Pre-Thanksgiving

Howdy, all!
We're just getting ready for Thanksgiving here today. We're heading to my Dad and Carol's tomorrow morning to spend the better part of the afternoon stuffing our faces (shyeah, right! I couldn't stuff my face these days if you paid me to! I wish!), visiting and shooting guns off the back deck - that's what my family does!
This afternoon I will be making the obligatory green bean casserole (the Campbell's recipe, tried and true!), a corn pudding that's just about to die for from a friend of mine (who also happens to be Pete's cousin!), and, if I still feel like it, pumpkin bread with chocolate chunks (my dear family friend Jane taught me how to make it when she came out last year for my second chemoembo). That's not too much cooking, ya think? Luckily, Pete's headed home at noon so surely I can coax him into helping me. I know if I lure him towards the kitchen with those french fried onions that go within and atop the green bean casserole, I can get him to whip that one up for me (he did it last year!). We'll just take it slow and easy. No rush. I might just skip the pumpkin bread since we're picking up 2 pies from Marie Callendar's for tomorrow's dessert.

Me? I feel just fine. Low on energy every day but nothing a simple nap routine can't fix. Up at 7, eat breakfast, nap at 9 till 11, then up to be productive or work on the computer then mid-afternoon nap so that I'm alert in the evening. Let's just say it's a good thing that napping after all that eating is a nation-wide tradition on Thanksgiving day!
My feet are still swollen and the longer I'm up on them, the more swollen (and painful) they get. Thankfully, it's the appropriate season to be wearing my uber-comfy Uggs whenever we go out and about...they are cushy and have lots of room in them so my balloon-feet aren't super-uncomfortable.
I could fill an entire blog listing and describing the symptoms I experience on a daily basis and what I do (and/or what I take, medication-wise) to manage them, so I'm not even going to bother. What other choice do I have but to learn to cope with them? Yes, my doctor(s) know all about these symptoms and have helped me with the coping.

I get this week off from chemo (yay!!!) but then start a new cycle next week. I'm still in pain that comes and goes from the chemo I had three weeks ago but that was just because it was only two weeks after the chemoembo procedure -- so it was like chemo poured in an already-overflowing recpetical of chemo drugs. Now that was a painful couple of weeks!

Pete's reading a book for me by the brilliant Deepak Chopra called Quantum Healing. He can better describe what it's all about but after he's read a few chapters, he discusses the topics he'd just read with me which are mostly about the mind/body connection when it comes to healing (and just about anything else in our lives). Sure, it's all about positive thinking but NOT DENIAL. Denial that I am sick is extremely negative and toxic to my system, as far as I'm concerned. But with the positive thinking comes creative, healing visualisation. Remember almost two years ago now when I started chemo, I would envision thousands of little colorful stick-figure-type characters parachuting through my veins and onto the tumors, where they'd then whip out their tools such as jack hammers, pick axes, chainsaws, etc. then they'd get to work chopping away at destroying the tumor? Well, after the first couple visits to houston with not-so-good-news (tho not necessarily bad, either), I gave up on picturing those little guys, convinced that they just didn't work for me.
Now that Pete's been reading this book for me (I bought it for myself to read but I knew that my attention span would make it very difficult to plow through and understand the concepts in the book...I also knew that Pete is totally into that sort of stuff so that's how he ended up reading it for me: he reads it on the train to and from work and then summarizes some of the better stuff he's read when he's home), he's also helped me create a whole knew scene to visualize the destruction of the tumors. Someday I'll tell you all about it but for now I'd like to keep it to myself.
I'd love to hear from you if you have any ideas of other things I could visualize to help heal myself! If you've got any, please leave your suggestions in the comments section!

Dr. G wants a CT scan done ASAP so I'll get that scheduled for next week, I'm sure. He wants to see how the last procedure went and then seriously consider doing the RFA ("berry picking") on the three smaller tiny tumors on the other, healthy lobe of my liver. That's the next step.

I certainly don't tell you all everything that's going on in the cancer part of our lives -- partly because it's simply just our business but mostly because the shit we hear from doctors is hard to hear and absorb (yes, even the "good" news) so after we discuss and work out plans and solutions, etc with the docs, the last thing either of us wants to do is relay every detail, good and bad, all over again on this blog. So I just tell you the big, overall stuff. The stuff I want you to know. If anything seriously changes, I'll tell you that too. But for now nothing serious is going on and nothing serious is new or detremental to my current health. All of my symptoms (all 500 of them, it feels like!) are just symptoms of my body coping with either cancer or chemo or trying to live a somewhat typical life with the combination of the two. Sometimes I have to do absolutely nothing for a couple of days, while other times, I can get up and move move move! It feels weird and sometimes painful and it really really SUCKS. But Pete and I are getting through it and we're going to create the most positive outcome that we possibly can out of all of this.
Want to know what/how we believe? Take some time out to read or watch The Secret and that will give you a general overview of what we're working on now because as the medical procedure options begin to disappear, we realize that it's more my (our) responsibility to do as much self-healing as possible. That movie goes a bit overboard and sappy but the general idea is there. Check it out if you have time and interest!

Again, if you have any ideas of what I can visualize inside of me to help me heal, please describe it in the comments section! Or, if it's way too long and complex, feel free to email it to me and I'll read and respond when I can.

In the meantime, Pete and I and our furry kids all hope that all of our friends and family have a wonderful Thanksgiving tomorrow, full of love and togetherness! And then, if you're into that midnight Black Friday Madness, good luck to you on that endeavor, too! (I'll be participating in the Cyber Black Friday from the comforts of my own home where, at midnight tomorrow night, I might just buy a few gifts as their prices drop online as well!)

Happy Thanksgiving!