Bertha was sooo immature

I’m going to be okay.

I’ll know more about my treatment when I have my big appointment with my oncologist next week, but for now here are the details:

   The tumor that I had removed on October 6^th was an immature cystic teratoma. This is pretty rare, about 99% of teratomas are mature and therefore benign. That’s why my surgeon and doctors were almost completely assured that I was cancer-free until the pathology report came back; it was totally surprising for everyone. Fun fact: because this is a germ cell tumor, it grows in reproductive organs such as ovaries OR testicles. I actually have the exact same cancer and will undergo the exact same treatment as Lance Armstrong. Maybe I should write to him and tell him someone stole my bike when I was in the ER?

Kick cancer's ass!

   The good news is that this tumor is highly curable and will have no effect on my life expectancy. My cancer is classified as stage 1a, grade 2. The stage 1a means Bertha was entirely contained and hasn’t spread, and grade 2 means the cancer cells themselves are intermediately aggressive. Chemo will be done just to make sure that any possible remaining bad cells will be completely destroyed.

I should have made her look more evil....

   So, chemotherapy. Oof. Definitely not looking forward to it. I’ll have 3 cycles of of BEP chemotherapy, which stands for bleomycin, etoposide, and platinum. The chemo treatment will be given for five consecutive days (mon-fri) then I get a two week rest period. This is repeated three times for a total of nine weeks on chemo. Basically, I’ll start on November 7^th and feel crappy until mid-January. No ski trips for me :-(

   Right now I think what worries me most are the short-term side effects. Stuff like losing my hair, vomiting all the time, losing too much weight, generally feeling like crap for a few months… it’s all going to happen pretty soon and pretty suddenly. There will be long-term risks to watch out for as well, but I’ll wrap my head around that later.  

   What comforts me the most is that after I get through these rough few months, I’ll most likely be rid of cancer for good. Obviously there are no guarantees (haven’t I learned that already!), but when I’m feeling particularly vulnerable and scared I keep reminding myself that I just need to get through the next three months. Thank God for all you guys supporting me right now. There’s a finish line in sight here, and a hell of a party to throw when we cross it!!!!

I'm a bird. Haven't met my bee.

   I want to have babies. Not right now, probably not in the next few years, but at some point I want to have a whole bunch of kids. I want to get married, and get pregnant, and get fat and happy with a big chaotic mess of family around me. And up until now, I’ve always sort of taken for granted that that would probably happen for me at some point. I certainly wasn’t in a rush to get married, but when it comes to life dreams and goals, this scenario is pretty high up on the list.

yes please!

   Well, here we are. Bertha knocked out one ovary, and chemotherapy is angrily threatening the other. I’ll talk more about my specific kind of chemo in the future, right now I’m just thinking about my reproductive health. I’m embarrassed to say that I’m startlingly ignorant about how my lady parts work every month (I had two ovaries, one of them pops out an egg, I get my period. End of story). Having just one ovary wouldn’t really affect my chances of getting pregnant in the future, but chemo definitely will. A good 20% of women who get my kind of chemo never have another period again, and therefore will never be able to get pregnant. That seems like a lot to me!!!! And yes, I have youth and health on my side, but even then this is still a real possibility. So for those of you who are curious, here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Go in and freeze a bunch of my eggs after chemotherapy. Why not before? Beause I don’t have time :-(  Of course, this only works if I don’t fall in that bad 20%.  Even if I can still get pregnant after chemotherapy, the amount of years that I’ll be able to bear children will be reduced (not may, will). So, if I happen to meet my prince charming in my mid 30’s, say, I don’t need to freak out about whether we’ll be able to have kids. There will be a neat little refrigerated back-up plan. 

oh, hey guys.

2. Lupron. This lovely wonder drug temporarily shuts down the message from my brain that tells my body to keep baby-making-machinery going. The upside is that with less activity in that area, chemo may not do as much damage. The downside? I’m effectively getting thrown into menopause cold-turkey… starting NOW. The side-effects aren’t supposed to kick in for a couple of weeks, but after that I will be on the hot-flash, mood-swing rollercoaster that we like to call “the change of life” or “that time that Julie was really mean”. Fun!

   So that’s a lot of really personal information about my inside parts, but all in all I am actually very positive about this. I’m young, I’ve got a lot of eggs in reserve, I think I’ll be okay. So bring it on, potential baby-daddies. Bring it on.

half done

    Tonight I’m meeting a friend for dinner or just to catch up. I want to look nice, so I decided to straighten my hair. I opened my drawer full of hair products, heated up my straightening iron, pulled out my hair spray, and actually managed to get through about half my hair before just absolutely bursting into tears in front of my mirror.

    I don’t want to lose my hair. I really really really don’t want to. I’ve had long hair as long as I can remember. It’s thick, it’s sexy, it’s shiny, and it’s the only aspect of my appearance that I’ve always liked, from a kid through the awkward chubby pimply teenage years to now. There’s a satisfaction to doing my hair. It’s a daily ritual, figuring out what to do with it.  I can toss it in a braid and forget about it, or take the time to tame this frizzy wild mane into soft smooth layers. It’s my go-to thing when I want to look pretty, or desirable, or put-together…. And just a few weeks from now I won’t have that anymore.

   This isn’t just about vanity. It’s not that I am worried that I’ll be ugly or undesirable without my hair; actually, I think I’ll rock it pretty awesomely. I just don’t WANT to, and no one is giving me that choice.

and so I took a picture

   I think I’m gonna go cry a while.

home sweet home!

I'm back from the hospital!!! That's all, it's just such good news I figured it deserved it's own space :-)

Eyebrows Shmybrows

    I’m starting to observe that with big news, you don’t really understand all the ramifications at once. You get the big picture, but smaller details just randomly trickle in as the days go by. This probably explains why it didn’t dawn on me until yesterday that I’ll probably lose my eyebrows as well. Also, when you are at the hospital the residents come wake you up at 6am but nothing else happens for at least another two hours and it’s very boring. How are these facts related? Well, enjoy this little gallery I just made of how I might look without eyebrows:

  

Love these eyebrow-less pictures? You too can have one of your own! Just submit a photo without bangs all in your face (hard, I know), a check for the low low price of $19.99 addressed to me, and a self-addressed stamped envelope. 

(I really need to figure out how to put all picture on the same line. Aaarrrggg stupid computers)

The pre-chemo List

    So good news, I’ll get to go home tonight or tomorrow. Yay! Chemo treatments will most likely start November 7^th.  That gives me at least 13 solid days to enjoy life before I get sick again. This is fantastic news for me, because I LOVE lists. I love thinking about lists, I love making lists, I love crossing things off my list.  So lets make a list! I think of a few things that I’d like to do before chemo. So here goes:

The Pre-Chemo List

• watch every movie in the theaters that I've been wanting to see
• go to Amanda's wedding
• get my teeth whitened, get a pedicure, do a face mask
• go to Matt Murphy's and the Regal Beagle for delicious food (and maaaaaybe a sip or two of beer :-) )
• do my hair every day, and take photos of myself with long hair and eyebrows so I don't forget what it looks like!!
• finish my desk organizing that I keep putting off

Alright that's all for now. Help me think of more things and post them in the comments section! Whether or not the list ever gets completed doesn't really matter, I just want LOTS of ideas :-)

Step 1: My Story

(This is to catch you up. I promise they won’t all be this long.) 

     I’m 25 years old.  As of two months ago I considered myself to be a fairly healthy, fit, generally happy young woman. I looked more or less like this:

   

(Okay this is an insanely flattering picture taken more like 2 years ago. 

Shut up. Stop interrupting. This is my story.)

     I love my job as a tech in the Emergency Department at Children’s Hospital, it’s a fantastic experience. I spent the summer filling out applications for Physician Assistant programs up and down the east coast. And, of course, I spent a good bit of the summer eating too many burgers, drinking too much beer, and spending a little too much time lounging around. So what if my belly was starting to stick out a little? I’d just work out more in the fall, right?

    Forward to one month ago: My beer belly is more prominent, and it’s not really going away. Actually, it feels pretty firm too. And I have to pee kind of frequently. My mom convinces me to go to the doctor. My doctor immediately sends me for a pelvic ultrasound. The ultrasound techs immediately call the radiologist attending, who immediately sends me to my gynecologist. Things are starting to get suspicious. My GYN tells me I have a cyst “the size of a grapefruit” and that I’ll need to get a CT scan and see a surgeon for removal. I am thinking this is totally surprising and a little overwhelming! We name my cyst “pamplemousse” and I go for the CT scan. This is the result:

     

THAT IS NOT THE SIZE OF ANY GRAPEFRUIT I HAVE EVER SEEN!!!! I immediately start showing these photos to anyone and everyone I know. How cool is this? It’s enormous! I feel fine! So weird in such a neat way! I rename my pamplemousse “Bertha” to reflect the increase in size.

   I underwent surgery on October 6^th. Because of Bertha’s girth, I had to have an open vertical incision from my belly button all the way down to my pubic bone. Guess what? It hurt. Otherwise, things were looking good. Bertha seemed like a completely benign teratoma, I was healing quickly, and the end was in sight. Or so I thought.

   On October 17^th I was back in the hospital with severe stomach pain. Turns out I had an intestinal obstruction, probably as a side effect of scarring from the surgery, and I’d need to be in the hospital for a week or so, with an naso-gastric tube in. Extremely irritating. I made this face:

   Here’s where it gets really terrible: A few days into this hospital stay my surgeon came in with some pretty bad news. Despite all appearances, Bertha was malignant. It’s a type of cancer called immature cystic teratoma, and apparently pretty rare. I know I won’t be able to convey how shocking and sudden and scary that news is, so I won’t even try. I was just concentrating on getting better from major surgery, and now I have to think about stuff like life expectancy and chemotherapy and preserving fertility and it’s still all overwhelming.

  So, that pretty much catches you all up to where I am now. Thanks for sticking through a pretty long story! I’m still in the hospital recovering from my obstruction, but I got my NG tube out and hopefully I’ll be headed home soon. Then, I’ll have about a week to get ready for some intense chemotherapy. 

I’ll probably be posting regularly in the next few days with info on the chemo, my long-term prognosis, and MOST IMPORTANTLY…. What am I going to do with my hair? Stay tuned.

Why?

I guess I should start by confessing that I don’t think I’ll be very good at the blog thing. There’s a great possibility that I’ll be boring, run out of ideas, or just forget to post. But here’s the thing: I have cancer. And that’s pretty freaking scary. It’s scary for me, it’s scary for my family, and it’s scary for my friends (at least it should be. If you’re not scared for me, I’m very disappointed in you. Bad friend, bad).  Hopefully this page will be a place for everyone to keep in touch and stay updated. For me, I hope keeping a blog will help me to feel productive and organize my life a little. I’ll avoid ruminating and obsessing over my thoughts, and that might prevent me from feeling like a big gross bald vomity mess.  Well, I might still feel that way sometimes, but this way you guys will have the pleasure of reading allllllll about it :-)