My immune system has been rebooted. Thanks, chemo!

One of the problems with writing a blog about breast cancer is that when you stop posting articles people fear the worst. So I apologize to my husband's colleagues in far-flung lands who send him concerned emails from time to time. "Dear Peter, and your wife, she is well?" You'll be pleased to hear that I'm alive and kicking and fit as a fiddle. And working harder than I've every worked in my life. How nuts is that?

See that bell on the wall behind me? I rang it after my last chemo on August 31, 2011. It's a bit Monty Pythonish and lots of fun. My girls brought a big ice-cream cake in my favorite flavors - coffee and double chocolate - and we had a party with everyone in the infusion room!

Last week I popped into Norwalk Hospital for a checkup with Dr. Z, my oncologist. We had to talk about pills and other boring maintenance issues. Suddenly he looked me square in the eyes and said, "You're cured. Understand? You don't have breast cancer." Wow, great news, of course, but I'd never really believed I had it in the first place. Sure, I went along with the chemo plan just in case Dr. Z was right, but I was mostly in denial.

At this point, I'm trying to get back into my pre-cancer groove, which means getting back to the boathouse every morning and building up my strength so that I can race in the fall. It's been a frustrating few months. After the chemo I decided to have a mastectomy. My type of cancer, the lobular sort, often develops in the other breast and I figured that removing both of them would make it harder for new cancers to take hold. I won't bore you with the details, but I found the mastectomy and recovery far more brutal than the chemo. Maybe that was just me - or maybe my body was just fed up with having things done to it.

Dr. Barbara Ward was my breast cancer surgeon. The woman is a tower of strength, calm under pressure and I can't recommend her highly enough. And I'm sorry for all the rubbish I must have said when I was in the recovery room. My daughter says I was hilarious. Hmm.

My hair started growing as soon as chemo finished. This is my plastic surgeon, Dr. David Passaretti, who's fixing me up with new headlights!

Anyway, that's all in the past and I'm not going to think about it anymore. Time to get on with the rest of my life. But before I close the book on chemo, here's something wonderful I discovered this spring. Chemo reboots your immune system. At least that's what Dr Paget, head of Rheumatology at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, told me. And my allergies have disappeared! Now that's nothing to sneeze at.

Embracing Baldness!

I LOVE being bald. Yes, I know, pretty weird thing for someone blessed with a thick mass of untameable curls that she used to hate but grew to love, but honestly I really like this new look. And I’ll tell you something – having no hair makes getting up and out of the house a breeze. I actually take quicker showers than my husband!

Peter, godblesshim, having become an instant parent to four teenagers some years ago, came up with a bizarre rule called The Two Minute Shower. His attempts to turn the entire household into TTMS followers met with dismal failure. My three girls would simply give him The Look as they trailed steam and wet towels. My son, who should have been more receptive to the concept being of the same species as Peter, just grunted and tried to wrestle him to the ground. As the wife, I paid no attention to P’s quaint little quirks. But these days I’m not only a convert to TTMS, I'm its best practitioner. With no hair to wash and condition or legs to shave, two minutes is longer than I need.

After I’d shaved my head and become a regular in the infusion room at Norwalk Hospital, I discovered that walking around au naturel was not the norm at all. In fact, I was the only one without a wig or scarf! Mind you, I’d started off wearing hats and scarves, mainly to keep my head warm but also because I didn’t want to make on-lookers uncomfortable. But there came a day when keeping my head warm was the last thing I wanted, and I didn’t give a hoot what anyone thought.

My step-daughter Rony (she's in the middle in the photo)was visiting from Australia and I decided to take her to Stew Leonard’s, a funky local supermarket. It was the middle of the afternoon and the temperature was hovering around 105°. Remember Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam? It’s hot! Damn hot. Real hot! As we set off across the parking lot I realized I’d left my Panama hat in the car. Ooof! We were nearly at the air-conditioning. Did I want to go back for the hat? No way.

Now that I think back to my pre-cancer days, I don’t remember seeing a lot of bald women walking around – and I’m the sort that notices that sort of thing. So I was absolutely gob-smacked that no-one stared at me in Stew’s. Actually, not quite true. Little kids stared open-mouthed, then tugged at their mothers, but nobody pointed or said anything out loud. Quite amazing. After that, I ditched the hats altogether except as sun protection. Incredibly liberating.

Fat Feet: Episode 2

I knew exactly what was going to happen when I turned up at the hospital the following week for my chemo. “How are your feet?” Dr. Z trumpeted from the far end of the corridor. “Not too bad, thanks, actually they’re much better this week,” I said, pointing out that we looked like twins with our bald heads and matching aqua-colored tops.

One thing I have to say about Dr. Z, which can’t be said of all men -- he’s remarkably observant. He spotted right away that I wasn’t being 100% truthful. He grabbed the phone. “You’re getting an ultrasound. We need to rule out blood clots in your legs.” I took a deep breath. “And if your legs are clear, I want ultrasounds of your pelvis,” he said, informing radiology that a crazy woman that ‘tawked’ funny was coming up immediately.

Of course there were no blood clots in either leg. Nor were there any blood clots in my pelvis or in any part of my reproductive system (retired). By the time I got back downstairs, Dr. Z had the results. “Everything is clean,” he said, scribbling furiously in my chart, which was starting to look like half an encyclopedia.

The problem with having cancer in one part of your body is that it might have spread to other areas -- and Dr. Z was determined to track down any errant cancer cells before they got into trouble. Obviously, this was a good thing, especially since all the new tests showed that I was the healthiest person on the planet, but all these exams and trips to different departments took up a huge amount of time. I tell you, having cancer is a full-time job.

Dr. Z didn’t know what to make of my feet. The swelling had begun soon after I started the Taxol part of my chemo, so we decided to keep an eye on them. Thank goodness it was summer – the only footwear that I could get on were flip-flops!

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!

Fun with hats!

For the first time in my life, I'm having an absolute blast wearing hats. They can look so positively glamorous!
But it wasn't always so. I'd always rather liked hats but my hair, which when I had it was impossibly curly, tended to make hats bounce right off. Plus, if there's one thing which I loathe with a passion, it's hat hair. Here's why.
In England, where I grew up, school children all wear uniforms, which is great because you can roll out of bed and put on your uniform, and off you go to school. No need to spend hours on the phone with your best friend figuring out what to wear the next day, or trying on outfits late into the night, which is how my three daughters spent most of their high school evenings.
Back in those days, an essential part of the school uniform was The Hat. We had a winter hat, which was a sort of navy blue felt thing with a hatband in our school colors, and we had a summer hat, which was a straw boater that looked like this and was unbelievably heavy.
My school had all sorts of impossible rules and regulations, including the color of your underwear and the thickness of your stockings, which we all bent whenever we could, but the rule governing the wearing of The Hat was the one we feared most.There was no such thing as a school bus in those days -- when the bell rang, we left school and walked: some took the city buses, others, like me, walked over a mile to the train station. I don't think anyone's mother drove to school to pick up her daughter. The minute you left the school grounds, you'd better have that hat on your head or you were dead meat.
We girls weren't the only ones walking -- the teachers were also heading home as well as the prefects, girls who were seniors and whose job it was to police the younger girls. So the roads were positively crawling with spies, and being spotted, and reported, for the serious breach of No Hat in Public, led to instant detention at school the next day.
One of the other hard-and-fast rules was absolutely no eating in public. "Very unlady-like," according to our headmistress. But we were starving teenagers and the London streets are thick with sweet shops, so we used to duck in for a packet of potato chips and a 1/4 lb of chocolate malteasers, stuff them into our blazer pocket and hope no-one had spotted us.
A group of us was in the sweet shop next to the train station one day, stocking up on munchies for the train ride, and I'd taken off my boater, sitting it on top of my book bag while I decided what to have. Suddenly there was a tremendous crash. Horrors!! A bottle of lemonade was stuck head first through the middle of my boater. We all froze. How the heck was I ever going to explain this?
Luckily my dad had the sort of glue you need to repair a boater with a hole through its top and I think I ended up concocting some complicated story that involved one or both of my brothers, so on that occasion I escaped punishment!Sorry, this has rambled on from the hat hair issue, but the point is that for all those school years I was positively tortured by those blasted hats, especially the boater which left me with a most extraordinary hair-do -- flat on the top and square on the sides. Really, really unflattering.
But now, my friends, I have turned into a total hat maven. I'm enjoying it while I can -- and that may not be for very long -- because I've suddenly got a layer of baby fluff growing back on my head! WooHoo!!

So what exactly is chemo?

In the life I lived before I became a cancer patient, I never gave any thought to what chemotherapy actually was. I'm the sort of person who's fascinated by all sorts of weird and wonderful things -- but finding out about chemotherapy just wasn't on my To-Do List. I thought it was a bunch of pills.
Well, let me enlighten you. Chemotherapy is nothing as simple as a bunch of pills -- it's a life-style and takes up huge chunks of time and leads to all sorts of worrying and fussing. I'll walk you through some of the highlights of my chemo experiences to date.
Once I'd finished with all the scanning and testing that the charming Dr. Z had signed me up for, I was given the green light for chemo. I was to report on Monday morning, every two weeks. On arrival you get a number on a blue card and go to the blood draw room for a finger stick. (Linda Madaffari and Edward Montoya are two of the fantastic phlebotomists at Norwalk Hospital) Your blood is sent off to check for white and red counts, which show whether you're in good enough shape to take the chemo. Then you're weighed, vitals taken and the good Dr. Z comes to poke and prod you, ask endless questions, all to make sure you're not sick in any way at all. If everything is A-OK, then you go and bag a chair in the infusion room, wait a while so that the nurses can custom mix your drugs according to Dr. Z's recipe, and finally you get hooked up. Getting the drugs doesn't hurt at all, which is one positive thing. The whole process from arrival to departure takes about four hours. You spend the rest of the day feeling a bit foggy.
The day after your infusion, you have to get a shot in the arm, so back you go to the hospital, get a number on a yellow card from the ladies at the desk and wait until the nurses spot you. The shot is something called Neulasta and it gives your white blood cells a boost -- and makes you feel achey as if you have the flu. Wonderful.
The reason for all the pre-chemo testing is that if there's any infection at all, you get a big F on your report card and are sent home with a prescription for antibiotics. Standing orders are that if your temperature is over 100.5° you must head straight to the ER. The chemo drugs are so toxic that they destroy both the bad cancer cells as well as other perfectly good cells that are just minding their own business. It's heavy artillery that knocks out everything within range. Nothing subtle about it. I hope that one of these days they'll develop fine-tuned drugs that can zoom in on their target more accurately, but for now this is what we have.
So the day I blew my nose and saw a version of Benjamin Moore's Grasshopper (a lovely shade that looks fantastic in my mudroom and really picks up the color of the slate on the floor) on my Kleenex, I knew I was in for it. I sent Dr. Z a text. "I think I've got a cold". Two minutes later he's on the phone. "What's going on? You need to come in. I'll see you in half an hour." The man is relentless. Back to the hospital. Another finger stick. More waiting. Another chance to get weighed, poked and prodded. Another half a day lost. I went home feeling ghastly, and spent three anxious days sleeping, taking my temperature and antibiotics, knocking back Tylenol like it was going out of fashion and drinking honey and lemon.
After eight weeks, I was done with the first set of chemo drugs and I'd survived. Phew!