(Post editing: I'm positively stoked that I finally figured the spacing mystery out! The solution for me was learning to speak a little HTML language. Now I am free to space wherever and whenever I want! Oh happy day!)Hmmm...no one on my favorite Hodgkin's forum is touching my question regarding fevers toward the end of ABVD treatment with a ten foot pole. This is the first time I have gotten 0 response toward a question. Just a couple, "oh yeah, that happened to me, it was nothing" kind of comments would be fantastic. Oh well. :)
I am doing okay doing the day to day thing. I enrolled in the school of life, what is there to be done about it? Nothing...except to do my best at being me. Performing the one-time role of Anastasia Louise Spiecker. My heart is here. If I drop my body than I think I will just continue to explore the world in my heart. It's really beautiful in there.
Wow. Just got a flash back of a really quite bizarre dream. A message from my deceased grandfather in the form of wine my dad accidentally spilled on my skirt right before I went on stage to perform. It spilled in the letters "J's Day." In my dream, my mom and I took that to mean Papa George Day was communicating with us. James/George Day.
Yes I have been reading a little bit about spirit communication. I have it in my blood. My great grandmother, Mildred Louise (my middle name's sake and I'm pretty sure I met some form of this woman one very strange morning on the beach), was in tune with spirits, premonition, visions, and such. So anyway...there a many layers to this life thing. We're all sharing the air and creating out of the same materials.
I have been having night sweats. They are not as drenching as they were pre-diagnosis, but I wake up in dampened clothes and sheets. I rub my "bald" head and it is slippery with sweat. Besides feeling like crap from the chemo and Neulasta shot, I don't feel that bad. I don't feel like running a marathon or anything, but I am okay laying here, sitting here, working on FSU admissions + scholarship stuff, taking it easy.
I am going to copy a story that I shared on the Hodgkin's board into this blog. It is supposed to be humorous, albeit dark humor, and it wasn't funny at the time. It is called "A+ For Freaking the Newly Initiated Out" and I hope you enjoy. xoxo. :)
I've got one. Before I share, I'd like to say that I am a rather quiet person, generally speaking, but I certainly have said things afterward which I really would've liked to put my foot in my mouth. So I can understand that sometimes people just don't know what to say and or just don't know how to NOT say a certain thing, a certain way, at a certain time. I guess what I am saying is that I empathize with human akwardness.
Anyway, here goes...February 1, 2009 was the day I was told that something had been growing in my chest for...a while. I was about two days into a short "vacation" in Arizona. Despite the dry weather, every morning I found myself hanging up the tanktop and shorts that I had slept in the night before on the shower rung because my clothing was literally drenched from night sweat. I had been having night sweats for a while, but they seemed to be getting increasingly worse. Anyway, what convinced me to ask the couple I was staying with in Arizona to drop me off at a walk in emergency clinic was the added symptom of tightness and chest pain, waking me in the middle of night, and restricting me from sleeping on a certain side. If I layed a certain way, my chest felt so tight, strange, and wrong. I almost decided to just wait until I got back to Florida to see my primary care practitioner yet again and insist that he figure out what the heck was going on with my body, but something in me said to get to the bottom of this NOW.
At the clinic, I gave the entry desk people a list of my symptoms, including a two year history of itching, at least six months of night sweats, and of course, the mysterious chest pain. After a suspicious chest x-ray came a CAT scan, then a doctor came into share with me the shocking news that they had found a large tumor in my chest. When I asked, "How large?" She told me that it was taking up most of the space of my left lung. Anyway she was serious, but also very polite and calm. She told me that it was probably cancer, but that there was a chance it was Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a kind of cancer that was, ideally, very treatable. She did recommend that I got home ASAP, get a biopsy, and start treatment. Of course, I could hardly believe that this was happening and was in total shock, but I also felt a small sense of satisfaction know that the itching and night sweats that had been plaguing me had an explanation and a possible solution (and it wasn't all in my head).
After the doctor left, I called my mom in Florida, and with tears running down my face I told her the news. Having worked in the medical field for over twenty years, she really wanted to speak to someone herself to find out more information. While I was on the phone with mom, a younger girl came in to give me my discharge papers and stuff. I recognized her because she was one of the younger workers there and I had noticed her sort of gaping at me, along with some of the other staff, while I was in the hall way after my CT scan. She now had a look of mixed horror and sympathy on her face. I asked her if she could speak to my mom on the phone. She agreed to. She had the CT scans text on her lap. With the phone to her ear she asked me, "Did the doctor tell you how large this tumor is?" "Not exactly," I said. She took a deep breath. "It's... .HUGE." She read the dimensions to us aloud, slowly, dramatically, looking up after each measurement. The longest dimension was nearly 17cm long. To my horror, she started crying! That was when I really started to think I was a goner. I was actually thinking...it is my time. I will have to pick out a nice place where I would like to die. Just go somewhere really beautiful and enjoy whatever time I have left as best as I can.
I said, "I had NO idea." The girl nodded, "that is why they call cancer the "Silent Killer." Then she said, "I heard that you are a singer. I am SO sorry." Part of me wanted to say "what?" "why?" , because the doctor had not touched that subject and of course I wondered why, is there something important that they cannot bring themselves to tell me? Am I going to lose my voice? What? But I did not want to know, and I did not want to hear it from this girl, who I had a feeling was going beyond what she should be saying and doing at this point. The girl said, "I HATE cancer. Cancer is DISGUSTING!" She shared with me (and my mom) that her brother had cancer and it kept coming back. She told me that the only thing that keeps her brother going is His faith in God.
In a room nearby I could hear someone throwing up or violentally coughing, it sounded like they were miserable. Between the sounds I was hearing from another patient, what I had just found out, what this girl was saying to me and the way she was looking at me, shaking her head with tears in her eyes, repeatedly telling me she was "so sorry," I felt like I was in a nightmare. The people that I had been staying with had arrived to pick me up. I said, "I've heard enough, let's get out of here." So that is basically the story. I think I would have been less freaked out if the girl hadn't used the phrase "silent killer" in relation to my newly discovered tumor and told me she was "so sorry" to hear I was a singer! She made me feel like my life was as good as over.I think that probably her personal connection with cancer because of her brother's experience caused her to get emotional and say things that were not the most comforting (or even realistic as it turns out) for me or my mother to hear that day.
