Laurie White’s Blog

Well, I am now quite the painted lady.

I started radiation today. I did the initial aiming last Friday and thought I has a lot of black paint pen marks all over my torso. I had no idea what “a lot of marks” was.

I got to the radiologists almost 10 minutes early after breakfast with the ladies of the church (there was no trouble with I-75 or the Red Parking garage–two places you can spend lots of time stopped). They brought me back immediately and spent over half an hour with more aiming and marking. I now know what a lot of marks are.

The actual radiation process itself wasn’t all that different from the aiming. You lay there, you hold onto the pegs, and the machine moves and makes noises. And, unsurprisingly, I don’t feel anything different. The biggest side effects of radiation are exhaustion, which I’ve had a lot of lately, and a slight burning of the skin (like sunburn), but both of these take time to appear, apparently.

Exhaustion? Yeah, okay, so things haven’t been great. And it’s not due to the cancer, or even the treatment, directly. I had a sciatica attack in 1999 in my right hip. As soon as I figured out what it was, it’s been easy to keep in check. But with surgery on my left side, it’s been hard to find a comfortable position to sleep in. So, I slept badly wrong Sunday night and my sciatica kicked in. Not cancer, not surgery, not radiation, just plain old sciatica has knocked me down badly. And the only drugs that have any effect on the pain also make me incredibly tired. So I’ve had to decide between being asleep or being in pain. I usually take the coward’s way out and take the drugs. So I’m dreadfully far behind in grading and, with classes ending next week, I really need to do something about that.

But each day I’m getting a little better. I can recognize that, but it doesn’t keep me from being pissed when I’m not well.

Of course, I may be a little disappointed that I’m painted too. I figured I’d be getting tattoos that I’d have to turn into butterflies after treatment is over!

So, it’s official. In the tissue taken during Friday’s surgery, there was “No residual tumor.” The cancer is gone.

Thank God.

Even better, in the short run, after my surgeon told us this, he removed the last drain. There’s still some pain and numbness and muscle strain on the left side of my body, but without the port there, it feels so much better already.

And I won’t see another doctor for almost 3 whole days, when I go in to the radilogists to set up 6 weeks of radiation. Which I used to be worried about. But there’s no more cancer, so I can face the radiation a little better.

And I bet I’ll eat those words sometime in the next 6 weeks!

Okay, let’s get this title straight. This is about “hair issues,” not about how much hair matters. Hair really is one of the least concerns I have. Perhaps the least.

I mean, if chemotherapy is going to cause you to lose something, isn’t hair the best choice? Well, second best. Imagine if chemo caused you to lose fat around the hips and thighs. I’d imagine something like when someone in my neighborhood as I was growing up caught chicken pox or measles, where we were all given shots of gammaglobulin and sent over to play with the kid in hopes of getting sick too. (And let me tell you it didn’t work. I did get a mild case of measles as a child, but then got another case as a college senior. Measles are not something college seniors need.)

But chemo causes hair loss, not fat loss, so I haven’t been mobbed by people trying to catch cancer from me.

I was surprised that I never had total hair loss though. I always had enough on my head so that under hats you might even believe I really did have hair. My eyebrows didn’t disappear…a good thing since I was the laughing stock of Cancer Wellfit during the “Look good, feel better” makeup session. (But with big glasses and hats, my eyebrows are barely visible.)

But last week, my hair started coming out in handfuls again (difficult, since there was so little there). And I lost most of my eyebrows and eyelashes. You want to see something strange, imagine eyes with eye lashes at the edges, but not in the middle.

But the good news is that the old stuff is coming out to make room for the new. Apparently my hair is starting to grow in again. Charlie says there’s lots of it and it’s back in the same silly color pattern (a streak of brown down the center back and white everywhere else).

So, maybe I will get past all of this. Of course, I’ll believe it more once the drain is removed Tuesday.

Well, I’m home from the surgery. It went so much better than last Monday’s.

Of course, I didn’t have full anesthesia or any work done on the lymph nodes. But I’m still pleased with how well it went.

But, I’m also exhausted (sedatives do that!), so will sign off now…

Laurie’s surgeon just came out to tell me that everything went fine, and apparently pretty quickly. The status board showed surgery starting at 11:50, so it took less than 30 minutes.

More when I know more, probably when we get home.

Laurie just went back to the operating room for her follow-up surgery. The last thing she told me as they wheeled her off was “blog this”. Since she said it about ten times in a row, I guess she really meant it!

They are just excising a bit more at the front of the lump, because pathology showed cancer at the front margin from the last operation. It should be very easy on her compared to last week. No general anesthesia, just heavy sedation.

I’ve been told to expect to next see her about 1:30, plus or minus a lot, so I’ll post whenever I get any new information.

Okay, nothing to do with cancer, but…

I was born and raised in Gainesville, Florida. Charlie and I may have met there when we were two or three years old and definitely met there years later in grad school. We have a total of 4 degrees from the University of Florida. And we’re wondering what tens of thousands of UF grads are wondering.

What’s with these round balls?

It’s gonna take some thinking, but I could probably get used to a sport other than football at UF. It’s a good thing I did my undergrad work at an ACC school!

Well,

I’ve had to face that miserable fact that I’m not SuperWoman. Sure, chemotherapy was rough, but I was in class every day afterwards, except for the first time. (And I missed class after my first chemo because I wasn’t sure how I’d be affected and it was easier to cancel classes than wait and see how I’d feel. And it was Veteran’s Day and, dammit, I should have Veteran’s Day off.)

But I had surgery a week ago and just got back to classes today. I wasn’t sure if I’d be ready to go back to school the day after I got out of the hospital, but I was sure I’d get there at some point last week. But no. I was off a whole week after surgery. And I reallio-trulio didn’t feel like going to class today. Unlike those times I’d feel the need to just force myself through the chemotherapy exhaustion, I would have been quite happy to stay curled up in my recliner all day.

Now, getting out and seeing the folks at church was wonderful for my spirit yesterday and if I had any sense, I wouldn’t have objected to going to work so much, but, well, who says I have any sense?

To my dismay, it was probably very, very good for me to go back to work today. Having to talk to people about what was going on forced me to find an approach other than the miserable self-pity I’ve been wallowing in. I mean, does anyone who asks how you’re feeling really want to know the constant pain that drains cause? Do they want to know how p.o.ed I am that I have to go back and have more surgery Friday since the pathology report showed cancer at the margins (even there is officially no cancer in the lymph system–something that wallowing in self-pity keeps me from being ecstatic about).

Com’on…as you’re reading this, all this whining is a bit much, isn’t it? I mean, this is happening to me and I find the last paragraph a bit tedious.

So instead I talked to real frat boys about projectile vomitting and compared notes on the “balls” we’re carrying around with other members of the department (yeah, I’m the only female faculty member, so I hadn’t been able to discuss this sort of stuff with them before). So I did refind my bad sense of humor and it’s been that bad sense of humor that’s gotten me through so far.

That, and the prayers and concern and support of dozens (hundreds?) of people. And I was reminded at church yesterday and at work today that I still have all that as well.

So all of the pain I’m feeling is because of dissecting lymph nodes to see if the cancer is still in my lymph system. Of course, the doctors sent the tissue off to be checked and when I called the surgeon’s office to see if there was a problem with gauze in my drainage tubes (there isn’t a problem), they had the pathology results.

But the receptionist and the nurse couldn’t officially give me the results. I’ll have to wait until next Thursday when I see the surgeon. That’s a whole week, a long time to worry.

But while talking to them, I got surprisingly psychic. I do believe that the results will show that there is no trace of cancer in my lymph system. And that’s very good news. So I thank those wonderful women who helped me become so “psychic!”

Charlie here. I never would have guessed, but Laurie may be a frat boy at heart. She’s very proud of just how far she was able to vomit at the hospital. She’s telling everybody. It was almost the first thing she told her pastor when he visited her at the hospital.