Magic comes with a price

Katie Thamer Treherne - illustration from
A Little Mermaid

Yesterday was not my best day ever.

I had my Faslodex, Xgeva, Lupron last week.  I'd even been upgraded to a 3-month dose of Lupron (1 injection, more medicine, lasts 3 months before needing the next injection), so for my next 2 visits I'm down to only 3 injections (Faslodex is 2 shots per dose).  So that's cool.

But in addition to the usual bruses, aches, and soreness from the various medications, and the physical side effects that are part of their life saving action, I've been noticing for a while that in the days after I get them, there are other side effects as well.

For one thing, they mess with my sleep.  Fortunately my oncologist has other things to help with that.  But, I've also been noticing more recently that they seem to also make it harder for me to be resilient emotionally.  I find myself less able to process stressful words, actions, events, right after I get the shots.  And I don't think that's something my oncologist can help me with.  So yesterday I was feeling that.  And even understanding that there was a chemical contributor, it was still a hard day.

Have you ever noticed that in some children's books magic is treated as a free gift with no-strings-attached, while in many, many others magic always comes with a price?

Mary Poppins is the free gift kind of magic, as she comes flying in out of nowhere to add interest and adventure to the lives of the Banks children.  Even when she flys out again, there's sadness, of course, but no one is the worse for wear, and there's even the promise (in French, in the book version anyway) to return again.

But in many other books and stories, when there's magic there's a bargain to be made, be it some sort of trade, tithe or blowback right from the start, or some sort of later discovered change or enslavement that turns out to come with all that power, or the dawning realization that the power or the situations you created with your magic because you thought they would be so lovely aren't all that lovely after all.

Medicine is kind of like that, too.  Some have side effects so minor that all you really get is win, but others have short or long lists of side effects and, like magic in books, the balance comes in determining if the reason to use the magic/the condition you need to treat with the medicine is worse than the side effects themselves.

I don't really find myself regretting the side effects of my medicines.  Especially after those nice stable scans that I also found out about last week, I'm feeling pretty warm and rosy about those little injectable buggers.  But they do have their price.

It's not as bad as the price of chemo, of course, and one of the biggest reliefs of the good scans is that it means I'm not back on chemo today.  Someday I probably will be (I'm learning to accept that), but I'm plenty happy that that day is not today.  Also, the permanent side effects from my previous chemos are really, really minor and managable, so that's also good.

As I heal up from the side effects of the latest radiation and am able to comfortably go for those 10,000 steps, I don't regreat having done that, either.  It occurs to me often as I go for those walks or tend my growing garden, or even use stairs easily on a regular basis, that those were the reasons I chose to get the hip radiated and here I am doing those thing, just like I wanted! 

But yesterday I wasn't feeling so jubilant.  And lack of jubelation was snowballing.  Among other stressful things to my resilliance-free self, I had not gotten in my 10,000 steps the day before (lots of driving and people over, so not bad reasons, just reasons) and had intended to make up for the missing steps by doing more yesterday.  But the worse I felt about it, the less I was able to just get up and do it, and the more time passed when I hadn't been able to get up and do it, the worse I felt.

Finally, my husband came home from work and I was at a paultry 3000 steps.  Not, necessairly the biggest deal in life, of course, but the walking is a "medicine" whose only real unpleasant side effect is time.  And it's something my oncologist recommended.  And it could help.  And it's something I can do, I can control in as world where the cancer seems to say "I'll do whatever I damn well please and there's nothing you can do to stop me." Which we deal with using "There are some major side effects but we hope it will slow down the cancer whose major side effect is death" medicine.  So getting in the steps feels really important.

And there I was at 3000 steps, failing at something important.  And that, tacked right on to my increasingly long list of other things that weren't being dealt with, seriously stressed my lack of resilience.

The crazy good part of all this is that when my husband came home from work, he suggested we take care of that walk right then and there, just go out and do it.  So, we drove to the local track (yes, we did drive out so we could walk) and together we walked around and around and around that track until we reached the 10,000 step point.

Instead of being a death march, walking with my guy on a summer evening, with other people coming and going and doing their own thing, watching the sky turn golden pink, seeing the birds and bees flit around in the overgrown border of weeds and wildflowers, it felt precious.

And, somehow, wasting the day and pulling it through at the end, against all odds, also felt important.  More important, even, than being virtuous all day and not needing to grab the fat out of the fire would have felt.  I guess it's because life is that way a lot of the time, crappy things happen, or are said, or come up as a consequence of something else, and sometimes resilience is in very short supply.  Yesterday I was coming up short on so many things, but we were still able to make good on a bad day.  It was like, for that day, with his help, the greedy gods of cancer and the dark price of magic were unexpectedly, at the very last minute, actually appeased.

With the work accomplished, we went home.  My husband baked chocolate chip cookies and my Fitbit dashboard called me a "Champ".

And I felt a whole lot better.

Good news!

Cliff Chiang's Wonder Woman

I got my scan results today and despite the hip pain, despite my fear, my cancer is looking stable, which is excellent news!

It seems a bit strange, I suspect, to people not dealing with cancer like this, because basically my scans told them I have cancer in a number of bones, but it's the same cancer in the same bones and not cancer spreading to new places.  It's not in new bones and it's not in my organs, so that's very, very good news.  Cancer gone would be nice, but stable is the name of the game and stable I am!

I'm thanking God tonight, that's for sure!

I was thankful to get more injections and be able to continue getting the injections.  Thankful to look at the paltry number of steps I've gotten in today and plan to go out when the heat abates to try and sweat through to 10,000 steps for another day.  Thankful to set my alarm to wake up and go to work and not  have to plan to add chemo to my schedule.  Thankful to take a little Advil for the hip thing since I'm no longer wondering if I'll need to stay off blood thinners so they can insert another port for infusions.

I'm sure I'll be back to complaining soon enough, but it would really take some doing to bring me down tonight, that's for sure :)

Post 48, In which I am Jacob (sort of)

Paul Gaugan - Vision after the Sermon

It seems like some bible stories get a lot of play both in and out of a religious setting (Noah, I'm looking at you!), some seem to never, ever come up in or out of churches, and some are just sort of "also rans" in the world of bible stories.  I think the one about Jacob wrestling with God (or an angel, I think it depends on the translation) is one of these "also rans," but it's one I've been thinking of a lot lately.

For those of you who didn't grow up with Arch books and Taylor's Bible Stories (which, let's face it, is probably all of you except my brothers and I) and are not fascinated by Puritan naming traditions or fangirling on the Mayflower passenger Wrestling Brewster (which, let's also face it, isn't going to be a lot of you), although I trust some of you still know about Jacob wrestling, let me give a very brief summary:

Jacob stole his twin brother's birthright, ran off to another land, worked for the right to marry one girl but was tricked into marrying her sister, worked some more and married the girl he wanted to marry, had a ton of kids through both sisters and their maids, stole some more stuff from his father-in-law and ran out in the middle of the night to return home to his presumably still really ticked off twin brother. 

On the night before he was to cross the stream into his brother's land, he sent his family across and spent the night alone.  Some strange man came up and fought with him but neither of them could overcome the other and, at dawn, the stranger tapped his hip and put his leg out of joint.  Finally they agreed to stop, Jacob demanded a blessing, the stranger revealed himself to be God (or sent by God) and blessed Jacob, but his hip never did get better.

I can see why this one is in the "also ran" pile, it's kind of a weird one and hard to make out exactly what the heck it's supposed to mean.  Good thing I blog about cancer and not biblical studies, because I'd totally throw up my hands and shrug over this one.

But, as I've mentioned before, even though my cancer is in a number of bones, it's really only my hips that have been painful and fragile enough to require me to remember not to do certain things. Radiation for me is not curative but just palliative (to kill enough cancer to stop the pain), and the radiation therapy I've gotten at stage iv has only been to my left hip.  And while I was feeling better for a while after that, in the last week or so, I'm feeling pain again not in the left hip but, this time, in the right.

So, lately I've been thinking of Jacob and God putting out his finger to give him life-long pain in his hip and wondering what it all could mean.

With cancer, probably at any stage, there's a lot of wrestling with God (or the universe or fate or whatever for those who don't believe in God).  I wish I had some idea what it all meant.  Why am I the one who puts my family through this? And why them? What have I done that I'm the one wondering if I'll live long enough to see how things turn out?  Why would anyone pick my sweet husband to be widowed and these kids to have to deal with this, my daughter to be motherless?  It's, to put it frankly, a pretty crappy thing.

I wish I could be like Jacob and just demand a blessing and limp over the river at dawn to a spiffy new life in a new-old land (at least until the whole Dinah so his sons murdered everyone in town, followed by the whole famine and Joseph sold to Egypt thing, which is another popular one, which I know because even my public middle school did a production of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" back in the day, so you know that story's made it to big-time).  And maybe I will end up with a great outcome, because, afterall, who knows?  It could still work out great.

But the new hip pain worries me, because, while I don't know the cause right now, new pain is not a good sign and could often indicate that the treatments I'm on are not doing a terrific job of keeping the cancer from continuing to grow.

Unlike Jacob, of course, I do have medical imaging and the combined forces of research and oncology on my side.  I had a bone scan and a CT scan last week, results to be discussed this coming week, so I'll have a few more pieces of the "what does this all mean" puzzle soon (at least in the physical sense. I don't know what kind of image it would take to clear up the spiritual questions but whatever it would take would probably net a pretty penny on Ebay).  Also, where this is all going to go in the end isn't something scans can tell me right now, although they should do a good job of helping decide whether we'll stay the course or go to something harder.

Modern medicine could have totally fixed Jacob's hip, or replaced it, or whatever.  But the story would still be really strange because a medical diagnosis wouldn't have answered the bigger questions like why God picked a fight with him and damaged his hip in the first place and what it was supposed to mean (it also wouldn't have kept him from being kind of a jerk and stealing from all kinds of everyone and being a really dysfunctionally bad father even after all the blessings he got, but that's going to have to be someone else's blog topic, not mine)

For those of you who've followed this whole indulgent post and have managed to keep your questions about brain mets to yourselves, thank you (and, for the record, brain mets are unlikely right now, not enough symptoms).  For those of you desperately looking for the exits, here's the TL;DR version:

My other hip hurts and I don't know why but I had some scans.  Also, I'm having trouble figuring out what it all means in the physical and universal senses.

More news later this week.