A Fun Birthday Experience!

A dear friend of mine sent me a birthday card within a thick envelope that rattled! It came in earlier last week but I've been reluctant to open it, for fear that I'd be awash with some crazy assortment of confetti's!
This is one of my two friends who have been sending me at least one card each week since shortly after my diagnosis (um, over two years now!). Her envelopes are always cute and inviting! She's a preschool teacher, too, so it should come as no surprise that she decorates the envelopes and cards with an assortment of adorable stickers (often according to the season or recent holiday) and encouraging words! This birthday envelope was, of course, no different than the rest...except that it rattled. There was something --a lot of somethings!-- in there, shaking around crazily every time I picked it up!
Finally, a couple of hours ago, I laid out a couple of paper towels on the counter and carefully opened the envelope above them.
I sliced the edge open, turned the envelope upside-down to shake out some of the more loose confetti's when all of a sudden...!
THEY WERE NOT CONFETTI'S BUT TEENIE TINY CHICKLETS!!!!

YES!

A packet of those "Tiny Size" Chicklets gum squares was actually part of the card, I believe, as it seemed to be adhered to the front of the card, under the words "Shake Things Up!" And my friend, my dear, sweet, thoughtful friend...well, she had the great idea of making a small little slit in the bottom of the packet of Chicklets so that they would slowly seep out of their packet as the envelope made its way from Ohio to Colorado! Boy, did her plan ever work! :) Almost all of the teenie tiny Chicklets had come out of their packaging and were free-flowing within the envelope and card!

I couldn't help but laugh out loud (yes, it was even funny enough to spell it out, rather than abbreviate it as usual!)! I know from experience that if you want to actually chew this kind of gum, it takes just about the entire packet of Chicklets to equal the size of a regular chunk of bubble gum! And yes, I did try to chew a few of them but all I could taste was paper!

I thought I'd share this story with you because it was such a unique idea! I mean, we've probably all been bombarded by an envelope full of heart or angel or birthday cake-shaped confetti in our lives, right? That's always fun and exciting (in fact, I have another dear friend who usually sends me a card with such decorations on my birthday...I should probably go check the mailbox today!)! But the Chicklets thing I'd never seen and it was thoroughly enjoyable!
So, the lesson here is, the next time you get a thick envelope covered with adorable smiley face stickers and it rattles...BE VERY CAREFUL! And be prepared to CHEW!!

P.S. Thank you, Betsy for the fun card! Actually, it was more an experience than just a card!

I'm Fried

I simply cannot eat a bunch of fried food anymore.

I used to not even think about what I put in my mouth. Naturally, that was *before.* When I started to not feel well, those two or three months prior to my diagnosis, the very last thing I ever wanted to eat was fried foods! It was like my body was actually giving me a warning, "Do NOT eat that! It's too hard on the liver and that's where the problem is now! Put the french fries DOWN!" So I stayed away from them for several months, maybe a whole year.

Every once in a while, I am bombarded by an almost overwhelming craving for a particular food or drink. Pete has mentioned that it's almost like what we hear pregnant women are like. Except that I'm not craving ice cream with dill pickles on it! My cravings are more direct. For example, I am currently in the midst of an Orange Crush soda craving! This from someone who rarely drank much soda in the first place! But it happened a month or so ago and we had to start buying Diet Orange soda so that I don't get sick from too much sugar. I like the way the diet tastes anyway...sort of sweeter.
My cravings aren't always bad for me, either. I have also craved cantaloupe and pineapple, edemame (soybeans) and chicken salad (not in those particular pairs, though). Alas, just like everyone else in America and beyond, I often do crave fried foods from time to time!

Last week I went to lunch with Dad and had a 6 McNugget meal. Six is really all I can eat until I get full anyway and I was proud of myself for eating all of them because it was protein protein protein (my nutritionist wants me eating a lot of protien but I struggle with that daily). Instead of fries, I had "Apple Dippers" on the side and I didn't even want the caramel dip that comes with them. I was just fine after that meal.
Another time recently, I was able to enjoy Bernie's Hot Dog Co.'s (a local restaurant) incredibly yummy onion rings (Pete and I usually split an order of them) without bad after effects.
However, two nights ago I guess I just turned my brain off and ate whatever I liked...which was two big egg rolls and half an order of sweet and sour chicken. Fried, fried and more fried...with some pineapple and red pepper chunks to "balance" everything out, right? WRONG!
Yesterday I was in so much pain in my liver that Pete and I thought for sure I needed a trip to the E.R.! It was horrible! We couldn't figure out what the cause was and of course we feared The Worst (a cousin of What If). But during a long phone conversation with Nurse Gari, in which I described exactly how and where I felt the pain, I remembered the previous night's Chinese food Pig Out and I said to him, "I don't want to go to the E.R. if this just turns out to be a very bad case of indigestion! I'd be so embarrassed!" (I am now asking myself why I'm sharing this story with you even though I'm still embarrassed about it!) So he suggested I take a couple of my breakthrough pain killers and take it easy for three or four hours and if it gets worse, give him a call and he'd get me in to see the doctor ASAP. Fortunately, a few hours later it did not come to that. It did not get worse but it also didn't get much better.
Last night I woke up every hour still feeling very uncomfortable in my gut. So I had to cancel my lunch plans for the day so I could stay home to manage the pain and try to, well...let's just say get to the end of this particular digestive crisis.

I tried Googling some information to share with you regarding what exactly the liver does and how fried foods are so horrible for it but I was unable to find any *reputable* articles with this information in it. In summary, the liver cleans the toxins and bad stuff out of whatever we put in our bodies before it can get into the bloodstream to give us energy, strength, etc. I think of it sort of like a blender: if you put fresh, sliced apples and carrots and oranges into it, they get ground up easily and smoothly, hardly a blip on the liver's Toxins Radar. But if you pour a cup of vegetable oil, a doughnut or two and the not-so-choice cuts of meat in there, hit the Puree button and let 'er rip, the blender will most likely get all that clogged up in its blades, causing the whole thing to just...S T O P. So if your liver is the bladed part of the blender and the whole blender itsself is your digestive system, you can imagine how unwell this would feel.
It happens to everyone, whether your liver is compromised or not. If you eat too much fried food either in one sitting or consistently for too long, your blender's bound to bind up and STOP, right? So with a liver that's not quite as healthy as it could be, it takes even less to stop those blades!

I am managing well, though and our fears subsided almost as quickly as they came yesterday. I am just grateful that I know exactly what is causing this pain, that I've been through this before, how to manage and get through it and that I will feel better very soon (maybe one more day, if that).

If you are a person who is now extremely worried about me and my health, please read the above two sentences VERY CAREFULLY. This is no big deal. It would be a big deal if I continued to eat junk food right now. But now I'm taking better care of myself and trying to figure out how to bend my body just enough to kick myself in the booty for not thinking things through when I ordered all that yummy Chinese food the other night! That'll learn me!

Now it's time for me to get on the treadmill for a while. Wish me luck!

The Agony of Painting Walls

Good grief! It's been like forever since I last posted! Don't worry, though, I've been very busy on Facebook! Farming takes a lot of diligent work!

Today we have three guys upstairs in our bedroom painting the walls! See, in our last house which we lived in for almost 5 years, I wanted to paint the guest room a purple color. I've done a ton of wall painting in my life for my mom whenever she'd move to a new condo or house (which was frequent), she'd insist that the walls be painted (or re-painted) white white WHITE! Well, there is a huge difference between flat white walls and PURPLE walls with that textured orange peel stuff on them!
Anyway, it took me the better part of a year to decide on a color. I kept bouncing back between shades of green and purple. I had so many samples on one wall, it almost looked tye-dyed! Finally, I settled on a purple shade. I moved everything out of the room, threw down a canvas over the carpet, put blue tape along every edge I could think of, and went to work. A few days later, I had a bright, gleaming, grape-colored room! Horray! Just what I wanted, right!? Um...after all that time trying to decide on the color and all that work I had done alone, I was not about to admit to myself that it didn't turn out quite how I wanted it to. So I praised it and removed the tape from along the edges...
I don't know if you ever knew this but when you paint along the edge of a textured wall and a flat-surfaced ceiling, even if you use tape along the edge, paint tends to seep right through the tiny gaps created by the orange peel texture and the tape. This resulted in millions of tiny speckles of purple dotting the edges of the ceiling all around the room. Everywhere! It was awful! And I soooo was not about to go shopping for the right shade of white in order to paint over those splotches and cover up my mistakes because, honestly, there are only a thousand and eighty six different shades of WHITE paint in the world and damned if I was going to spend the next 8 months trying to match the right shade to the color of the rest of the ceiling! So I left it. Stupid room. Stupid ceiling. Stupid bright purple color. And yet I still walked away proud that I did it all myself!
About a year and a half before we moved, Pete built a giant bookcase which he attached to the wall in the "front room" of the house (I suppose it was supposed to serve as a formal dining room but it was too small for a large table and several chairs, and all the other things that make a formal dining room formal). So we turned it into a "library" with a couple of comfy hand-me-down chairs and the bookcase. I wanted the wall behind the open back of the bookcase to be green. I didn't take nearly as long to choose the right shade as I had with the purple room but once I had chosen my green, I asked Pete's opinion and then he gathered his own set of samples (since this was his first time painting a colored wall too, I think!) and set to work of tye-dying the wall with samples of reds, browns, and purples! OMG! Eventually, we compromised on a forest green color and painted the wall behind the bookcase and the wall opposite that one which happened to be the wall around the front bay windows. After the purple splotchy ceiling disaster upstairs, I had since learned that if you run a nice smooth bead of caulk along the edge of the tape and the ceiling, it will seal up those little gaps and easily create a nice straight line of color, sans splotches! So I did the majority of the taping and caulking. We painted together and got it done within just one weekend. Alas, as I removed the blue tape, I noticed two problems: 1) the caulk between the tape and the other edge (which was actually just trim) dried so much that it served as a sort of glue so that when we pulled up the tape, quite a bit of green paint came off the wall along the edge with it! and 2) naturally, the tape and caulking method had not been applied to create a perfectly straight line along the very long wall behind the bookcase and up the stairway! It was a crappy-looking job to me but still a bit better than the spare bedroom fiasco.
Did I end up liking the green? Um...okay. I liked that it was a project that Pete and I did together as proud homeowners! And I was proud of the tape + caulk trick, too (hey, at least it wasn't splotchy!).
Needless to say, when we moved out of the house and prepared it to be put on the market, the entire house got repainted a soothing white color that Carolyn picked out (she is the decorator...I should've let her call the shots the whole time to begin with!). In my opinion, the guy that did the paint job inside the house did a terrible job: in one room and ONLY one room, he painted over the outlet covers; in the purple room he seemed to have only used one or two thin coats of paint because I can still see the purple beneath the white in some areas; he neglected to clean or simply wipe off a surface here and there so that now there are wee bits of dust, lint or even a cat hair or two embedded in the paint throughout the whole house! I'm concerned that may be a contributing factor as to why it's still on the market! But that's an entirely different story.

Moving into our new house was wonderful (have I already mentioned that...ha ha!). There are lots of walls with unique angles, twists and turns. Most of the walls are ten feet tall while the walls in what will one day morph into the sitting room (is it called the formal living room or just living room or what? the one with the fancy chairs and coffee table, maybe a fancy sofa and such...we're not fancy people by any means so we are putting off decorating that room for quite a while now) are two stories tall with windows even wayyyyy up close to the ceiling. Obviously, that room will need to be painted to bring down the mood in there just a bit.
But when we moved in here I decided I was not going to wait forever to paint the rooms! I was going to get right on it. And I wasn't going to be quite so OCD about choosing the perfect shades and such.
Recently, I have been having a lot of trouble sleeping through the night. So at one point I decided the problem was that our bedroom is so large and very bright white and that if I had the room painted some mellow colors, it would help soothe me to sleep at night. I knew I wanted a deep violet shade behind the bed as an accent wall, with the other walls a different, more neutral color, and the bathroom a third different color. But besides that accent wall, I didn't know where to start!
Enter my dear "Mamacita" Carolyn! I asked her to come counsel me on how to choose and put together such colors. So she showed up one day with a folder filled with pictures of color combo-painted rooms and a large thing of swatches and a zillion shades of each color of the rainbow (and beyond!). She sat with me on our bed as we brainstormed together. She lead me in the right directions and I was able to narrow down the colors I wanted in each area. She left me with just a couple of swatches for each area of the room (since there's no door to the bathroom and the retreat area is big enough to be it's own room, I have trouble just calling the whole bedroom ONE room...to me it's split into three rooms or at least three different sections of one big room). I taped up the swatches on the walls, watched them gently (or drastically) change shades as the sun went up and down. I also moved the swatches to different walls just to see the different effects light had on them. I did this for one week. A week after my consultation session with Mamacita, I had my three colors chosen! And I never once allowed myself to second guess myself and consider other colors! I just went with it. I knew they looked great together and they were exactly what I had in mind. I wanted this done NOW!
Last week I "began" interviewing and getting estimates from different painting companies since we decided to spare me or anyone else in the family the headache of doing it ourselves and just hire professionals to do it!
The first guy that came to do an estimate just blew me away with his friendliness, professionalism, experience, and price! Plus, even though the brand of paint that I wanted to use was not their standard brand, he offered to go to a different store to get the brand that I wanted so we wouldn't have to mess around with trying to match the right colors with a different brand. I hired that company on the spot.
And that is why there are three dudes up in our bedroom, retreat and bathroom painting up a storm today! I spent all of yesterday moving all of our STUFF out of the room or stashing it into cabinets and drawers. Then last night Pete took down the curtains and moved some of the smaller furniture out of the room. We were totally ready. And the lead painter guy says they will have it 100% done by the end of today. Wow! Two coats even?! I'm amazed but not surprised, after the impression I got from him during the interview period.
So I'm sitting down here, working on the computer, writing, chatting, playing, and trying to prevent the dogs from barking every time one of the painters goes in or out of the front door while I let the PROFESSIONALS worry about the tape and the caulk and the orange peel and the splotches and getting it on the carpet and all of that crap! Let them do the dirty work and let us enjoy the end results!
Believe me, it's worth every cent!

Once they are done and we are moved back into our room, I will take and share pictures with you so you'll know what I'm talking about. I can't wait to go to bed tonight!

Dr. G Called Me!!!!

Well wonder of all wonders...!

I'm just sitting here, minding my own business, wiping the sleep out of my eyes after my afternoon nap, trying to figure out why I've been constantly hungry for the past 36 hours, when the phone rang. Hmmm. Normally, I don't answer daytime phone calls but I was feeling lucky so I answered this one.

It was Dr. G! My surgeon who did the chemoembolizations! He calls from time to time, usually after one of my most recent CT scans is dug up from the pile of paperwork on his desk (he's also an instructor), goes over the results of the CT with me via phone (no office visit = no copay!), lets me reitterate what I think he just said then he says "yes, exactly," or "not really" and then clarifies. Typically, what comes next is some sort of promise to have his IR department call me to schedule another exciting procedure.

He is very "matter-of-fact" and to the point. If he has bad news or doesn't like something he sees, he forewarns me of that before spitting it out. But if he sees something good, the inflection of his voice can be quite obvious and encouraging! He's not too afraid to tell me flat out what's going on and what our options are next. Unfortunately, after this next procedure (I'll tell you about coming up), I think he will have done all he can for me and I probably won't be seeing much of him again. Boooo hooo. :(

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

I love Dr. Kane my oncologist and I do feel like I'm in very good hands under her care. But sometimes she skirts issues or is very vague and unwilling to commit to an answer regarding my future. So while she did give me the results of my CT scan when I saw her last week, she was hesitant to say more about it until I talked with Dr. G and got his (possibly more expert?) opinion. I can understand that since our next step in this cancer-ass-kicking process involves him.

So back to the phone call a little while ago now.

He called to say he only really sees 2 small tumors on the right lobe of the liver. (Remember, last December these guys popped up and I started referring to them as "The Four Little Guys." Well, as it turns out, two of the four have disappeared since chemoembos and regular chemotherapy treatments. HORRAY!!!) He also said, "the tumor on the left lobe looks pretty much the same if not just slightly smaller."

JUST
SLIGHTLY
SMALLER
!$($)&$&@#$(&%&

THAT'S ALL THAT I NEED TO HEAR!

I almost threw down the phone, ran out my front door screaming "JUST SLIGHTLY SMALLER!" and jumped on the nearest kid's new scooter to ride around the whole neighborhood, spreading my joy!

Alas, I did not do such a thing. Pete told me long ago that it's not nice to throw the phone down when someone nice is still on the other end. That, plus it's really cold outside and I'm wearing short sleeves.

Anyway, once I recovered from that information (which didn't take long because I know he's a super busy guy, what with his teaching and surgerying and all that) I let him continue.

He says he thinks it's definitely time to do the Radio Frequency Ablation on those "Two Little Guys That Are Left" on the right lobe. In case you don't recall my older post in which I explained just what RFA means, click here to get a very clear explanation. He says he can easily go in there and burn those guys right off. So he's having someone in his department call me either later this month or early next month in order to schedule the procedure.

After that we will re-address the big tumor on the left lobe but for now, it's stable (IF NOT SLIGHTLY SMALLER!!!!) and probably mostly dead so chemo will continue as normal throughout.

YAY!

Dr. G's da bomb!

The Worst Sunday of the Year

A year or so ago, I blogged about how anxious and sad I used to get when Sunday night rolled around every week. I felt that way mostly because my mom travelled a LOT for the work she did with Boeing and she'd usually leave town either Sunday evening or first thing Monday morning. I would miss her terribly and even count the minutes on little pieces of paper until her expected returns. I always thought that I was the only one who dreaded Sundays like that.

I finally opened up about it to Pete a week ago and he said that he, too, dislikes Sunday evenings because it means it's time to stop having fun chilling or tinkering around the house, turn around and get ready for another long week at work. Heh! I never knew other people felt this way! That was comforting.

Somehow the topic arose again in an email exchange I had recently with Carol and she, too, confirmed the loneliness, sadness and dread that most Sunday evenings have brought to her in her own life as well. And I'm pretty sure yet another friend mentioned the same thing in a separate email exchange we'd been having!

Wow! I didn't feel quite so alone anymore! Other people feel the same way I do about Sunday nights?! It's not just as simple as, "Bah. I don't wanna have to go to work tomorrow. Boo." Heh. If only it were that simple! Instead it seems that everyone has different "negative" emotions tied up with this particular evening hours. Sure, the basis of such short-term depression may root itself in having to go back to work for those in the Rat Race. But there's far more emotions mixed up in that, too.

In the early evening on New Year's Eve, Pete and I had a chance for a short visit with a co-worker of his (she gave him all of her old photography studio gear to get his darkroom started in its setup!!! She's totally awesome!). We lightly discussed how nice our holidays had been and what we were all doing for the evening in celebration (party for us then sleeping through midnight). At one point, I heard her say something along these lines (I'm paraphrasing): "Isn't this Sunday night like THE WORST of the whole year?! You've gotten all this time off for the past two, maybe three weeks for vacations or family visitations because of Christmas and the New Year and all that. Sure you may have to work a few days in the middle there but they're slow days at work and it's mostly relaxing and fun anyway. But I always hate the Sunday night after New Year's Eve because that's when I know that for real it's all over. It's time to get back to work and get serious again. No more back-to-back paid days off or any of that. Just back to the daily grind for another whole year. Big bummer." And she's RIGHT! This has GOT to be the worst Sunday of the entire year for just those reasons she referred to!!! UGH! No wonder I've been feeling the dread slowly building since the moment I got up this morning! What are we to do to get through it?!

I haven't conferred with many stay-at-home people on the subject yet and I wish not to only limit my inquiry to stay-at-home MOMS and/or DADS because there are lots of people without kids (*ahem*) who stay home for different reasons (*ahem*) aside from taking care of children. Speaking of which, I am also curious to know how Sunday nights feel for those who work from home, too.

Now that I've begun getting a consensus of sorts from those around me who also dread the creepy dark and depressing evening hours of Sunday nights, I am working on a way to change or combat such awful feelings.

There was a time, about five years ago, where I took some time off from any form of employment because we were finally able to afford it and I had recently suffered through a long period at a job that I really hated. So I took the year off to be a Housewife (though, certainly not Desperate!). It took me a while to accept the fact that there is no shame in being a Housewife when, in fact, it's more of an honorable position of sorts. But that's a different story entirely. My point in telling you this is back then I'd make myself to-do lists on Sundays and work on them throughout the following week. But for the last two years, it's been different for me. The other night at a neighborhood New Year's Eve party, various new neighbors of ours (well, we're new to them I guess) asked me what I did and I said, "Nothing right now, I'm just taking some time off. But in reality, I'm actually a preschool teacher." However, on the stroll over to the party across the street earlier in the evening, I had fantasized about replying to that sort of question with, "I stay at home and fight cancer. Though, I'd rather be teaching preschool again, this is my job right now. The pay is crummy." Ha. Ha. I refrained from using that line because I have found that when new people come into my life, they are rarely comfortable with some of my more light-hearted moments when I make jokes about my cancer-ridden life. (Most women really hate one of my favorite quips that "chemo is the best diet EVER! Want to lose 60 pounds in one year without even trying??? Get on some chemo! Wooo hoooo!" Heheh. I still think it's funny. Mostly cause it's true!)



Okay, returning from that slight tangent...back to my point. These days I dread Sunday nights because I know Honey's going to get up at the wee hours of Monday morning and go to work and be in Work Mode and on Work Schedule for the following five days while I just have to take it day by day, sometimes hour by hour, in keeping an eye on how I'm feeling physically in order to decide what sort of tasks I can occupy myself with while I stay home and fight this cancer. Even the most mundane of projects can be daunting for me sometimes, such as even filling the dishwasher with a sink full of yucky dishes that have been collecting for several days! I hate these sorts of daily challenges and it's awfully lonely most of the time. Which explains why I'm usually online nearly every single day!

Like I said before, I'm trying to come up with ways to avoid or work around the Sunday Night Blues (as my parents used to call them). So if you feel similarly on Sunday evenings, please drop your thoughts etc. on the subject in the Comments area to share with me and the other readers. Again, it will definitely help me (and hopefully others) feel less alone on Sunday nights - thusfar, I've felt it even a little bit comforting to know that if I'm here ho-humming through the evening, so is Pete or Carol and Dad and probably some, if not all of our neighbors, too! I know there's got to be more we can do to turn these Sunday Frowns Upside Downs!

Where'd Bush Go?

I've been wondering this for several months now. Hopefully, some of you can help.
I ask this question without delcaring myself for one side or the other, and I ask that you please not use this simple, innocent question of mine to jump up on your political soapbox via my blog. Remember, I can delete any comments that I don't like.

All of that aside, my question is...

Where the heck is George W. Bush?!?! He was president of our country for what seemed like an eternity, then his terms were over and done with and he just up and disappeared! I've heard hide nor hair about him ever since Obama took office. Why is that? Is there some general rule I don't know about where, after a president has served his full 8 years as Leader of the Free World, he's supposed to go into hiding for a particular amount of time? I've seen one of his daughters "reporting" from time to time on the Today show, but it seems that nobody ever even mentions Bush's name (other than in reference to, "the previous administration," etc.).

I'm just curious. Where'd he go and whycome we don't hear about/from him no more?