Lessons from my dog

This is Finn McKlumph, named after Finn McMissile in the Cars 2 movie. She is also known as train wreck, or Finny Marie if you're my Aunt Linda. Here is her signature modest sleeping pose. She's a lab and hilariously awesome, and probably obnoxious if you don't know and love her. Watching her in panting action tonight I'm totally entertained and taking lessons.

Lesson #1. Live in the moment!! Cancer? What's cancer? What happened yesterday? What happened five minutes ago? Hey look! It's a ball!!!

Lesson #2. Exercise and play everyday. We get to play!!?? YES!!! Chase the ball, retrieve the ball, chase it again, retrieve it again… repeat until you throw up.

Lesson #3. Make sure the people you love know you love them. My people are home! Wheee!! Make sure I am touching one of them at all times every second of the day. If they try to leave look as pitiful as possible.

Lesson #4. All of us need hugs. Pet me, pet me, pet me, pet me!

Lesson #5. Brush your teeth, man doggy breath is disgusting.

PS

Oh yeah… health wise… I have blood work that has been rescheduled for this next Thursday. My stress overload is decreasing. My cold sore is nearly gone, my headache is gone, my acne is backing off and my kidney stone hasn't been felt in days. I got a massage yesterday, the sun is out and I exercised. My blood pressure was pretty high on Friday, so it was a good reality check to chill out and not get caught up in the stress. My whole system was pissed and screaming at me, so I think I finally got the message. :) I'm working my way back down from the rafters.

Running and Rambling

Running in the sunshine might be the greatest thing ever. I finally felt good enough for exercise today. It was slow and somewhat painful and absolutely beautiful. As I was about to head up the giant hill back home, a friend of mine drove past. She was in a white car in the passenger seat with the window down. Picture a tall long haired blonde woman with sunglasses on, the sun on her face. Her arm was fully extended out the window with a huge thumbs up and a smile directed at me.

Sometimes I picture lives as a movie. As snapshots of moments of lives I guess. Like if there was a movie of my life, then at the end they would show these moments in my life that sort of sum it up, and it would all be set to some really cheesy music. Everyone would cry at how touching it was, and would smile at the same time. Which moments of my life would be chosen totally depends on the mood that I'm in. This moment of my friend in the car should have been one of her moments.

As I then headed up the giant hill to my house I started thinking about beauty. That moment was beautiful. When I watch my friend Jesse in all of her confidence I see such beauty. I see my mom playing with a superhero mask on her face with my kids and its beautiful. We get so caught up sometimes in seeing the beauty in others we easily forget to see our own. Or we try to emulate them rather than be who we are. Is it just my personality and my genetic makeup that sees someone else and thinks "I should do that?" Instead of thinking "good for them" my brain goes to "I should do it too."

I see my sister in law Jenn who never physically stops moving unless she's on a boat on a lake. She's playing, she's planning, she's cleaning, she's running just a little bit farther, she's… just… always… going. I see my other sister in law Sam who is tall blonde and "the hot one" in my wedding pictures. She's always so stylish, she's great with kids, she's all sorts of craftily talented. My cousin Amy is always super thoughtful about remembering birthdays, sending gifts, listening to what you really want. I'm surrounded by so many inspirational amazing people. I think I have tried to be like each one of them one way or another. It's absolutely exhausting. I don't really want to clean all the time, I don't want to care what I look like all the time, I am learning to be thrilled with who I am and be thrilled that they are who they are. Why should we all have the same strengths? That's just boring.

I had run 3.6 miles today when I hit the bottom of my hill. If I was running with Jenn & Sam they would have insisted we make it up the hill and we run exactly 4 miles, or we would have gone an additional mile so it was an even 5. I thought about it. "Sam and Jenn would keep going, I should just run." Why is it my human nature to focus on the .4 that I didn't run rather than the 3.6 that I did? I got home and thought "I should play with the kids," even though I really want to write.

I think I have finally gotten to a point where I recognize that I can appreciate what other people are like without a need to have to do it too.  I catch myself and think "screw it, do whatever the hell you want to do." Does this mean I'm maturing!? Yikes.

I walked up the hill and sang out loud with my headphones on. I walked across the field to my house in the sun and sat down on the porch to write. I hope my end of life slideshow has me singing out loud in the sunshine.

Time to vent...

Overall things are great, but I've been pretty frustrated the last couple of weeks. I have had a kidney stone just hanging out in my left kidney for 6 years. It developed during chemo and has just become my little dormant side kick. Well... It's decided to move and shake things up a bit.

People get kidney stones all the time and they vary as far as pain and intensity. Last week I had one night and day that it hurt like a son of a gun. No sleeping, no breaks in the pain... All sorts of fun. Finally it moved or something and I had times of no pain and times of little pain. It's been kind of alternating between it hurts and I forget its there. 

My stress relief is exercise. A kidney stone does not like exercise. This time of year is hectic at school with seniors trying to graduate and kids bouncing off the walls with the sun out, and it's just always stressful for me. I apparently have not been managing my stress well because I had a breakdown yesterday and last night. I feel better sanity wise today, but now there's a headache and some throwing up. I don't think of myself as sickly, but twice in the last 2 weeks I've had to be gone from school which means everybody else has to rework their schedes to bail me out. Irritating. I'm guessing today's sick is my body telling me I need a break. I'm annoyed and saying the f word a lot...

I have bloodwork today at 3 to make sure all the cancer stuff is cruising along. My kidneys don't hurt today. I haven't thrown up in a few hours. Hopefully we've hit the bottom and we're working our way back up.

Everything is Awesome

Super annoying song from the Lego movie (also annoying), but completely true. Things are going great. Brent and I often look around us at our families who are incredible, at our friends who are great, at our kids who are hilariously awesome, and just smile at all we have. 

This scenario sometimes makes me wonder when the ball will drop for something not so awesome, but I'm learning to stay in the moment and not worry about what's out there in the future. It's hard. How you just change your line of thinking is kinda tricky, but I'm working on it. 

Brent wanted to make a bucket list for us the other night. Cool and fun idea, but my brain instantly thought "is this because you think I won't be around very long?" Which is not what he was thinking at all. He just wanted to write stuff down so we wouldn't forget. Changing my thinking... :)

As far as the bucket list is concerned I really don't have much. I would like to travel, but there wasn't much that jumped to the front of my brain. Maybe I'm getting better at being happy in the moment than I thought.

I get today off from work, so as I lay in bed this morning I hear the kids quietly playing in the living room.  They're letting me sleep... that's a pretty nice moment.

Thoughts

I tried to take a picture of myself in the pose of "The Thinker" to add to this post. It didn't work, I even had Max give it a shot. I'm really good at wasting time. Rather than google how I should correctly punctuate "The Thinker" I'll just leave it as is. For those of you that know something about grammar… sorry. I do math.

I found an article in the NY Post today about a new drug to treat cancer. By 'found' I mean I was wasting time on Facebook and read a short blurb someone else had "shared."It basically stated that Stanford had found a drug that showed very promising results to cure all types of cancer. It had been tested in mice on breast, liver, brain, ovarian… etc. AMAZING! Cancer basically keeps growing in your body because your immune system doesn't know it should kill it. It's a tricky little bugger. This drug (in my dumbed down version) blocks that part of the cancer cell so the immune system realizes it's bad news. They received huge amounts of money in grants to now begin testing humans. They briefly mentioned side effects, but it was a minimal mention. I'm sure there are some, I'm sure processes and such will take forever, blah blah blah. BUT IT'S EXCITING!!!!

It also got me to thinking… what if cancer really didn't exist? What would that world even look like? First of all, I'm quite certain that big pharmaceutical companies would make the drug so inaccessible it would be obscene. They need their money, right!? What would oncologists do for a profession? Where would all of that money go? Donated funds to cure cancer, runs and walks and triathlons galore to raise money and awareness for cancer. Pink stuff made for October, ribbon magnets, car stickers, save that tatas shirts, cancer cookbooks, wow there's a lot of stuff out there! What if there was no longer a reason for it!? Its incredible to think about. American Cancer Society, cancer related blogs, Cancer centers of America… what would plastic surgeons start reconstructing without breasts!? Wow. It could save lives, and ruin some too. So many people hurt because of cancer and so many people make their living because of cancer.

I'm ready. Let's end this sucker. Let's use that financial guy's snowball effect for disease. Everybody target one (but I get to pick which one), then once it's cured and eliminated, everybody migrates to the next disease. Yes!? YES! I should totally be in charge of the world...

Scan Results are IN!

Hello cancer? I'm kicking your ass!
Cheesiest picture I could muster:

I went to see Dr. Lee today and the biggest news is that the scan results were good! The small tumors can't even be seen anymore, and the big one went down from 11mm in size to 7mm! Let me repeat… some are GONE and the others are soon to be GONE. Feel free to bust a move, dance whatever dance you feel suits your abilities and personalities best and go for it! I just received a video of a happy dance and it was well… pretty awesome!

Other good news: the results in blood work and the results from the scan are showing the same thing. This is hugely awesome because it means there is a direct correlation between blood work and what's actually happening. The tumor marker is something that is kind of iffy for some people. It can give inaccurate results. In my case, it gives accurate results which is great news. It means that I can keep track of what's going on in my body through some simple blood work without having to do a bunch of other scans and tests. Some people have scan results that show growth, but the blood test doesn't show that, so they get to keep scanning and scanning and scanning. Thankfully I don't have to do that.

I will continue to do blood work every 2 months, but I don't have an appointment with Dr. Lee until September. Six months from now. aaaaaahhhhh….. So nice! We went out to dinner to celebrate, and we're all feeling pretty cocky around here. :)

Wheeeeeee!!!!!
Love you