I'm a week out and doing a bit better!

My last post was a bit of a downer, so I just wanted to do a really short guy to say that I'm a week out from surgery and I'm doing a bit better! Last night we even sat in the park (me in a chair) for hours to celebrate Alan's bday. I saw this dog wearing a rave collar and it really brought up my spirits:

Sometimes it's the little things. (Seeing friends in this very isolating climate was also nice.) Love you, you small batch of readers.

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I am here (I am alive)!

Hello! This will be a quick one as I am very still much in post-double mastectomy + axillary lymph node dissection land. I'll start by saying that the title of this blogpost is that of a Bonny Doon song, one of the artists we saw when were upstate this past weekend for the Woodsist Fest: It was awesome, and the weather was perfect. But you guys don't care about that, nor do you care about the great Rosh Hashanah dinner we had on Sunday night!* You want to know more about how I'm feeling and all that good stuff. Well, surgery is officially over 🙏, and it went mostly as planned! I want to give a hugeeee shoutout to our friends Austin and Allix, who stayed at the surgery center all day on Tuesday. Austie kept G company while Allix, who works at Sloan in the pathology lab, stayed on top of lymph node dissection like it was precious cargo! We love them and little doodis so damn much. After waking up pretty out of it (but still cracking some good jokes about how bedpan...

Well, fuck this shit!

Hello! Lately, I haven't really felt like posting a blog, in part because I haven't really felt like having cancer. When I reached the halfway point last week, instead of feeling a sense of accomplishment, I actually felt really frustrated that I have to repeat the same amount of chemo sessions I already have under my belt.* And then I got to thinking about how I'm only halfway through the first step of my treatment. And how even when I am done with the next intensive steps– surgery, then radiation, and likely, more surgery– I will be taking medicine every day for the next 5-10 years that will basically put me into early menopause. And I will be monitored for the next several decades to make sure this piece of shit cancer doesn't recur somewhere else in my body. Greg initially described this whole cancer thing as a detour. But it actually feels like my car has been hijacked. And when the hijacker finally abandons it, it's keeping a few parts. There's just so...

50% through AC, 25% (?) through chemo!

Yesterday was a chemo day, and boy, I can't sugarcoat it, are those days rough. It's a weird thing, because the treatment itself, besides being prodded with an IV for three hours, is perfectly fine. Even the first few hours after, you feel pretty okay. But then, it just slowly creeps up on you, like a fog cloud all over your body. And then the exhaustion and nausea set in. Man, so much of cancer is just a wicked waiting game. I will say that sleeping through the day did me some good, and in general, my response was MUCH better than the first treatment, especially in terms of the heartburn, for which I prophylactically took some meds. I had a new nurse this treatment, who was a Soviet from Brooklyn like Grisha. She was nice, and good at her job, but I didn't like her as much as nurse #1, Asha.* With the chemo meds, they bring in a second nurse to double-check your identity as to make sure they're 100% giving the right doses to the right person, and Asha popped in fo...

I'm a pisces, but I had cancer!

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