It is safe to say that the Weekly Photo Challenge topic for this week called my name.
ESCAPE means different things for different people. But if you know me — either through this blog or in “real life” — you know that for me it seems that my favorite escape is almost always water-related.
Here are my photos for this week (all taken during a holiday in Puerto Rico):
As always, thank you for visiting. And if you’d like to participate in the challenge, just click here:
When the planets align in the breast cancer universe things get interesting. It has been an unprecedented four-five weeks. The first planet to get into position was that of oral arguments delivered to the Supreme Court of the United States on the legality of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s practice of granting patents on human genes. The next two planets to align were the publication of Peggy Orenstein's game changing…
[May 6, 2013]
So I had the Mohs Microsurgery / Chemosurgery last Tuesday morning. I was grateful for all of the kind comments on Mistaken for the Bride of Frankenstein and Skin Cancer, Too? Really?! You really gave me the courage to face another surgery and another type of cancer. Of course this surgery was nothing compared to the others and this cancer was just a bump in the road, but I think I would have continued to push this surgery out even further if it weren’t for all of you.
I have been meaning to post about what the experience was like, but it was such a difficult week that I just couldn’t manage it. And then I thought the Frank and Nancy post was much more important. I will begin with what has happened to my face since the surgery. Quite simply, my face has swollen beyond recognition. I wish I were exaggerating. On a positive note, they say it will get better — but that it will take a week or two to do so. I’ll take it — I’m just glad this won’t be permanent! And so are the kids, who looked horrified when they saw me this morning and told me that it was getting worse! Back to the procedure.
As you know, I was quite nervous about this one! Fortunately, my lovely friend jme was here and she not only made me feel better about going, but she got the boys ready for school so we could leave at 7:40 a.m. for the hospital.
H (husband) dropped me off in the hospital loop and I made my way up to the Mohs Surgery Department. I haven’t mentioned it before (this is another post I haven’t gotten to!), but we have had a photojournalism student (Jennifer) following us around for the past couple of months to document our lives as a family dealing with the effects of cancer. Jennifer met me just outside the doors and began taking photos as I walked to the check-in desk and made my way to the waiting area. H met us in the waiting area about 10 minutes later. He promptly found a magazine and took a seat. When they came to collect me to prep me for the surgery and asked if I would like to bring someone back with me for this part since I had skipped out of the pre-op / question-answering appointment, H didn’t look up from his magazine. Apparently, reading about the life and times of Billie Joe (Green Day’s frontman) was more riveting than what was about to happen to my face and asking questions about the cancer growing on my forehead. Normally this wouldn’t bother me. But this morning it did because I was so unenthusiastic about the surgery that I think I was visibly shaken. So when Jennifer asked if she could follow me back, I did not object.
We were taken to a large, bright room with a special chair — it looked like one of the birthing chairs from Star Trek: The Next Generation — positioned in its center. Jennifer asked the nurse if she would be allowed to take photographs, so the nurse left to see if the surgeon would allow this. When she came back with an “okay” for photographing everything but the surgery, the prep began.
A second nurse arrived, and after asking me some questions and cleaning my forehead, they began injecting my forehead to anesthetize the area. After massaging the anesthetic in, waiting, and testing the area to see if it was truly numb, the nurses left to get the surgeon.
When Dr. B arrived, he discussed the procedure, used a black marker to outline the area he’d be cutting, and described what my scar would look like. Then he asked if I had any questions. At jme’s urging, I asked if he could make my scar look like Harry Potter’s. He smiled, said yes, and walked out, promising to return when my prep was finished. After he left, the nurses draped my head with sterile cloths, rechecked the numbness of the area, and asked Jennifer to leave.
When Dr. B returned, he looked at my online chart and said that he thought it was safe to say that I had been through a lot. So he then assured me that he would do his best to get as much as he could in the first round so he wouldn’t have to put me through anything more than necessary. I thanked him and then tried to go to my happy place as I felt the cold instruments touch my head. I’m not sure how much time passed before he said that he needed the cautery. I asked if I had forgotten to mention that I was on blood thinners. Yes, I had. I could smell burning flesh.
Then he continued, and cauterized more because I continued to bleed. And eventually he was done. He cauterized some more, and then they put a pressure bandage on my head, and escorted me to the waiting area so we could see if he had taken enough to get clean margins.
While I waited, my surgeon, who is uniquely qualified to double as a pathologist, looked at slides of the tissue he had taken to determine whether he was able to get clean margins. As I waited, before and after my surgery, I watched as a nurse came to the waiting area to tell several other patients their results. My surgeon had managed to get clean margins for each of them.
As I read an issue of Coastal Living, I couldn’t help but notice that I was the youngest patient in the packed waiting room. By far. I think I could safely say that most of the people there were double my age. This fact wasn’t lost on Dr. B, either. He told me that it is not uncommon for people to develop skin cancer. It’s just fairly unusual to develop it at my age.
Now it was my turn to get my results. I was told that he had also gotten clean margins for me.
The nurses brought me back to the surgical room. They asked Jennifer not to follow. They whipped out the needles to numb me again. When this was done, Dr. B came back in, reiterated that he had managed to get clean margins around the cancer. Then they draped me with blue sterile cloths again. And Dr. B undid my pressure bandage and began cauterizing me again. Then he started to stitch me up.
When he was through, he apologized for everything I was going through and wished me well. He told me that I had a much higher risk of developing future skin cancers and asked me to schedule a full skin check in 6 months. He said that I would always need to do this now and that I would need to be more vigilant about checking myself and being protected in the sun. I neglected to tell him that being more vigilant would require staying indoors entirely, even in our grey city.
After he walked out, one of the nurses asked if I’d like to see it. Of course I did!
She handed me the mirror and “That’s big!” was the first thing I said. Dr. B could have made a nice Harry Potter scar and it would have been the same length! The nurses reassured me that it wouldn’t be that noticeable one day and they wrapped me up with a pressure bandage and went over the care instructions.
It wasn’t long before I was finished and had an appointment scheduled to remove my stitches in a week (tomorrow). I was there about 5 hours, but it didn’t feel like it. It really wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated. And I am glad that I did it.
Or at least I was until the swelling began. It began to appear on Day 3. By that evening I was so swollen that even H thought I should call the surgeon’s office after hours. When I did, they gave me a few instructions and scheduled me to come back to the hospital in the morning.
At the hospital I was told that the swelling was a result of an excessive amount of bleeding. My surgeon said this was pretty unusual. He seemed to feel that my “young” age and skin were partially to blame. He said that it would get worse before it would get better and that it would soon look bruised (and give me a set of black eyes). Lovely!
The Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenge for this week asks participants to take a photo or photos from above.
Here are my selections, taken from a trip to Hawaii that feels as though it was a lifetime ago now!
I hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I enjoyed taking them…Okay, half as much (it was Hawaii, after all!)
If you’d like to participate in the challenge, just click on the link below.
Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above
And, as always, thank you for visiting!
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Every year, my twin sons choose a something they’d each like me to capture in a cake. This year, W chose a pirate treasure chest and M chose a block of TNT from Minecraft (a video game).
I’d love to share the cakes with you — along with just a handful of my favorite memories from their birthday parties (a kid party for 17 of their closest friends! and a family party)…
I’m hoping that a birthday party post will be coming soon?…
Until then, thanks for visiting!
This blogging thing can sometimes feel like a burden. It seems that I never know how to begin or finish a post anymore. I want to write, probably need to write, and most definitely I feel a responsibility to write. Especially when it has been the kind of week this past week has been in the breast cancer community.
In the past week, two of my friends have had cancer return and a third friend, who has been living with metastatic breast cancer for some time, is now dealing with very severe health problems due to her treatment (to put it mildly, she is in a great deal of pain).
***
Do you remember Man of Science, Man of Faith, a story about my friends Frank and Nancy?
Frank was diagnosed with a recurrence of his cancer last month. He was given 3 months to live.
It hasn’t been a month yet.
Three weeks ago, Frank and Nancy were still kind of hopeful. Even I am not quite sure what I mean by this. Maybe just that they believed Frank had some good time left and that he would surpass the three month expiration date he’d been given?
Exactly three weeks ago (a couple of days after learning about Frank’s updated diagnosis), I stood in my kitchen chopping vegetables and browning chicken for homemade chicken soup. I was making it for Frank. When the people I care about are sick and I feel helpless, I am compelled to make chicken soup and bring food. I certainly felt helpless when I heard about Frank’s stomach metastasis, so out came the big soup pot.
A few hours later, when the soup was finished and packaged in big, blue glass bowls, I walked next door to Frank and Nancy’s house. I dragged my husband along so he could deliver the large bag of organic fruits and vegetables I had picked up at the grocery store for Frank and Nancy.
I knew that Nancy would understand my response to her husband’s illness. I knew this because she has showed up on my doorstep with food a number of times since my diagnosis.
Nancy accepted the big red bag full of produce. But she did not want me to leave the soup. She said that three families from her church had dropped off three different kinds of soup that weekend.
I insisted that Nancy keep the soup. I said that they didn’t need to eat it, but that I had made it just for them, so they could freeze it or toss it, but I wanted them to have it. I needed them to accept it. I’m usually not this forceful, so I surprised myself with my insistence. But they had to take it, for my sake, because I had to help in some small way.
A couple of hours later, Nancy called me to tell me that she hadn’t wanted to say anything, but Frank was only eating soft foods. She said that he had tried the other soups but couldn’t eat them (or didn’t want to). She told me that he tried mine and enjoyed it, including the soft vegetables and mushrooms it contained. She said that he had even managed to finish a bowl. She was so happy that she had to call. And I was so touched that I felt a hard lump develop in my throat.
So two weeks ago when Nancy said that the soup was gone and she asked me to make more, I was delighted. I was just getting over pneumonia and was so tired that it took me most of the day (with rests in between!), but I was honored that Nancy had asked.
This time I decided to roast a whole chicken. I stood in the kitchen dressing the chicken, thinking about poor Frank and Nancy. As I placed rosemary sprigs and a freshly cut lemon into the chicken, I recalled that day two summers ago. Nancy had arranged a surprise 50th birthday party for Frank. As I rubbed the herbed butter I had just made onto the chicken and under it’s breast skin, I remember how excited Nancy was. She wanted everything to be perfect.
Nancy even went so far as to plan the party in a large and lovely space in the new town hall building — in another town a half hour away. She didn’t want him to suspect. She told Frank that the party he was going to was a graduation party for a girl they knew.
I was now chopping vegetables, placing them in the roasting pan beneath the chicken, and dousing them with olive oil and salt and pepper.
When Frank walked into the party room, we were all there. His closest family and friends. Nancy had even flown Frank’s brother and sister in from out of state. So when he walked in and saw the fake graduation girl and noticed his own friends and family behind her, I think he was just as shocked as when everyone shouted “Surprise!”
I opened the oven and slid the roasting pan in. It was time to start working on the soup now.
Frank was clearly surprised. So surprised and touched that he wept. Frank is a very tall man, so to see this tall man with a commanding presence stop in his tracks and begin crying was a moving sight.
I filled a large pot with water, chicken stock and salt and pepper, and I began washing and chopping more vegetables.
It was a great day filled with smiling and laughter. Genuine happiness. Nancy had done a beautiful thing for Frank. Though she didn’t have a lot of money to spend, she made the party seem like she had a large budget to work with. She worked hard on this day and she asked people to pitch in where they could. She knew it was an important day.
It would come to be more important than she ever could have realized.
I gently dropped vegetables into the pot and added a touch of olive oil and seasoning to the stock. Soon I would take the golden brown chicken from the oven and add juicy chunks of chicken and tender, roasted vegetables to the stockpot. And then I would walk next door to Frank and Nancy’s house with my pot and with the hope that Frank would be able to eat my humble offering.
That was two weeks ago.
One week ago, Nancy said that Frank was now only able to drink the broth.
And things got progressively worse this week. I remember hearing the distress in Nancy’s voice whenever we talked. She was tired from worry and from caring for Frank around the clock.
And when Frank and Nancy’s son came over in need of a ride to school on a couple of the mornings (because he had missed the bus so he could help his mom take care of his dad), he was noticeably quiet.
Nancy was having trouble keeping Frank hydrated. She was using a syringe to wet his lips and mouth. I took Pedialyte popsicles over so she could melt them down and replenish some of his electrolytes. But we knew they wouldn’t make that much of a difference.
Despite her vigilance, Frank had also developed a bedsore. Nancy said that the nurses had’t been caring for it, so I took a special cream over that would help to soothe it and form a barrier. But I was afraid that it would get infected and I knew that it must be causing pain.
Early Thursday morning, the phone rang when it was still dark outside. It was Nancy. She said that Frank was unresponsive and that he had wet himself. I tried to conceal how upset I was to hear this, but it was no use. I talked to Nancy for a little while and told her I would bring some adult diapers over. They had given me these when I was hospitalized for my hysterectomy last year and had been hemorrhaging and pads were not enough. I was sad when I realized that I had no idea back then that they would be going to Frank.
Frank came around again that morning and was able to talk to Nancy and his kids, but I knew that these things were signs that he would be gone soon. My guess was that day. Frank and Nancy’s son came over for a ride to school after he helped his mom clean and diaper his dad. He was visibly shaken. It was heartbreaking. He is a good kid and a good son. I was upset that he had to experience this. His prom was the next night and instead of worrying about what kind of corsage to get his date like his friends, he was worrying about losing his father to cancer.
The day went on and night came. At 2 a.m., the phone rang. I knew it was Nancy. I picked up the phone and heard a small voice on the other end. It was Nancy telling me that Frank had just passed. She sounded both upset and relieved. His pain had ended and his suffering was over.
Cancer claimed another life.
Frank was just 51. He is survived by his loving wife, son, daughter, brand new (5-month-old) granddaughter, and a large group of friends and family who loved him.
