so i'm not even sure who will see this post or not, i suppose those who were set up to receive email updates from this blog, maybe those who stumble upon this via cyber space, maybe no one will ever see it. and i'm ok with any of that. this post i am writing really more for myself than anything else. when i set out to write this blog, i created it as a way for my friends and family to get updates on my treatment, as well as a journal for me to express how i was feeling as a then 27 year old woman recently diagnosed. at some point it got too mundane for me and was no longer therapeutic. i felt like every two weeks i was just saying and posting the same things, because in a lot of ways that's what my life had become, a constant cycle, thursday, go to dana farber in the morning, spend half the day sitting in a chair staring at chris, staring at me, go home, be sick and tired all weekend, try to have a normal life for a week, start process over again, rinse and repeat.
i look at the date of my last blog and it's a little haunting to look at. it was two days before my last scheduled treatment date, it was two days after the original date chris and i were supposed to get married. and thinking about it now, i basically just walked away from this blog. i walked away from feeling the need to have everyone know what was going on with every detail of my treatment. i was sick of answering questions, getting poked and prodded every two weeks by doctors, feeling anxiety every minute of everyday not knowing what was going to happen next. i've had a few people say to me over the past 2 years that they felt like they never got closure from my blog, they followed for six months and then i kind of just dropped off the face of the earth in blog world. obviously my friends and family knows how it all ended and how things turned out, and i've been thinking about writing this post for a long time now, but today i feel like it's time. i'm 29 now, and there have been many moments over the past 2 years that have made me feel so lucky, so privileged to be here, i feel almost guilty for being happy about it when so many people don't make it. but i've finally come to a place where i need to be happy for myself.
1. i'm cancer free!!! whoo hooo!! yes on 11/7/2010 i was declared cancer free! oh it was a lovely new england fall morning, stressful like no other. i think i didn't sleep the night before because i was so terrified of what the next day would bring. what if it wasn't over? what if they didn't get everything? what if i have to go through some worse treatment? what's going to happen to me? what if what if what if. i'm an anxious person by nature, chris likes to call this the 'what if game' you should hear some of the crap i come up with.of course his answer always is 'then we deal with it' so i went into DFCI, had a petscan, then waited. and waited. and waited. we had to wait for dr. lacasce to give us the diagnosis, and it was an especially packed day in the office, also it was the first time i had been there in the afternoon, it was like seeing a whole different crew in there. but eventually the good doctor came in, gave us the good news and i basically sprinted out of there. my stepdad shouted in the waiting room, which was of course extremely inappropriate, my mom cried, and i just wanted to leave. i wanted to leave and never come back. of course i would be back, every 3 months. for the next two years. just for standard check ups, every appointment was switched off between just blood work (just a pinch! p.s. i now forever have 'petite veins') and CT scans. everytime all clear, coincidentally, this year on 10/4/12 (i should have played the lottery or something) i went back to see dr lacasce for my 2 year check up and i'm officially 2 years cancer free! the 2 year mark is a big deal, this is when you are at the highest risk of the cancer coming back. and this is when they treat it more aggressively. it's also when you decrease your visits to every six months, with just 1 CT scan per year. since i left treatment they have opened the new yawkey center at dana farber, it's beautiful! it's really such a fitting place for such amazing people to be and do the work they are doing. i'm happy that chris and i have done the jimmy fund walk for the past two years and have raised over 5k for the jimmy fund. we continue to try and give back in anyway we can. there isn't a day that goes by that i'm not grateful to everyone i came across while i was there. it's so bizarre now to go there and be so far from treatment and be in the waiting room and see people in the different phases of treatment. i just want to hug them and tell them it's going to be ok, and if it isn't, it will be someday. but i know they don't want to hear that, so i don't.
2. i'm married! chris and i got married on 2/12/11 at the omni parker house in boston. it was the most perfect day ever and the most fun day i had ever had. we had to drastically cut our guest list. this was not an easy decision to make as we wanted to have everyone there to celebrate all that we had been through and overcome, we contemplated eloping, waiting even longer, but i'm glad we did what we did, i loved every minute of it, and wouldn't change a thing.
3. we bought a house! yes last june chris and i entered the real estate market with a vengeance and bought a lovely property in north attleboro. we love having a house, i love decorating it, chris loves yard work, (i tolerate it), we love having our friends over, i love love love having a house,
4.we have a dog! this past march chris gave me the second greatest thing to ever happen to me (other than him, of course;)) my baby girl willow!!! i literally had no idea how much i could love a dog as much as i love her. she is the perfect dog, so calm and well behaved, so pretty, she likes long walks, playing with squeaky toys, and cookies. i mean just look at her.
so as you can see a lot has changed over the last 2 years, bottom line is that life has moved on. i started thinking about writing this post a couple of weeks ago when i learned about another young person get diagnosed with cancer, she is young, a mother of three, but still, in her early 30s and to think that she has to go through all of this with young children, just really got to me. battling cancer is hard. the things you think about, the emotional roller coaster you go through, the toll it takes on relationships, your mind, your body, it's exhausting. it effects you forever. you can never go back to being a person that never had cancer. you are put in a different category in life. never again can you hear about someone getting diagnosed and not take a minute to really know what that person is going through. what they will go through. i'm so blessed to have survived this. that's something i have taken for granted. i've been spending a lot of time over the last two years trying to almost ignore what happened. acting like it wasn't a big deal. it is a big deal, i had cancer. it happened, i dealt with it, and made it through. but it doesn't stop there. i will forever live with the anxiety of it coming back, developing another type of cancer, life long side effects (did you know i can never donate blood again?) but again, that's the what if game, and part of my journey is to embrace those fears and learn to live with them, you really can't live your life thinking about the what if's. IF something happens, THEN you deal with it.
so i want to thank all of you for following this blog to begin with. i started this out as something for all of you, but it ended up being something so much more important for me.
