It's About Time!

I've been "meaning" to blog for a while, but it just hasn't happened. Until now. Why? Because I'm lost with life. (Not to be confused with lost IN life. I have purpose and am not treading water.) I get lost with life in so many brilliantly good ways: enjoying most bits that every day brings forth. I'm in full appreciation of spring coming 'round (and technically summer now, too) and the joy that accompanies this time of year.

I feel a deep sense of appreciation for being able to participate in most every activity that's available. The hard thing, sometimes, is placing limits on what I say "yes" to. A common dilemma for many people, I suppose. My post-cancer self has a great need to have more time alone, more peace'n'quiet time, and to let my creative juices flow. It's easier now for me to be overwhelmed with stimulus - especially noise and people. I find solace in working on projects, making weird stuff that I think is artistic, listening to music, walking with Daisy, enjoying coffee on the patio in the morning, drinking margs with Joshua in the evenings, etc. Life feels good. Life is good. 

And what a joy it is to be here. To be alive. 

This spring, more than any other, I felt as though I was emerging from the darkness just as the perennials did in our yard. The entire cancer "experience," plus losing Stephanie last fall, weighed on me. I slowed down activity and have put on unnecessary pounds. That, too, made/makes a difference in how I feel. 

Post-cancer selves are tricky. I find this to be true with many other survivors I know. You have the traumatic memory emblazoned in your mind of being told "You have cancer." and can recall so acutely what that felt like. What a sh*t-tastic feeling. There are little muscle pangs, smells, and tastes that can evoke -in a heartbeat- some of the most nasty times of treatment. Sometimes I can shake them off immediately; other times, they stick. And it's like snot: hard to shake off! :)

Me and my trusty sidekick (in tow).
There's a lot to be learned from dogs!

My last follow-up with the oncologist went well. Nothing in my bloodwork came up looking suspicious. And although I'd feel a heck of a lot better in my own head having a scan to look at a "prove" my body is going along with being well, I'm *mostly* satisfied with the fact that along with good bloodwork, I am not experiencing any signs of progression. In my mind, a big part of my overall wellness is linked to my own brain and how it thinks, processes, etc. So until I have a reason not to be: I am a believer in my own wellness! Get this: I even went to see a "regular" doctor this spring - my first time in >3 years!! That's making a paradigm shift right there!

I've had many adventures in the last 4 months and will spare you, dear readers, from listing them ('cause I looove lists!!). It's been a pleasure to emerge, grow, and energize this season - to participate more fully in life, to see those I love, and to take moments to enjoy being here - now. 

I invite you ALL to do the same! 

What have you enjoyed doing this spring/summer?

World Cancer Day

Did you know today is "World Cancer Day?" Yeah, me neither, until I saw some BC survivors post that factoid on their Facebook pages. So as a nod to this day, which aims to reduce stigma and reduce myths about cancer, I'd like to share an alarming article with you.

Truly, if you have not been personally 'touched' by cancer nor know someone that has, you are a lucky individual. And unfortunately, that luck may run out. Cancer is abound! Since I was diagnosed in 2011, there have been multiple friends, acquaintances, and a family member diagnosed; I have also lost a good friend to cancer. It seems to ravage so many individuals and families, with no thought to their good deeds, great personalities, whom they may leave behind, nor their social status. There are no limitations for cancer. 

In many ways, cancer the "perfect disease." It is smart and can change itself and its deadly pathways based on an individual's treatments. The only downfall it has (so far as I can tell) is that it eventually kills its host. There must be something done - or I'm afraid the article below will become true - or worse.

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The World Health Organization predicts an "alarming rise" in cancer rates worldwide in coming years.

Cancer cases are expected to surge 57% worldwide in the next 20 years, an imminent "human disaster" that will require a renewed focus on prevention to combat, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The World Cancer Report, produced by the WHO's specialized cancer agency, predicts new cancer cases will rise from an estimated 14 million in 2012 to 22 million annually within two decades. Over the same period, cancer deaths are tipped to rise from 8.2 million a year to 13 million annually.

The rising incidence of cancer, brought about by growing, aging populations worldwide, will require a heavier focus on preventive public health policies, said Christopher Wild, director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

"We cannot treat our way out of the cancer problem," he said. "More commitment to prevention and early detection is desperately needed in order to complement improved treatments and address the alarming rise in cancer burden globally."

The report notes that the rocketing cost of responding to the "cancer burden" -- in 2010, the economic cost of the disease worldwide was estimated at $1.16 trillion -- is hurting the economies of rich countries and beyond the means of poor ones.

The report said about half of all cancers were preventable, and could be avoided if current medical knowledge was acted upon. The disease could be tackled by addressing lifestyle factors, such as smoking, alcohol consumption, diet and exercise; adopting screening programs; or, in the case of infection-triggered cancers such as cervical and liver cancers, through vaccines.

Cutting smoking rates would have a significant impact, as lung cancer remained the most commonly diagnosed cancer (1.8 million cases a year, or 13% of total cancer diagnoses) and the deadliest, accounting for about a fifth (1.6 million) of all cancer deaths worldwide.

The report's authors suggested governments take similar legislative approaches to those they had taken against tobacco in attempting to reduce consumption of alcohol and sugary drinks, and in limiting exposure to occupational and environmental carcinogens, including air pollution.

According to the report, the next two most common diagnoses were for breast (1.7 million, 11.9%) and large bowel cancer (1.4 million, 9.7%). Liver (800,000 or 9.1%) and stomach cancer (700,000 or 8.8%) were responsible for the most deaths after lung cancer.

"The rise of cancer worldwide is a major obstacle to human development and well-being," said Wild. "These new figures and projections send a strong signal that immediate action is needed to confront this human disaster, which touches every community worldwide."

The report said the growing cancer burden would disproportionately hit developing countries -- which had the least resources to deal with the problem -- due to their populations growing, living longer and becoming increasingly susceptible to cancers associated with industrialized lifestyles.

More than 60% of the world's cases and about 70% of the world's cancer deaths occurred in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

Governments needed to appreciate that screening and early detection programs were "an investment rather than a cost," said Bernard Stewart, co-editor of the report -- and low-tech approaches had proven successful in some developing countries.

The World Cancer Report, which is published about once every five years, involved a collaboration of around 250 scientists from more than 40 countries. 

(Original article can be found here.)

This Side of Cancer

A Vanderbilt-produced video of three cancer survivors and what their lives are like "on this side of cancer." This pulled at my heartstrings:

(Don't know what's up with the weird wording that shows up - it wasn't in the video originally - just ignore it.)

Your focus is different.

You take nothing for granted.

You cherish every moment. 

You adapt to a "new normal." 

We all have different ways of getting through it. 

A new beginning. A second chance...to live. 

Prescriptions for Fruits & Veggies?

A yummy fruit, veg, and herb medley we made.

Images from nwedible.com.

New York City has instituted a program - a fruit and vegetable prescription program. The basic premise? "It allows doctors to 'prescribe' fresh fruit and vegetables to overweight or obese patients by giving them 'Health Bucks' that are redeemable at local farmer's markets."

One part of me thinks: great idea.

The other part says: is this what our nation's eating problems have come to?

What do you think? I'm curious to hear what you have to say.

Here is the Hungry for Change article I read about this program.

Wholesome Wave is the group that has the Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program™ in addition to their Double Value Coupon Program and Healthy Food Commerce Investments.

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Since the subject of today's post is fruit and veggies, I thought this would be a great place to insert this helpful graphic on how to find a "just right" avocado. I always thought it was a guessing game based on feel and color, but this makes it simple and has helped me find perfectly ripe avocados. Yummy!

A Glimpse of Understanding

A Can-Can sister shared this article on our Facebook Chemoraderie page. I like both the descriptive writing and the way the author caught what it's like:


Living With Cancer: Life of the Party
by Susan Gubar

The prospect of a party frightened me — probably because the enforced isolation of cancer treatments has rendered me hypersensitive. It was raining outside and festivities would not begin until after 8 p.m. But my husband and I had promised to attend the celebration of a book publication. So we dragged ourselves to Judith and Aidan’s house where I hoped to find a comfortable chair in which I would not look like the battle-ax at Mrs. Dalloway’s party whom everyone had thought long dead.

The house, crowded with people clutching drinks, pulsed with their robust vitality. Before the cancer diagnosis, I would have moved around the room schmoozing with a series of acquaintances while getting a tad tipsy. Now I was determined to have a drink, but I would need to sit down, and I could not control who might sit with me or indeed whether anyone would. Still, sit I had to do while dealing with a hideous mix of nostalgia, jealousy and self-pity. Exhausted by five years of surgeries and drugs, I have spent too much time alone and have nothing to exchange in return for tidbits of gossip.

My colleagues, kind people, took turns as sitters. Unfortunately, the atmosphere of jollity only underscored my worries: fears that thinning hair would not hide my scalp, qualms about not recalling the names of graduate students I recognized but could not place. The cumulative effect of treatment also left me bereft of the prevarications and censors that ease everyday interactions. The membrane between internal feelings and external expressions (on which I used to rely) has worn thin.

I have neither the time nor the energy to maintain buffers between me and the limited world I inhabit. Cancer has made me porous and susceptible to others — those I know personally, and those I do not. A friend in mourning, or runners and spectators maimed in Boston, reduce me to tears. Have other patients experienced this permeable sense of self when the barrier between the person we present in public and our private sentiments erodes? With few filters, I really do not belong in polite society.

Just when I decided to give my husband a signal for us to up and leave, two guests started to sing in a corner of the room. I settled down, pleased at not having to make chitchat with my current sitter, a very young woman with a crew cut. A succession of musicians followed, producing that vivid vibrancy only live music in an intimate space can create. By the time Jason Fickel stood up to sing, accompanying himself on his acoustic guitar, my exhilaration knew no bounds.

Live music should not be reserved for memorials. Musicians ought to be allowed to play in infusion centers, hospital rooms and hospices. Or so I think as my body feels sprayed and bathed, plumped and pumped by the rhythms of a melody that comes from Jason’s mouth and hands but courses through me like currents of energy.

The wine helps, undoubtedly, but it is the thrumming strings and the wry yet sonorous voice that delight me, galvanizing my attention and quickening my spirits. I sense the vibrations on my skin, in my bones, massaging the synapses of my brain: “music, sweet music, music everywhere.” Let there be trombones and guitars, flutes and pianos, singing and, especially, cellos for the sick and the dying. During my mother’s last months in assisted care, she would have loved to have heard a string quartet: harmonies returning her to pleasures displaced by old age and disease.

Awash and exultant as the music ends, I recall a line of poetry — “we feel that we are greater than we know”— and turn to the girl on my right. I did not remember her because, apparently, I had never met her before. But, she explained carefully, she works out with a member of my cancer support group … in a special class. A beat, a pause, and I understand.

The crew cut has to do with cancer. I shake her hand to wish her well. Her fingers are icy. A surge urges me on: the need, the palpable urgency, to pay tribute to her resolute stamina. I clasp both her frozen hands and kiss them, overwhelmed that someone so young has had to go through what she has gone through, though I scold myself too, for these eruptions of extravagant emotion are sure to make me look like a fool.

By the time Don and I got home, I realized that there are liabilities but also benefits of being thin-skinned. At the party I had felt the beauty, felt the fun. Lucky, lucky, lucky, I thought as I drifted off to sleep.

(Original link to article can be found here.)

Movie: Pink Ribbons, Inc.

I highly recommend watching the movie Pink Ribbons, Inc. It's available via Netflix streaming. It's also available online here and here and here.

Last year, I saw down with two of my "breastie" sisters (BC survivors) to watch this documentary. Our viewing resulted in a lively conversation afterwards between the three of us. I took a bunch of notes, intending on writing them all up in to a blog post. But frankly, that was nearly a year ago and I don't want to take time to type things out that you can watch for yourself.

Please consider watching this documentary. It addresses the "pinkwashing" of breast cancer, the "pretty, feminine, and normal" portrayal of breast cancer (none of which BC actually is), and many of the ridiculous ways of turning this disease into a bottom-line fundraising event for way too many companies. Some of which are in direct conflict with ever finding a cure! Cancer-causing cosmetics? Slap a pink ribbon on it, donate a teensy amount to BC awareness or research, and sell a lot more product. It sickens me.

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Here are my notes, in case you want to get a high-level peek into what this documentary includes:

• A Huffington Post article about Komen's bad decisions...one after the other. 

• BC has become a "culture" of pink ribbons.

• 1981 - President Reagan changed things so BC funding/research needed to seek private solutions ...which lead to BC marketing. To get marketing to work, they need attention of companies. If companies associate with a cause, more people will buy their products - it worked! BC marketing promotions range from household goods to handguns to gasoline to porn sites!

• In 1940, chances of getting cancer were 1 in 22.
  In 2011, it was 1 in 8.
  Today, changes of getting breast cancer are 1 in 4. 

• Lighting monuments pink for "awareness" - accomplishes what, exactly?

• During breast cancer awareness month, the message being sent out is "be vigilant - mammograms can save lives" - But what does this really do to effect change?

• Early detection (is your best "protection") works for some...and some get sick from treatment...and for others with aggressive current treatments that can't it can't help at all. Everyone thinks they're in the first group (that early detection will save you), but that only works for some!

• Learning to live versus learning to die.

• We are not just a little pink ribbon! We have faces, pain, and stories.

• Some survivors have anger with pride and optimism expressed by marketing tactics and companies have to "sell the disease" in a certain way or lose customers.

• Yoplait "Save Lids to Save Lives" example: For every lid you save from a Yoplait yogurt (and mail in, using a stamp that costs you money), they will donate 10 cents to breast cancer research. If you ate 3 yogurts/day for 4 months, you will have raised a grand total of $36 for breast cancer research, but spent more on stamps and in environmental shipping waste. Really? - Just write a check!

• NFL: players were in trouble with the law, needed help with boosting positive image of individuals and teams, and they realized there's a large women viewership. So they started in on PINKing everything! Shoes, sweat bands, ...

• To those that call surviving "fighting a battle." We're not fighting a battle. We force ourselves to comply with the treatments recommended. 

• We shouldn't deny what is possible - good AND bad. To do so offends our sense of DIGNITY.

• Pressure on BC patients to be happy, overly optomistic, etc. : "the tyrrany of cheerfulness" - coined by Barbara Ehrenreich.

• Make it pretty, feminine, and normal = it sells. BUT BREAST CANCER IS NOT pretty, feminine, and normal!! It's time to re-politicize it: find out where your money goes! Most monies go to researching a marketable product (that extends life). Not to finding out what causes it.

• We hear how much companies raise, but not how it was spent or the results from it. How can you cure something when you don't know the cause?

• What "eggs on cancer"? It is not a foreign entity (e.g., from space, alien, "Osama") - it's at home (e.g., your body, familiar, "McVeigh").

• Every 23 seconds an individual is diagnosed with breast cancer.
  Every 69 seconds an individual dies because of breast cancer.

• Casting a pink veil of positivity over a dark and dreadful disease, we are told, encourages the myth of progress and distracts from treatment options that remain limited to what Dr. Susan Love calls “slash, burn, and poison” and mortality rates that have barely altered in six decades.

• Federal standards do not protect public health.

• Charlotte Haley is the original ribbon maker. Hers was salmon colored. Estee Lauder wanted to use it to market. Haley wanted nothing to do with Estee Lauder; they were too commercial. On goes the story with lawyers, changing the color, etc. Estee Lauder conducted focus groups on what color was "comforting, reassuring, and non-threatening" (everything BC is not) - which led to the ribbon color being pink.

• "We used to march in the streets. Now we run for a cure."

• Get the stuff out of the products we use everyday.

• Another Yoplait example: send in lids from dairy stimulated with RGBH - linked with breast cancer! Activists called them on it and they changed their formula - no longer use RGBH.

• AstraZeneca: the maker of Tamoxifen and Arimidex (biopharmaceudicals used in BC treatment) - also makes chemicals that are estrogen-boosters! Check it out here or read a quote from the article below:

"Some of the very companies that sponsor fundraising events and make money off of pink revenue either make deleterious products linked to cancer or stand to profit from treatment of it. Revlon, sponsors of the Run/Walk for Women, are manufacturers of many cosmetics (searchable on the database Skin Deep) that are linked to cancer. The average woman puts on 12 cosmetics products per day, yet only 20% of all cosmetics have undergone FDA examination and safety testing. The pharmaceutical giant Astra Zeneca can’t seem to decide if it’s for or against cancer. They produce the anti-estrogen breast cancer drug Tamoxifen, yet also manufacture the pesticide atrazine (under the Swiss-based company Syngenta), which has been linked to cancer as an estrogen-boosting compound. Breast cancer history month (October) is nothing more than a PR stunt that was invented by a marketing expert at… drumroll please… Astra Zeneca! Their goal was to promote mammography as a powerful weapon in the war against breast cancer. But as the American arm of the largest chemical company in the world, the reality is that Astra Zeneca was and is benefiting from the very illness it was urging women to get screened for. Perhaps the most audacious example of them all is pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. Sponsors of cancer research and treatment, both in medicine and the community, Lilly produced the cancer and infertility causing DES (diethylstilbestrol), and currently manufactures rBGH, an artificial hormone given to cows to make them produce more milk. rBGH has been linked to breast cancer and a host of other health problems. These strong corporate links in many ways explain the uplifting, happy, sterile messaging behind the pink ribbon. Corporations are, quite bluntly, making money off of marketing cancer, so if they don’t put a smiley face on the disease, they will alienate their customers and the conglomerate businesses pouring money into these campaigns."

• October: BCA month (breast cancer awareness): a comforting lie.
  mammography-->radiation exposure-->BC risk increase

• Research = incremental increase in life expectancy. That is not enough.

• Walk and run-a-thons are like a revival.

• Do something besides worry. Act!