I'm a pisces, but I had cancer!

A quick post to say happy new year to all you friends and lovers out there. To say this has been a difficult year would be an understatement, and I close it out feeling how I spent a whole lot of it, which is sick as hell. Since last weekend, I came down with a terrible cold, and now Greg has caught whatever it is that I have. So that sucks. And because I'm too sick/tired/lazy to try and turn this into any kind of narrative, I'm about to throw an amalgamation of things that have happened over the last few weeks at you, in no particular order. I finished radiation, rang the bell at MSKCC, and had a great NYC day with Nicole: I made a ton of cookies for Christmas/Hanukkah with Katie, and a few on my own too (I swear the non-decorated ones taste better than they look):   I GOT macaron cookies from the Mazzella clan*:  We celebrated Christmas Eve with Martina and co., and had a wonderful feast of the seven fishes. We followed tha...

Tomorrow, I will be done with radiation. I know what you’re thinking- that went by fast! Well, sure, if you say so! It has been a whirlwind of a month, one filled with the standard busyness of the period between Thanksgiving and New Years, made all the more tiring by having to schlepp to the Upper East Side everyday to receive small doses of radiation to my chest wall. The bad news is, I’m pretty exhausted by it all. The good news is, it is mostly a tolerable tired, and the effects have been fairly minimal.*   Also, looking on the bright side, being in the city everyday meant that I could periodically do cool things before/after treatment. Like when I got to go on a private tour of the Yayoi Kusama exhibit with Aar and co. at David Zwirner a few weeks back: Throughout treatment, there was really only one day when I just couldn’t, so I came home, laid on the couch, and did this: BUT, just to be clear, that was after a few weeks of lots of things that kept me out ...

Since I recently kind of got sick of not posting on social media about this huge part of my life*, I believe there are a few new readers joining us- if so, welcome! Thank you for being interested enough to join in for my ramblings. So let's get this party started. Happy Thanksgiving weekend, everybody! Since my last post, I have been keeping on top of my daily radiation sessions- as of Friday, I've officially finished 11 of 25, or 44% of my treatments! It's been mostly uneventful/tolerable, but I did have a bit of a breakdown at my session on Friday. You see, every 5 days or so of treatment, my radiation techs** are required to take images of my chest wall. This involves me lying still, half-naked, and with my arms above my head in the exact same position on a very hard table for roughly an hour. Mind you, this would be very uncomfortable for just about anyone, but it is especially uncomfortable for someone not even 2 months out from a double mastectomy/axillary lymph nod...

Hello! It may have been the longest stretch of time I've gone without posting since starting this blog, and that is mostly a good thing. It means that I've had the energy to get back into the swing of things, and to be busy. I recently listened to  a podcast  by the woman who wrote the book I reference in my breast cancer awareness month post and she said something that really rang true to me. In describing her life pre-cancer, she said something along the lines of, "our life was full of well, a whole lot of life." I very much feel the same way. And getting back to a new normal, one with a whole lot of doctors, but also a whole lot of well, life, has been very cathartic for me. This has meant that:  I've been prepping my lectures for my class (and giving them once a week) and going grocery shopping and cooking us dinner.  I've been making carrot cakes for Grisha and celebrating him with all of our nearest and dearest:  I've been going to PT,...

Well, we got some more fun news in cancer land this week. My oncologist called on Monday, and she informed me that between my first biopsy when I was diagnosed in May and when they took the tumor out of me in October, the composition of my tumor changed, at a cellular level. As a reminder, when I was first diagnosed, my tumor was estrogen receptor positive, progesterone receptor negative, and HER-2 negative.* Well, during chemo, turns out it morphed into an estrogen receptor positive AND a HER-2 positive tumor. This type of evolution is pretty rare. Generally speaking, rare in the world of cancer is not great, because there's not a lot of tried and true methods to follow. But more on that later.  First, what does this actually mean in terms of my treatment and prognosis? HER-2 positive tumors tend to be more aggressive, i.e. faster growing, faster spreading, with a higher risk of recurrence ( that's bad ). But for the last 10-ish years, there has been an immunotherapy drug us...

A lot can happen in a week of cancer treatment, and it's been quite the week. Last Friday, I had my first appointment with my oncologist since my surgery. It was a pretty rough one, to say the least. Because my post-surgery pathology showed that I had quite a bit of residual disease left (i.e. they still saw living cancer cells in my tumor/6 of my lymph nodes), my oncologist is suggesting a particularly aggressive course of additional treatment to attempt to prevent a recurrence*. Namely, she is considering 6 months of oral chemo after my 25 radiation sessions and would like me to do 10 years of the most extreme of hormone suppressants, which involves taking a pill every day for the next ten years, during which I will not be able to get pregnant. I had a lot of feelings after the appointment. Among them, fear, frustration, sadness, and, perhaps most of all, anger. It's hard not to think about how my cancer was about one-fifth of the size of the disease that I had left me AFTE...