Things Are Looking Up/!END OF CHEMO!/Can Anyone Say "Manic"? ;)

As of today, August 17, 2009, I am officially DONE with ABVD (and AVD) chemotherapy!!!!!!!! All twelve treatments/six cycles have BEEN COMPLETED!

I am THRILLED and feeling GOOD!!!! Thank you God and Angels for looking on me with such MERCY.

I AM READY to move along in my HEALING PROCESS!!! I will have the radiation, but in the way determined to be the most effective and safest by Dr. Hoppe and Dr. Nancy Mendenhall at the Proton Institute. Papers will be signed and a number of tests will be administered, including a PET Scan, to determine what form of radiation treatment will be most effective for my unique case.

During radiation treatment I will likey have to hold back on getting on the detoxification journey. But as soon as treatment is complete, I want to really give this body the best I can to help it repair itself and stay happy and well! I want to show it lots and lots of LOVE!!!

I want to move foward in my life, letting go of the past that only exists in my mind anyway. I want to grow more into my "adult" self, becoming increasingly self-possessed, responsible, and aware. I want to go further into this adventure with a greater sense of my connection with the Divine and a greater awareness of the Divine being all around me and within me at all times.

I want to go further with my education. The ideal for me I see is a combination of Music Therapy and religious/philosophical studies. I see how both of these can interweave and inform my ability to help others on their healing journey.

If it is God's will, I want to help the human get into better touch with the earth heart, the big heart, and heal. I don't even know if that makes any sense, but my dreams keep emphasizing to me the "Earth." We are divine, but we are also people "of the Earth." In order to heal, it seems, we need to re-connect with the Earth. Music is an ancient way of doing that. In fact, the earth and cosmos even issues out its own music in the form of frequencies and the sounds of nature.

I am perhaps getting off the topic. The point is.....it is TIME. To BE HERE NOW. Living, growing, embracing The Present and the EXPANSIVE possibilities.

Thank you to everyone for your support and love. Thank you also to everyone who has "hurt me." Thank you because YOU are part of ME trying to show ME myself. And it doesn't matter whether you know that or not! Thank you DIVINE for guiding me, teaching me, and helping me along this healing journey. You make me feel so strong and ancient.

And Thank You, Jillian for the picture, taken several months ago, at the top of this post. I love you SO much, my beautiful, fabulous friend!!!!!

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Yep

Well, I want to mention that I may have slightly inacurrately misrepresented the Proton study. I was reading the "Informed Consent to Participate in Research" form, and from what I gather, Dr. Nancy P. Mendenhall is actually the "principal investigator." Dr. Hoppe is a "sub-investigator." Dr. Hoppe is the person who I met with for my consultation though.

I am sad about a friend's news. I am playing tomorrow, 12-4. Monday, more chemo.

In the meantime...I am reading. I am on a reading kick. A fiction kick. I haven't read fiction like this since I was pre-pubescent. Ha ha. I'm not saying there is a connection...I am just saying. I read a lot of fiction as a kid. (Perhaps the connection is that I have a lot of "me-time"). There is a lot that can be learned from fiction...and that is the kind of fiction I enjoy the most.

Right now I am in the middle of two fiction works: "Second Glance" by Jodi Piccoult and "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" by Tom Robbins. My mom gave me the Piccoult book recently and the Robbins book I have because I am kind of trying to read all his stuff. I appreciate the art of composing, of the framing of the human experience from different perspectives, and not only that, but playing around with time. There are so many countless choices that go into the creation of a story, of the translation of that story into language, scenes, dialogues, characters, and of course the almost God-like perpective of the narrator. How will that story be told? And how will that story resonate with the reader?

I had a dream last night of a somewhat recurring theme. The theme has to do with moving out. In this dream, I went over to visit the house where I last lived, and discovered that I had left a bunch of stuff which I had entirely forgotten about. There was a stack of piano music I had left behind. And then, in the room which had previously been my own, I had left a ridiculous amount of my personal possessions. A huge dresser with clothing I had totally forgotten I owned, bookcases with many, many books, shelves with ceramic precious moments figurines, and other annoying clutter. The new roomate that had moved into my old room had not even moved in her own stuff yet, because my stuff was taking up so much of the space.

So, in my dream, I kept making trip after trip to this house, carrying load after load of my stuff out of it. There were obstacles. I couldn't seem to get anyone to help me. And people and events kept trying to snag my attention away from the task I desparately wanted to complete.

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Good News About Proton Therapy

Wednesday's trip to the University of Florida Proton Therapy Institute (UFPTI) was very positive! The building was neat, the people were nice, and there is a baby grand in the waiting room. But besides all that, the program sounds really ideal for me! What is ironic is that this particular institute only opened a program for Hodgkin's patients this April. The doctor that would be overseeing my treatment, Dr. Hoppe, began this research study/program. His father is a well-known Hodgkin's/radiation doctor at Stanford Medical University in California. So I would be a part of this study. It may be a while before we know if I am doing it for sure because there are still aspects to be considered and the institute is still working with our insurance company to make it happen. It would be 20 days in August, Monday-Friday.

I am pretty tired at the moment! It has been a really good week. I have been pretty active. I am feeling good. :)

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Proton Therapy Consultation Tomorrow

My eyebrows have never been so thin before! Chemo hair. You can see mine is growing. It never all fell out; it just thinned out a lot. I had a nice lunch with a good friend today and a great energy/manual therapy session afterwards. In between I hung out with the cool trees by the lighthouse. I stayed a while under one whose limbs streched out horizantally like great big arms that came up to about my chest level. I took my shoes off and sort of hugged on the tree for a while. Ha ha ha. Besides my noisy mind, it was nice. Ah, it is what it is.

I was able to do some crying. It was a good release.

This evening my heart started pounding and then every so often I would feel a sharp, quick, startling pain around the area of my heart. It only happened like 4 or 5 times tonight. It happens every so often. Pooka was whimpering, whining, and wouldn't settle down. I just laid in bed very still and relaxed. And prayed for courage and peace. And for the ability to handle pain. That it won't hurt too bad.

Tomorrow I'm going with my mom and dad to the Florida Proton Therapy Insititute in Jacksonville, FL. I read up on it a little bit tonight. Get this, they use a particle accelerator. There is one of those in "Angels and Demons." I wonder if this place also has a tunnel underground that is miles and miles long. Anyway, it sounds like if I could do Proton Therapy rather than radiation therapy, if it will work for my situation, it causes much less damage to the healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. This would be a really good thing, as the surrounding tissue that would be in the field of normal radiation therapy, includes at least that of my lungs, heart, breasts, esophogus, and thyroid. From what I understand, the protons are relatively large and "scatter" less when they hit the tissue. Both therapies work by damaging the DNA of cells.

My oncologist doesn't know much about proton therapy, and is also sort of on a "team" with the radiotion department at the local hospital here. So they tend to recommend eachother. With a tumor that began so large as mine did, it is common practice to follow up 6-8 cycles of ABVD chemo with "rads." I have already met the woman who would do my rads if I end up doing them here, in town. We will see what the proton institute has to say about my case tomorrow. Bright and early. (leaving at 6:45 A.M. -whoa!) It is neat that it is only forty-five minutes away, there are not that many places to have this kind of treatment done. It will be interesting to learn about in any case!

In the world of reading, I finished "The Golden Compass" - (cool! I loved the shape-shifting daemons!). I am now reading a Jodi Picoult novel my mom loaned me called "Second Glance."

Till Next Time.

x's and o's.

P.S. Do any of you fellow bloggers know how to get the blog to hold a freaking format, like spaces in between paragraphs? I'm kind of a perfectionist about some things, e.g, my writing, and this big long messy paragraph thing over and over again is kind of driving me crazy. I'm going to go bang my head against the wall now. Jk, of course. Advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks =).

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