Friendship Introspection, Part I

Over the years I have had the pleasure of having moved from one city to another by being the child of a member of the Air Force. Both my mom and my dad (and my step-dad) were active duty at certain points of our lives and so I grew up in never having lived in one place for more than 3 years until we moved to Cincinnati, Ohio and I enrolled in 6th grade at Kings Mills Middle School.

I am also an only child. Being an only child and one who has moved around, I honestly don’t have much recollection of my childhood years, especially school years. I don’t remember my friends from those years because they were so random and scattered. I think not having anyone else to connect those times and places to limits my recall capacity in some way. I remember summers, spent with my grandparents in Marion or Ashland, Ohio; or at a Bible camp a couple times. I remember a friend here and there who I saw every summer because they lived near my grandparents or were at camp. But individual grades or teachers are out of reach for my memory and always have been.

Cincinnati and Kings Mills is where things start to settle into my head better and I have a clear memory of my friends there, my teachers, the classrooms, the fun and the laughs and the things we learned. From there my mom and I moved to Ocean Springs, Mississippi where I would graduate high school and find another set of friends. I have to say that after years of moving around the States, living in the south truly felt like home for me. I don’t know if it was the pace, the beach, the food, the colors, or everything combined but there is a kinship I feel with the Gulf Coast. I only have to read something from there or start to recall a memory out loud and my drawl will kick in (Brian adores it).

I traveled over to Mobile, Alabama to attend college, graduated and stayed on (even after my mom had moved back “up north") there until 1996, when I decided that it was time to move on. I packed up and headed to Columbus, Ohio where I met and married Brian, where we live now.

Beyond school, my friends came from work. My college years (as well as when I moved to Columbus) were filled with friends from the restaurant and bar world. These are great friends who are seriously down for a good time. The memories (and sometimes the lack there of) that I have of concerts, crawls, football games, after parties, and on and on…oh my. Thank goodness the Internet was not around then. Just sayin’.

However, I am very happy to say that because of the Internet I was able to reconnect with and am able to stay connected with many friends with whom I have lost contact through the years. I’m not a good letter writer and I don’t really like to gab on the phone, so email and Facebook have made the world smaller for me.

To be continued . . . 

Time for a face lift...

I've been doing lots of fun things on the YSC Puck Bunnies site, working up a site for the place where I ride, keeping up a few twitter accounts and the YSC Puck Bunnies facebook page...I think it's time I gave MMWR a little facelift!


So - if anyone actually stops by here - sorry if I move your cheese but there will be some switches and I don't know if they will be big or small! But I like change so put on your big-girl panties and deal!

To biopsy or not to biopsy...

That was the question...

My apologies for the sometimes cryptic statuses over the last several weeks: I wasn’t trying to be mysterious or inviting attention. I was venting some frustrations and pain and fear while at the same time trying to keep some information contained. I have friends who are family and family who had events going on last weekend and honestly, with all the unknown aspects of what was going on – there was just no reason to lay it all out here. Had there been more certainty in what was going to happen at any given point, I promise I would have been more open, because I believe in sharing my life in hopes that it teaches something…

The journey of a cancer survivor trying to get answers is never easy and never quick.

I ride horses. I LOVE riding – it helps to keep me sane and is a major way to relieve stress. I am able to communicate with a creature who is larger than life, who is waiting for my commands, and who is thinking for itself. Well, sometimes this works against humans. In September, a horse I had been riding for about a year threw me off. Hard. When I hit the ground I had the wind completely knocked out of me. I remember getting mad because I couldn’t breathe and telling myself to breathe. I sucked in some air and blacked out. When I came too I heard myself groaning and the sound of sirens. I ended up at the emergency room in Delaware, where it was determined I had 3 broken ribs on the right side, a mild concussion, a sprained left shoulder, and some bruising on my right hip. I recovered through the fall and started riding again last month.

Meanwhile, at Christmas, I had a nasty cold, accompanied by some severe pain on my left front chest. This is also the side on which I had my breast cancer. I then had bronchitis with a lovely cough. The pain mellowed and moved from the front to the side, but has remained (along with the cough).

At some point during the holidays, because of the pain, I had a couple chest xrays and both were negative. It was sort of thought that I probably had pleurisy or perhaps coughed myself into a broken rib. But when the pain continued my primary care doc ordered a bone scan.

Now, for those of you that don’t know, a bone scan is used to look for metastatic cancer lesions, but will also show healing spots (like fractures) and other things. I had a “hot spot” show up on left rib and my left shoulder blade. Well, this caused chaos.

My primary care doc and my oncologist both decided these could be metastatic spots because they were so isolated. At this point, of course, I am freaking out too. My left shoulder had not been in pain so for a spot to show up there REALLY concerned me.

I contacted a longtime friend who is also an excellent radiologist, and asked him to pull the films from the Delaware ER (where I went when I was thrown from the horse) to see what he could see. He found a shattered left shoulder blade, which I never knew about, and which explained the hot spot showing up on bone scan, but couldn't see the left ribs to see anything different there.

In advance of the rib biopsy, I was scheduled to have a chest CT. On Saturday, both my radiologist friend and my oncologist called- both felt that the spot on the left rib looked to be a healing fracture and nothing else. The last step would be to gather as many films as possible and get a really big picture of what was going on.

I was scheduled to have the biopsy this morning at 6am.

Yesterday afternoon my oncologist called and the radiologist scheduled to actually do the biopsy recommended against it. The feeling was overwhelming that the spot being seen on the bone scan is definitely a recent break, different from the right side fractures from September, probably not cancer mets, and not worth a biopsy!!

The current plan is to wait and if it doesn't heal or gets worse will rescan in 6-8 weeks, and I am completely fine with this. I have some good pain medications that don’t knock me out, just help with the minor twinges. And perhaps now I can start sleeping again!

So -alls well that ends well!

For now.

As my oncologist said “until the next shit hits the fan.”

*sighs*

Such is life as a survivor.

However, I am always thankful that I am one.