Surgery Tomorrow

It's 12:30 am and I'm wide awake - did a dumb thing and had a delicious cappuccino after dinner tonight.  Might as well take advantage of the awake time and make an entry in my blog.  At 4:30 am we're supposed to wake up and leave the house by 5:15 to be at the hospital by 6:00 am.  I'm having outpatient surgery to finish up the breast reconstruction saga brought on by my cancer diagnosis 3 years ago.  All is well - I have finished all the chemo, the mastectomy, the Herceptin infusions, the radiation, and the tram flap breast reconstruction, except for the contouring that I'm getting tomorrow.  The contouring is going to use liposuctioned fat cells from somewhere - don't know yet where - to even out the new "breast" that once was my abdomen.  That will be nice.  Then (cover your ears if you don't want to hear this) a nipple will be constructed, to be tattooed at a later date in the doctor's office.  I'm glad to see the end of the road on this journey.  Seems like it's been forever.  My experience was not bad at all - even though it was lengthy and involved.  I didn't realize at the time that my cancer was as aggressive and had spread through the breast as it did, but the treatments I had left me with the best possible final result - NED, or No Evidence of Disease.

Now for the final Nip/Tuck, and I'll be good to go!

Getting Old!

I'm pretty tired tonight.  I had a hard day at the library, where I volunteer once a week for the ongoing Book Sale.  There were many, many boxes and bags of book donations that came in during the week, and another half a dozen while I was there.  I managed to plough through most of them, but didn't get as much done as I would have liked to do.  I just don't have the energy any more.

It bothers me that I have slowed down as much as I have, and I don't know what to attribute it to, although perhaps it has to do with having had breast cancer in 2007.  The treatment for it was chemotherapy, mastectomy, radiation, and Herceptin, a monoclonal antibody infusion treatment for a year.  I started having reconstruction surgeries in April 2009, and have had several, and will have a final one for liposuction contouring on June 30th.  It just seems to me that I've really aged over the past couple of years.  I also have a lot of arthritis throughout my body, especially in my knees, and that has slowed me down a lot.  I take Aleve, but not regularly, and it helps a lot.

I think maybe know I need to get back into exercise again.  I used to go to the pool twice a week for water aerobics, but I don't any more.  I've given up that membership.  I have a treadmill and that's where I have to begin.  I also have several sets of dumbbell weights, and those may help in strength training.  The other thing I like to do is to go for walks, so I may start going to a local park to take walks.  I just know I need to do something, because I sure don't like feeling this way.  At least I've managed to lose a few pounds, maybe 5-7, by cutting back on portions and making better food choices.  I need to continue to lose, although it's very hard to do.  I know all the things I need to do - it's just following through that is the key.

Time Share Tales

Today was really hot and humid, but I stayed inside, and it was very comfortable.  Got a lot of laundry done, cleaned the fridge, and spent hours trying to make vacation plans for us for our time share weeks, 2 use-it-or-lose-it weeks that will be gone if we don't use them by this October.  Sigh ... and of course, there's nowhere that both of us really want to go that is available - Ireland, England, Italy, France, Greece - the list goes on and on.  That's the problem with time shares.  Unless you make arrangements 2 years in advance, you are at their mercy.  And that's not how we live our lives.  We don't make vacation plans way far in advance.  You never know what may come up and prevent you from following through.  As example, we made plans to use a week in St. Martin in 2007, and had made our plans months in advance.  Bought the airline tickets and booked the week, and I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  All is well now, but at the time I was just beginning chemotherapy, and my oncologist said I couldn't go because my immune system was compromised.  We managed to get our airline tickets refunded, but we lost the week and the deposit on the time share, and it was unable to be compensated.  I was very sad about that - I knew I was in for a long haul, and this was going to be our last vacation before all the medical trauma ahead.

So for now, we may settle on Argentina, the only place where we could find 2 consecutive weeks.  I'm sure it will be fine once we get there, but I really don't have much enthusiasm yet.  We've sold the time share, so other than one more week that will expire in 2011, we won't have any more weeks.  Worst investments we ever made.  At one point we had 2 of them, now we don't have any.

Ming Poo is moving very slowly today.  I did a better job this morning with her pain injection and her antibiotic by mouth.  She's been quiet and off sleeping most of the day.  The vet called around 1:00 to check on her, which I thought was very nice.  She's on my lap now as I'm typing, using my arm as her pillow.  I've had many corrections to make as I type!


P.S.  Forget Argentina - Hubby looked up air fare for 2 to Argentina, and it's $11,157.00 round trip.  No, that's not a typo!!

Is this August?

What an amazing day.  The temperature was just short of 90°, and it's still in the 80's at 8:00.  It seemed like a good day to use the grill, so I made burgers for dinner.  They were good, and we froze the rest of the meat for future use.

The husband of one of my close friends is in the hospital following surgery to have a part of his lung removed.  There was a cancerous mass in the upper lobe that had to be taken out.  It turned out to be a bigger problem than they thought it would be.  The other lung collapsed, but that was taken care of.  The surgery took 6 hours and my friend heard nothing until it was over.  He came through surgery and was given a private room, but since then he's back in ICU and on a ventilator again.  It's hard to get information, and we all feel out of the loop.  I am really concerned about them and hope and pray all goes well.  Such a sweet couple.