10 Years...

10 Years...

I haven't mentioned this anywhere in my blog yet...many reasons surround that decision. I have officially been cancer free for 10 years now! (Actually it was on December 5th) .

Looking back on my 9 months of chemo and seemingly constant hospital trips is so strange to me. Sometimes it seems like yesterday and others it seems like a different lifetime. It is very hard to explain, but maybe someone can learn from it or relate to this.

Seems like yesterday when...

...I think about the physical pain of my bleomycin (even the chemical make-up of this drug looks scary!) shot in my thighs. I mostly think about this when I am changing clothes or wearing shorts because if the scars on my legs. This hurt like hell. I have no words to describe it and I think you can only know if you had it too. I remember fighting and crying for nearly an hour every two weeks dreading this ( I was 15). I can remembering begging my nurse it skip it. When it was injected you could watch my leg turn red as the drug spread out over my body. After several weeks we finally discovered that icing my leg for a hour or so before the shot helped the redness and swelling. I also think this may have minimized some of the scaring. (BTW- shortly after my treatment the powers that be decided that even with the few benefits of administering this drug in the muscle had, it was not such a good idea, No kidding, I could have told them that!)

... I think about the pain of having my port-a-cath accessed ( this is a central IV line that was in my chest under the skin). It was so bad in tea beginning, just odd and took some getting used to. After it broke, however, it was much more painful. We didn't know that it had broken until I had it taken out. I had finished chemo by this point. I have some
tissue damage from drugs leaking into my chest muscle wall. Every now and then the site still hurts, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and think it is still there. That is weirdest thing ever!

...I have "chemo belly." Nausea-it will never be the same and hopefully never that bad again.

...I smell certain things and taste certain things. Smells or the worst-anything strong smelling good or bad makes me a little queasy. The smell of betadine is almost impossible. Other smells that trigger memories are: latex gloves with powder, pizza (STILL), some hand soaps, vanilla lotion or perfume, bug spray and sunscreen, "camp" and cinnamon gum. I have no idea about the gum, but the rest I can pinpoint. To this day some flavors of gatorade and koolaid taste like "chemo" to me. (just ask Brandon, I almost turned inside out when I took a drink of his gatorade once!) Which is nearly impossible because all of my drugs were IV or shots. Pizza sometimes still makes me feel funny, YES, I know its all in my head!

... I think about all of the things I had to learn. My drug names Adriamycin, bleomycin, Vincristine, and Dacarbazine, and kytril. Kytril is my miracle drug, it is an anti-medic that reduces nausea and vomiting. I was actually in a clinical trial for this drug because all the others failed. This made chemo more pleasant (is that possible?) What lab results were called and why they were important. How to read lab results and tell if they were normal or low, without having to wait and be told. When I could go out in public and when I had to stay home due to a weakened immune system. It was a whole new culture.

...I think about the emotions of cancer diagnosis at age 15. My cousin had died in August if '93 of cancer. I was diagnosed in March of '94. Scary stuff. Once I started crying on a trip for teens with cancer to Florida (April '94) I cried for the rest of the week.

...I learn about the deaths of people from camp or from the hospital that I know. It will never seem right that at the age of 16 I had been to more friends' funerals than my 70 year old grandmother. It will never be right to me that children get a disease that is associated with old age and death. For a good read on this, may I suggest Erma Bombeck's I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I want to Go to Boise.

It seems like a life time ago when...

...I try to relate to people in treatment now, it is so different. Scans go quicker, treatments have improved and cure rates have skyrocketed.

...I think about all the kids and adults I met when I was on chemo and the years since. Hundreds of kids and teens with cancer come to mind. So many have died.

...I am at Camp HIS KIDS with people whose memories don't go back as far as mine. Not many of us can recall the Lion's Den site and the summer of '94. Good times! This also makes me sad, there are just a handful of us who are still around and come around each summer.

...I try to remember what I was supposed to learn in 10th grade. Geometry for instance. No idea, the home tutor did it for me... She was the geometry teacher and I couldn't tell you jack about it. World History-there is another mystical topic for me. Since college I at least learned some history, but now I am learning more as I study the Bible. I wish I would have known that the history that schools teach was correlated so closely with the Bible. Maybe I would have payed more attention in professor Krieksieks's class. Of well.

...I think of it in passing. Its like "Oh, yeah...I had cancer."

As I look back on the last 10 years, my heart is flooded with emotions and thoughts. Fear, saddens, anger, love, hate, confusion, happiness, excitement, sickness, you name it, I can tell you when I felt it during my treatment and the months after.

Mostly I feel amazed. I had a very advanced stage of cancer. My chest, all around my heart and lungs, was filled with tumors. I was very sick. God was even working then, the story of my diagnosis is incredible, almost unbelievable. If many more days had passed, I may have died from heart failure. God has been so good to me. He has spared my life on numerous occasions with cancer and last term side effects of chemotherapy. He has allowed me to grow closer to Him with each "cancer episode," even the bad ones. He has guided doctors to the best care possible for me. He has allowed me to use this experience to help others. But most importantly to my heart tonight, God has offered me grace and love each and every time I have walked away from Him in anger because of cancer and what it has done to the people I love. I stand amazed...