Goodbye.. part1

   Wow oh wow has this been a long time coming. I realize that last post I wrote was almost four months ago and I’ve been keeping you guys hanging this whole time. Apologies. Part of my reluctance in posting is due to the fact that I always intended for this post to be my final one. I created this blog to help me keep in touch with friends and document my experience while fighting cancer. I’m done with that now, so there’s really no more reason to keep this going. Still, goodbyes are sad and in some strange way I’m kind of reluctant to definitively close this chapter of my life. So I’ll make you guys a deal: there will be no frequent posting, but if something comes up that is cancer-related and crucial to my life I will not hesitate to dust off the keyboard and tell you all about it.  (This is the “we can still be friends” of blog-breakups.) Ok let’s get to the important stuff…

My home/prison for the next 24 months

   I GOT IN TO DUKE!!!!! I found out less than a week after I went for my interview, so I’ve already gotten to enjoy this feeling for a few months. Honestly, I think I was starting to take it for granted a bit until I re-read my last post and was reminded of how much it means to me. I’ll be in Durham, North Carolina for a pretty intense two-year program, but at the end of it I’ll be in my dream job. How awesome is that?!? It just gets better: one of my good friends from work got into the same program, so I’ll get to be roomies with Ms.Dana Riker. I bet this won’t really totally sink in ‘till I’m packing up a U-Haul and driving south but it’s gotta be the second best news I’ve received in the last few months. Why second best? Well…

    BECAUSE THE BEST NEWS IS THAT I AM CANCER-FREE AND IN REMISSION!!!! Yes, I realize that’s the second paragraph in a row to start with all caps but you can just go ahead and shut up about that because I am CANCER-FREE and it’s simply impossible to write in lowercase :-D Oh happy day!!! Happy faces galore!!! I’m in complete remission, which means that there are absolutely no signs or symptoms to indicate that there is any more cancer in my body. Nobody can ever guarantee that I don’t have a few rogue cancer cells still floating around somewhere, so I’ll keep going to my oncology checkups every few months for the next couple of years… and then every six months for a few years after that, and then yearly for the rest of my long, healthy, happy, cancer-free life :-)

This is not the actual photo of my friends and me celebrating. That photo involved shots and scrubs and this is way prettier.

    How do I even start to explain to you what it feels like to be done with this?  I’m not sure that I can even identify to myself how I feel about it. Can you believe it hasn’t even been one year? On September 21^st I went for a seemingly normal visit with my doctor, and on April 12^th I was officially in remission.  Six and half months for my life to be turned upside-down, for everything I took for granted to be knocked senseless, for me to hit lows I was completely unprepared for and then rocket right back up to the highest highs.  I know I’m being dramatic but c’mon, this WAS dramatic!!!!  It’s shaken me up quite a bit, and I don’t think I’m settled yet. There are some big questions up in the air (will I be able to have kids?) but the overwhelming sensation is just absolute joy.  A little while ago I wrote about how having cancer gives you the freedom to face the rest of life absolutely unafraid. This is still true, but I guess I never realized how it also gives you the freedom to be absolutely happy. I don’t have to second-guess good things that come my way in life, or be restrained in my enjoyment of life’s small pleasures, or have any doubts whatsoever about my worth as a person.  I spent 204 days in pain, fighting, suffering, crying, and believe me I am DONE with that. I have EARNED my happiness now and I am going to enjoy the hell out of it!!!!!!!  I plan to spend my summer having an absolutely fabulous time with my friends, partying, laughing, dancing, drinking, and listening to too many Kelly Clarkson-esque inspirational power pop-ballads.

   Well it turns out there is more that I still have to say, but it’s late and I don’t want to bore you.  I absolutely promise to finish this tomorrow, and the upside is that I don’t have to say goodbye QUITE yet :-)

PA Updates

   Hello everyone!!! Let’s start off with standard apologies: I’m so sorry I haven’t written anything on here for the last couple of weeks! I guess I got excited about being done with chemo and I just forget that there is still a lot going on with my recovery. Tomorrow I’ll write about how I’m doing physically, but today I want to talk about what’s most on my mind at the moment…. PA school!

    Right now I’m at a really uncertain juncture in the application process. Out of the nine physician assistant programs that I applied to, I got called back to interviews at five of them, but could only go to four because of my chemo schedule (we won’t mention the evil, evil school that wouldn’t let me reschedule my interview). So I interviewed at Cornell (didn’t like it, thought I did OK) and Northeastern (absolutely LOVED it, thought I did amazing) and I got waitlisted at BOTH of them! This is pretty disheartening… On one hand getting waitlisted isn’t an outright “no”, at least they liked me enough to consider me for the program. On the other hand, it totally undermines my confidence because I have no idea of gauging the result of my interviews! I thought I was a perfect fit for Northeastern and my interviews were engaging, easy, informative… but I still haven’t gotten in yet. Sad face.

   So I have two more possibilities in the pipeline. I interviewed at George Washington University last Saturday, and I thought it went okay. The program is good, but the interviews were a bit awkward. They ask questions like “when have you been most disappointed in yourself” and “tell us about a  time that you have been under a lot of stress”. I was tempted to answer “right now” to both of those, just to see if the interviewers had a sense of humor at all (I got the impression that they really didn’t!).

   MOST IMPORTANTLY, I have an interview at Duke this Tuesday. For those of you that don’t know, Duke is my top choice school. It’s my dream. I can’t believe that I even got invited to interview there, and I am beyond excited to visit. It’s so nerve-wracking though! I haven’t had a single acceptance to any other school, so I really can’t expect things to go differently at Duke, but I have SUCH high hopes for it that I can’t help but let myself get a little carried away with how awesome it would be if I actually got in.

   Nothing is certain right now. I’m waiting to hear back from GWU, and we’ll see how things go at Duke. Within the next two or three weeks I should know if I got in anywhere at all. It would be a huge bummer for me if I didn’t manage to get accepted into any school that I applied to (I mean 0 for 9? C’mon!), but it’ll just mean I’ll have to do this whole process again next year and hope for better luck. I’m trying not to stress out about it, but this is a pretty crazy time. I just want to know what’s going to happen!!!

Good News

    So remember those annoying little nodules that showed up on my lung CT a few days ago? Well, they are very very probably NOT cancer or dangerous to me in any way. Yay!!! My doctors went through and looked at all my old chest x-rays, and it turns out my lungs look perfectly clear in an x-ray done immediately before my surgery, and then these mysteriously nodules appear in an x-ray done nine hours later, after my surgery. Since there’s really no way that cancer or an infection could suddenly appear in the space of nine hours, it seems most likely that it’s some sort of foreign matter or debris that got introduced into my lungs on accident when I was intubated. I’ll still get re-scanned in 3 months to make absolutely sure that they’re not getting bigger or anything, but at least that’s one less thing I have to worry about this weekend. Hooray for good news!

All DONE!!!

     It’s official; I had my last day of chemotherapy on Tuesday!!!! This is definitely a big milestone. Remember nine weeks ago when I was first starting this thing and I was nervous about going in for my first day? I really can’t believe it’s been over two months and that I actually finished this without anything going seriously wrong. I’ve had a lot of bad days, I lost my hair, I’ve changed so much physically… but from now on I can just look forward to improving little by little every day. I must say, overall my experience at Beth Israel has been fantastic. My chemo nurses even got me this cute little pin to celebrate my last day of chemo. Maybe I’ll be lucky and it’ll help make it snow (I love the snow!). 

    Of course, it’s not entirely smooth sailing from here on out. In fact, I had kind of an unpleasant visit to the emergency department last night. I started feeling sudden chest pain in the afternoon, and so my doctors said I had to go in and get it checked out. Turns out having cancer and undergoing chemo predisposes me to blood clots, so they really had to do a CT to make sure I wasn’t having a pulmonary embolus (a clot in my lung). It took a whole lot of tries to finally get an IV in my arm (my veins are tired of being used and abused) but in the end it all went well. This is a good news/ bad news situation. Good news: I did not have a pulmonary embolus, and although there’s no good reason for my chest pain at least it was nothing serious and I got to go home last night. Bad news: My CT showed five nodules in my lungs. Given my history of cancer, the immediate concern is that they might be metastases of my tumor. That’s not the ONLY thing they could be, and in fact it seems pretty unlikely given that I just finished chemotherapy, but it’s still concerning and it has to be checked out. Bummer, but I have an appointment with my oncologist this afternoon to see how we’ll proceed. 

Faking a smile

Hopefully my last IV for a very long time

   On a much happier note, guess who is on the cover of the BIDMC Quarterly? That would be me!! Don’t know what the BIDMC Quarterly is? Well, its only the coolest magazine in the world, and also Beth Israel’s internal publication about the goings-on at the hospital. Turns out the photographers for the “Look Good Feel Better” event that I went to a few months ago were taking photos for the magazine. It’s just a small article on the inside with a few paragraphs about the event, but I’m excited for my first cover anyway. Funny story: none of my nurses from chemo recognized me on the cover, because none of them knew me when I had my normal brown hair! Would you have recognized me based on this photo?

   Well, now that I’m all done with chemo I am looking forward to all the awesome stuff that I can do as I start to feel better. One of my next posts will have to be a list (yay!) of things I want to enjoy, eat, accomplish, or attempt in my post-cancer life. Stay tuned!