I have four family members who have run marathons. I'm simply in awe of this accomplishment. Our oldest daughter Elizabeth has run three and I'll never forget her first one, the St. Jude Memphis Marathon. The whole family went downtown on a very cold December morning,...
Boy, this sure isn't the post I thought I'd be writing. I didn't think it would be September before I wrote it and I didn't realize it would be this hard to write. This is the toughest one, because it's a different kind of trauma than I've ever experienced. But here...
This isn’t going to be a feel-good post. Because I’m feeling crappy and rotten. So if you're here for daisies and rainbows, you're in the wrong spot today. I had colon surgery on July 6 and was recovering well. I felt so much like myself that we went out Thursday...
Y’all know what a 12-6 curveball is? You do if you’re a baseball fan like me. Imagine you’re at bat and you see the ball coming toward you. You can tell it’s not a 100-mph fastball and it looks like it’s just in the right place to connect with the sweet spot of your...
it Pours. :: Heavy Sigh :: Yesterday, just as I'm beginning to recover physically from surgery, I log on to my patient portal account and see the report of my lymph node biopsy from the procedure. I had been waiting for it, but felt pretty confident that my prognosis...
I'm a richly blessed old chick. The summer of 2023 started with my first ever colonoscopy on June 13. The gastroenterologist who did the procedure was a real jerk. It's bad to be a jerk, but I think it's a lot worse to be a doctor and a jerk. This particular ass in...
This is the toughest part of the cancer thing. The waiting. Waiting for surgery. Waiting for another scan (a PET scan, the one after which I'll be radioactive) in two days, waiting to know about treatment. I'd like to say I'm waiting patiently, but that would be a...
Oh, here we go. Now I'm overwhelmed. Things are moving pretty quickly. Today I saw the oncologist and my head started spinning. He's a very nice man, and is from Ecuador, so he probably speaks much better Spanish than I do. My sister Sara says oncologists are always...
If the title of this post offends you, sorry. Cancer offends me. I hope you're more bothered by cancer than by the word damn. I'm a 25-year breast cancer survivor as of this writing, and I thought I was finished with cancer. My tumor was very small when diagnosed and...