Just Call me Sausage Toes

All sorts of weird and not particularly wonderful things happen to your body when you have chemo. Like the fact that I’m putting on a pound a week despite having given up wine and chocolate. I started off as a trim lightweight rower (that's about a 130lbs to you non-rowers) -- and at this rate I'm going to look like a heffalump by the time I finish. And the worst of it is, I had all my winter pants taken in last year, and I'm darned if I'm paying to have them all let out again!

I was slightly freaked out when I woke up one morning to find that my fingers and toes were all peeling. The fingers weren’t too bad, but my feet were a total fright. They looked as if I’d spent several years wearing the same woolly socks and hiking boots with no access to a pumice stone. I dug out an old rectangular plastic bin from the basement, filled it with warm sudsy water and stuck it under my desk so that my feet could have a good soak, and gave myself a pedicure. It didn't help all that much.

But the worst was a couple of weeks later when my feet and ankles swelled up so much that my skin actually hurt. I was at the hospital getting yet another of those darned shots to boost my white blood cells so I swung by Dr. Z’s office to show him this new development. “Hey, baldy, wassup?” he greeted me in his usual cheery fashion, rubbing my head for good luck. “Just look at my feet,” I yelped. “They look like a pair of over-stuffed burritos with five sausages stuck on the ends.

”

We stood in the corridor and peered down. Michelle, the lovely nurse practitioner, and Mary Heery, the Smilow Breast Cancer patient navigator, joined us. (That's Mary in the photo with me - and the little square thing on my chest is my port!) The four of us huddled into a rugby scrum and stared at the offending objects. Dr. Z had the answer right away. “Go and get your blood drawn and come right back.” "What's my blood got to do with swollen feet?" I shot back. "I need to check your chemistry to see what's going on," he replied, ducking into an exam room before I could say anything else.

I should have known better and kept quiet….. sigh!....it was going to be another long afternoon. I sat and waited for a finger stick then headed back to the waiting room to sit and wait again - and chat with the other patients. After a while you get to know everyone.

“Oy, sausage toes, get over here!” No mistaking Dr. Z’s dulcet tones. Everyone in the room stared at me. Mary burst out laughing. I gathered my belongings with some semblance of dignity, smiled at the collected company, and shuffled off on my burritos. The Q & A session in the exam proceeded as normal with the odds stacked against me and ended with instructions for further medical tests. “I don’t want an ultrasound. Let’s see if it goes away,” I said, tapping my sausages in frustration at not having kept my big mouth shut. “You are so-u impossible,” said Dr. Z, trying to round out his ‘O’s like a Brit. “I want to make sure you don’t have any blood clots in your legs.”

Well, I didn’t want any blood clots in my legs either, but I didn't want to spend the rest of the day up in radiology so we reached a compromise. I’d eliminate all salt from my diet to see if that helped. I hobbled off before Dr. Z could change his mind. “But if you’ve still got fat feet next time I see you, you’re having an ultrasound!” he hollered at my retreating back.

Read All About It! Cancer Patient Lands New Job

I know, I know...... I should have written. There are some wonderful people in far-flung places who've been worrying about me because it's been so quiet here in blog-land, so apologies for dropping out of sight. All is well, I'm plugging along with the chemo -- it's a bit of a bore, to be quite frank about it, but the light at the end of the tunnel is getting brighter which means I'm close to the end. Wait!... I mean end of the chemo! Gosh, hope you didn't think I meant one of those other tunnels with a light at the end! I'm nowhere near that particular road just yet, thank you very much. Heaps and heaps of things to do first.

The truth is that something rather interesting happened just as I was about to start chemo. Those of you who've been following along since the beginning will remember my huge Feel Good blanket, knitted and stitched with love and care by my rowing buddies. A photo of my knitter friends with the blanket was posted on Maritime Rowing's Facebook page, where said photo was spotted by an eagle-eyed chap called Tom Renner, sports reporter for a brand new on-line community news publication. Ace sleuth that he is, Tom tracked me down, and next thing you know he's written an article on me and the blanket. Here's a link to the article in TheDailyNorwalk. In return, I sent him the link to my blog.

A couple of days later, I heard from Tom again. He loved the blog and wanted to know if he could publish it in TheDailyNorwalk. "Of course, the more women (and men) that read it the better," I told him. How wonderful to get my story out there to a wider audience. I was thrilled.

Tom was back in my email in-box again the next day. "Are you free to have lunch with Jane Bryant Quinn tomorrow?" he wanted to know. Well, I knew who Jane Bryant Quinn was having read her personal finance column in Newsweek, but why on earth did she want to have lunch with me? I had a bit of a panic when I thought she might want to interview me on the state of my personal finances. But that was a no-brainer -- if she wanted to talk to me about my money, then I'd steer her to the doctors and hospitals who've taken it all.

I did some sleuthing of my own and discovered that Jane is the Editorial Director of TheDailyNorwalk.com so now I was even more curious. I set off armed with a list of future blog posts and an open mind. Jane is an incredibly smart and charming woman, plus her birthday is the same day as my favorite aunt's, so we had a great conversation and solved the problems of the world. Tom valiantly tried to follow an Acquarian and a Gemini as they jumped from one topic to another, but the upshot of this meeting was that I WAS OFFERED A NEW JOB!! As a writer, no less!

All right, now you have to follow this. My world has been turned inside out by the whole breast cancer problem, I'm just about to start 20 weeks of chemo, which is supposed to knock you from here into tomorrow, and I get hired to write the Home & Garden magazine section of a new publication!! This was fantastic! I was thrilled!! I love writing!!! Talk about lemons and lemonade....

SO -- I think the moral of this story is that if, in the face of adversity, you keep your wits about you and make sure to keep smiling, good things will happen. Here I am, a cancer warrior engaged in a fierce battle with an unseen foe, I've got a brand new job and I'm loving it. Life sure is a funny old thing!