help by suggesting you embrace the wig and hat routine and "have fun with it" (bless their hearts), without realizing that the mere fact of having that conversation makes you feel like more of an oddball.

But what has happened in the last week is that I have been walking around feeling quite liberated with my fuzzy head out in the open air, and I have actually managed to have cancer slip my mind a couple of times, that's been a sweet relief. I have quite a way to go before I start to have my real hair back, and I think that maybe somewhere in the back of my mind getting my hair back gets equated with getting my identity back but that's not going to happen. Life is in the middle of making me forge a new identity, I'm a work in progress.

Umbilical Cord Syndrome

These were his words: "you have an astronomically high cure rate... 95%... forget cancer and live your life", that was from my oncologist yesterday, I sat there in the exam room that I knew all too well and couldn't really digest what he was saying, thank God my son was there with me, thank God he knew enough to ask him to elaborate, thank God he was there, period. I was way too nervous. My rush of tears, he said, were evidence of "Umbilical Cord Syndrome", when patients are afraid to let go of treatment, no matter how miserable it has been. And he was right, that's what I was feeling. Going to the hospital for treatment had become routine in my life and even though you dreaded it at least you felt like you were fighting this thing inside you that might start to grow again without it.

Although I gotta say that today I'm not missing that cord much, I'm sure the feeling will come up often as I move forward, but today I've sort of spent the day retracing my steps, and re-living all the love and light that has been sent my way by so many wonderful people in my life. And I feel like a little kid, all antsy to go out and do things. I could ramble on a long list of goofy things I want to do and do right now!

But "forget cancer", that's not one of them... I don't know if I will ever get to such a Zen place where I can be grateful for my cancer, but I do know that my life is richer for it, I have lived an intensity that I had never lived before, certainly through bad things like I had never experienced before, but I am also content with the knowledge that I will now feel that deep of an intensity through all the good as well.

Hippychick 2.0

I'm still working on soaking up everything Omega... I know I said I didn't want for this blog to be a journal all about me, me, me, but I have got to share my experiences at the Omega Institute's Women and Power conference over the weekend, it was simply amazing, inspiring and exactly what I needed.

I have been thinking a lot about womanhood lately, about what it means in it's essence. I've been thinking about the physical self loathing that I absorbed into my life since I was a young girl, and then I look at that in the context of what happened to me, basically my female parts went bad on me, I had ovarian and uterine cancer, and now I have no ovaries and no uterus, not that I need those organs to feel like a woman but these are things that have been on my mind. So I think on some level I was going to the Women's conference to not only plug into a female energy that I know I missed but maybe also to learn about being a woman from other women. What I didn't expect, yet happily welcomed, was the instant empowerment that flowed from the minute the conference opened. As I listened to women like Elizabeth Lesser, Lateefah Simon and the amazing Gloria Steinem that first night, I found myself once again hungry for external definition when I simply snapped out of it- I DO know what woman means, I know what me as a woman means and what traveling thru this female life is; it means being open and loving and fearless and soft and strong and embracing a deep innate wisdom we are born with yet all too often doubt. I listened to, met, exchanged ideas with, and broke bread with some amazing women, there were all ages there and I was at the same time proud of my generation for things we accomplished and awed by the younger ones for things they are committed to. I made two wonderful friends, the sweet, loving, kind and accepting Teresa and the passionate and forthright seeker Maria (who also happens to be from Cuba to boot), two woman that were given to me for a reason, I know, and that maybe represent two facets of my very own self that I am to embrace, I'm so grateful to have met them.

And Omega the place itself is magical, there is an energy there that must come from years of people coming together to explore themselves and to explore things seen and unseen that gives it a living heart, it's like a big warm hug of a place. I was also happy to realize that the 60's are alive and kicking, in me and at Omega. I know I will be back, no doubt about it.

My mind has been spinning with everything I took in, we heard from Isabel Allende, Helen Thomas, the young founders of Feministing.com and World Pulse Magazine, a woman from Afghanistan who needs bodyguards round the clock because she has dedicated her life to building schools and even a university for girls in her country, the gifted and hilarious Sarah Jones, Natalie Merchant, Olympic medalists, and many others. And I have to admit I was feeling quite small and intimidated in light of the work that all of these women were involved in and working so hard for. And then Elizabeth Lesser did it again, she gave us all a gift as she did with her book, she ended the conference with the message that every one we heard from, all these women who have accomplished so much, are simply "making it up" as they go along, that that's what we all do, she said that what she wishes is for us all to just go out there and "make it up". Gloria Steinem repeatedly said to remember that we are communal beings, that we can't get things done alone, human beings need community, so very true. I realized that I need community as a woman and as a person dealing with cancer. My personal version of "making it up" will be to develop the C-Tribe as community.

Power

I have power on the brain lately, the particular radiation treatment I just went thru made me feel completely powerless, I am going to the Omega Institute for a seminar on Women and Power this weekend and I just picked up my copy of this month's Oprah Magazine and what's the theme? you guessed it, power. I just read something in it, "Real power is usually unspectacular, a simple setting aside of fear that allows the free flow of love... The process of spotting fear and refusing to obey it is the source of all true empowerment". The words of Martha Beck, page 57 in this issue, read it. I have often been blown away by Martha's books and columns, but more than anything I have been blow away by her personally. I attended a workshop run by her and by Koelle Simpson back in April, right after I had surgery and before I started treatment, and more than anything during that amazing weekend when I learned so much about myself and being in my own energy, a weekend when I met a small group of amazing people completely open and vulnerable to each other, more than all the powerful experiences we shared, is the memory of a conversation Martha had with us all at the very end of the workshop. We talked about presence, about mindfulness and about our connection; I was so moved by the pure goodness of this woman and how she completely gave of herself, how open her soul was to us all with the message that we are all one, we are connected. I know that probably sounds hokey to a lot of people but it was one of the most real and human experiences I have had in my life. I periodically plug back in to the memory of that day and I feel power.

The other words I have recently read that moved me came from Elizabeth Lesser, her book, Broken Open, is, in essence, a gift. I had purchased it a while ago, it's subtitle is "how difficult times can help you grow" and I assumed it was going to be another one of those smile thru your fear and sorrow approaches, I wasn't quite into that. But from the minute I started to read it I realized this was something real and it proved to be something very important to me during this journey. I not only felt the camaraderie with Elizabeth the seeker (although clearly she has followed a more direct and more sophisticated path than the one I have been on intermittently in my life) but her words are poetry for a hurting soul. I am blown away by the fact that this woman is able to and willing to open herself up as she has and touch people as she touched me. To be able to help someone come through pain is power, and I am grateful for her fearlessness. Elizabeth Lesser founded the Omega Institute and has spent a lifetime working in the field of wellness and personal growth, working on the delicacy and complexity that is the human experience, really. How happy am I that I'm heading there tomorrow?

Goes to show you how much I know...

OK, it's been over a week since I posted on here naively thinking I'd be doing a grand performance of the happy dance all over the place because my treatment was finally over; well, little did I know... I was a complete wreck. I was expecting relief, I was expecting a parting of the clouds, and while there definitely was some of that, what was there the most of was an overwhelming flood of emotions. I realize now that for the last six months I was holding back so much (mainly my whole life most of the time) and now it all came pouring out. Finishing treatment wasn't joyous, it was sobering. Finishing treatment meant release, but also fear, fear that even though treatment was awful I knew at least that whatever cancer cells might still be in me were being attacked, now that the attack is over what does that mean, that they are free to grow again? It's taken me a few days to digest everything, and I have come to the realization that I now go from attacking cancer with outside treatments, i.e., chemo and radiation, to managing it from the inside, from my head, from my spirit and my physical body. I will make my body into the best cancer fighting entity it can be thru nutrition and supplements, I'll keep all those great killer cells we all have strong and hungry, and I'll stay on the monitoring program of scans and blood tests until I hear the doctors utter that most wonderful of all C-words: cure. That's when I KNOW I'll do that pending happy dance :)

Phase 3

It seems I enter what I've heard be called Phase 3 soon- recovery, it goes from diagnosis to treatment to recovery (if you ask me each one of those phases their own "7 steps" thing- anger, denial, bargaining, blah, blah, blah...). The thing is that I have my very last treatment tomorrow, I'm done with treatment, I'm just letting that sink in. And I'm nervous about it because once again I don't know what to expect, the one thing I have learned by now is that I shouldn't expect anything, I should just feel, to allow yourself to experience everything step by step is the way to go, I think. And right now, at this moment, I'm feeling just a bit of sunshine beaming down on me but think I'm going to be obnoxiously happy tomorrow!

Been thinking some more

OK, until I completely figure out what it is I am supposed to do in terms of website, etc., I'm just going to keep writing down my thoughts, in the words of my amazing brother who I just shared this with I'm gonna just "be myself and keep the honest, open approach"...

The newly diagnosed- that's a very singular position to be in, it's a cloud, a fog, really. It is surreal and hyper-real at the same time, it's completely disorienting and frightening and very lonely. And you have Twilight Zone moments like when you find yourself sitting in a waiting room with other people clearly going thru chemo and you think to yourself "oh, those poor people, they have cancer...", as if you didn't too. There are a lot of resources out there for cancer information, too many maybe, there are a lot of quack type websites who will tell you that if you drink worm feces tea or suck on pine cones found on the northwest side of Mt Whatever that you will be cured of cancer, guaranteed, or sites that go on and on about early detection (how does that help you when you've just been diagnosed at your particular stage? it makes you feel like a goner is what it does), or sites that are so general they make you want to scream. So what do you do? I think one of the best things to do is to stay off of them altogether. There is just so much information you can process at a time, and at the moment you are busy dealing with the words you heard from your doctors mouth and the steps to come. I'm going to concentrate my efforts on those that are in the midst of this newly diagnosed whirlwind, because it can be easy to lose your spirit for a little bit, and it's your spirit that's going to get you through this. I'm not talking about the "you have to be positive" platitudes (usually said with the best of intentions, I know), but believe me, if you could THINK your cancer away I would not have gone thru what I went thru. And the flip side of this train of thought is this weird unspoken insinuation that you got sick or had a recurrence because you weren't positive enough. At any rate, what I'm getting at is that what does get you through things and what gives you strength is reaching down in your core, in your heart of hearts and realizing that in spite of everything that's being laid on you right now, in spite of the fear, you know that life is good, simply and solidly good, and that no matter what, no matter the outcome of things, you will be fine.

Wrapping my head around a blog

Not sure if a blog is the right thing for me, better said, a blog can be a good thing for me but not sure that's what I had in mind. I can see how this format could so quickly turn into a personal diary, that's all nice and good but I don't think a personal diary would be of much use to anyone, especially to anyone just learning that they are members of my tribe too. While of course it can be inspiring to read about survival stories and positive outcomes when you first start to grapple with this, and believe me, there are plenty of them out there, I want this to be different. I don't want it to be about my story, because to be honest, my story is probably irrelevant to people outside of my circle. Every person's story is different, every cancer is different, every circumstance is different, and when I first began to try to navigate through this what I needed most wasn't reading other people's stories, what I needed was some sort of resource to help me piece together my own, so that's what I'm setting out to do. Even a little bit of information that helps you sort out the experience you are going through can be huge, and I've been lucky enough to have found help along my way, that's what I want to provide to my sisters and brothers now.

Let me explain the Tribe

The days I spent in the hospital after my surgery were laced with dream images that held messages for me, I know they probably had more to do with the happy juice running through my veins but they were meaningful for me nonetheless.

One of these messages was The C-Tribe. I realized that I now belonged to a new tribe, with all the plus and minuses that entailed. This is what I wrote down initially:

We walk among you, you know, we’re not all that different from you, no need to fear us, pity us, reject us or ignore us. We are just like you, except that one day we had the “C” word dropped on us… yes, that “C” word, cancer. It’s the great divider, those with and those without, but is it? And does it need to be? We all walk around with it in our bodies, we all have cancer cells present, its just that some of us have or had more of them, OK, maybe lots more of them. But the minute that scarlett letter is emblazened on you then you become this other person, you are no longer just “my friend, Dora”, you become “my friend, Dora, with cancer”; the addendum typically said in a whisper. And that makes both parties feel odd, different, awkward, needlessly so. So I’m here to say that we can all relax around this, I know it would do me a world of good and would probably be good for you as well.

Odds are that even if you’re not aware of it you know people who have had to deal with cancer, we put our pants on one leg at a time too; we’re just like everyone else. Except that the minute you are made aware of someone’s “C” status there is a social schism that drops down like a weighted curtain, and stays there. Are we really that scary? Is that whole “reminds us of our own mortality” thing really that strong? We have the same probability of stepping off a curb one day and being hit by a bus as you do; the odds are the same for us all.

OK, back to today- I know I walk alone through my experience with cancer (ironically even though I have amazing people in my life that hold my hand down the path, and for them I am infinitely grateful). There's such a push-pull involved in this tribe, the push against pre-conceived concepts surrounding our diagnoses, the pull of a forceful camaraderie that we would no doubt opt out of given the choice. But this is what I have been given in life, some of us belong to the blue eyed tribe, some the left handed tribe, some the alcoholic tribe, you get my drift... me? the c-tribe.

Timing...

I think it's interesting that I have decided to write about my perceptions now, I started this last night and can't stop thinking about getting back on here for some more, that's not like me...

At any rate, timing- I finish treatment this week and I think somewhere in my mind is the lurking thought about the possibility of re-entering my life as I knew it before. And although I know for a fact that my life as I knew it before no longer exists I guess it's a seductive illusion. I have a friend, a three time cancer survivor, who I spoke to days after this thing started and I naively said "I don't think this has sunk in yet", she wisely replied "honey, this won't even begin to sink in for six months", so here I am, starting to process.

The last six months I think my soul has been on auto pilot, and that's not such a bad thing, to begin with, my soul is one that believes unabashedly in the core good in everything and that is a comfort. And also, I've been put through a series of experiences that have been a bit mind numbing, surgery, chemo, radiation... things you just plug through I guess.

I have often been wrapped up in a feeling that I am supposed to "DO" something with all of this, not in the often trite "everything happens for a reason" vein of thought, but rather with a sense of logic, a compulsion to make sense of things not only for me but for others in my tribe.

The nitty and the gritty

OK, so all of this setting up of the blog was a lot easier than expected, now it's time to write. And defining what I want to write about is the hard part. So here are the basics- I'm a 52 year old woman living in LA, I'm overweight, have been all my life but always healthy. Life was plugging right along, sometimes happily, sometimes begrudgingly, but steadily one foot in front of the other. Until one day I went to the emergency room out of sheer frustration with the nothingness I knew I would get from a regular doctor visit, I had a nagging pain in my right lower abdomen, appendicitis? probably not... probably something as unglamorous and humiliating as diverticulitis (anybody old enough to remember the SNL skit?). So I sat there in the exam room, doing everything that was asked of me (drink 4 oz of this contrast liquid every 15 minutes for one hour, etc.), had my scan, read my book, and waited for the very young doctor to come back and tell me what to do to relieve the pain (I won't make the obligatory Doogie Howser wisecracks), but all of a sudden he seemed a little jittery: "when was the last time you had a pelvic ultrasound?" huh? how often do people have pelvic ultrasounds? he made it sound like something as routinely done as a dental check-up... "because the radiology report says they see masses consistent with ovarian cancer and metastases..." yeah, that's about where time stopped. It's been pretty much a blur since then, and that was 6 months and 9 days ago...

It's not my intention to make this blog about my story, I can't think of anything more boring for my hypothetical readers out there. It is my intention, though, to talk about the isolation that is cancer. And to do my damnedest to topple that.

Figuring it out

It's going to take me a little bit to sort out where I want to go with this, with the blog and with my life since I had the C word dropped on me, so please indulge me.

C-Tribe is born

I've been thinking about this for a while... 6 months to be exact, more on that in a bit, first I have to get this blog thing off the ground.