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Hello everyone,
I’m going to continue where I left off on my last post regarding my battle with breast cancer and the start of my chemotherapy. I hope that maybe you find this interesting and also that maybe will be able to find something within to help you with a personal battle of your own or maybe someone you know. As always, feel free to comment or offer your experiences and advice, and God bless you and yours !!
Friday, day 5 of my first round with chemo. I couldn’t go to the bathroom, and hadn’t since five or six days earlier. I’d been taking fiber and doing metamucel heavily, all with NO results !! I finally gave in and gave myself an enema, and had some results, ( which I noted in my last post, and was a HUGE mistake by the way ) but I had abdominal discomfort for the rest of that day. Next day, saturday, as I was feeling less nauseated, I still had abdominal discomfort. I paged the doctor on call and he told me to watch for fevers, anything greater than 100.6 needed immediate attention. The next morning I woke up feeling near death. I had absolutely NO energy. I took my temp and it was over 101, I woke up my husband and had him take me to ER, paged my Oncologist and she said she’d meet me there.
Long story short, I was there for 5 LONG DAYS, in isolation for 4 of those. My son couldn’t even visit me for the first 3 DAYS !! That sucks. I had NO white blood cells in my body, and I had to have Neulasta and Neupogen to stimulate my bone marrow to make more WBC. VERY boring to sit in a bed for 5 damn days !! I’d been “ok” mentally til then, but I had this weird, “Walls closing in on me” feeling and asked my oncologist if I could start an anti-depressant. She said “I’m surprised you haven’t asked before now !”
On about day 13, I started to feel my scalp tingle and could pull hair out easily. I didn’t want to get upset by it, so I called in the reinforcements, some friends and family to bring over food and we’d have a head shaving party. It was the best thing I could have done !! I took control of it before it could take control of me. Remember that. We shaved my head and had fun, took pictures, which I will share and even my husband shaved his !!! Trust me, thats not a big step !!!
Every 3 weeks on a Monday I recieved my damn chemo-cocktail. Oh yum !! It’s not a margarita, trust me. I drank water by the gallon, ate all the time and became a napper extraordinaire. I’d sleep 9-10 hours at night, plus a few naps when I had days off. I worked all through my chemo, really wasn’t too bad because as a nurse I generally only work 12 hour shifts 3 days a week. My boss just rearranged them to suit my chemo, I loved her for that !! ( She’s no longer with our hospital )
Halloween fell during my chemo, and in the middle of a cycle, and I thought, I’m bald, let’s have fun with this. I went as Howie Mandell from “Deal or No Deal” and 2 friends were my “briefcase girls”, the quirk was that one of them was a dude in drag !! Trust me, my husband, would NEVER have a part in that, god bless him. We ended up winning 2nd place at a costume contest !!
The fatigue and nausea got progressively worse with each round, and I needed more meds. By the 5th and 6th rounds I dreaded going, even though I knew it was necessary.
I was SO glad to be done, the last one was December 11th, a very, very good day. By christmas I felt good enough to enjoy the day, just a little tired.
I’ll go more into this later and will soon be adding pics here for you to see my steroid bloated face and bald head !! What a treat for you !! As always, feel free to include your input.
God bless you and yours always,
Meredith – RNC
You always hear that saying, “theres always a woman behind a great man”, that doesn’t change here. Eleanor Roosevelt was a great woman and here are a few of her thoughts/quotes !! Enjoy.
Friendship with one’s self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
Friendship with oneself is all-important because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
He who loses money, loses much; He who loses a friend, loses much more; He who loses faith, loses all.
If we want a free and peaceful world, if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being – we can do it.
It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.
Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.
Hello again,
Well today, I’m going to continue on with sharing my story about my recent battle with breast cancer. Hopefully, somewhere in my ramblings you will find something you can relate to or maybe draw some hope from. As always, your comments are appreciated and welcomed. God bless.
The day of my surgery was 08-04-2006, so it’s been just about two years !! Time flys when you’re having fun ! Anyway, I woke up nice and early, had to be at the hospital very early in the morning. My parents came with me and my husband showed up a bit before I went in for the surgery itself. I was scheduled for a needle localization with wire insertion by ultrasound guidance prior to the surgery. They mark the tumor with the surgical wire, to let the surgeon find it easily. Just like the biopsy, it didn’t hurt.
Also, since they had to check my lymph nodes, I had to have my lymph nodes “marked” to help find those as they aren’t easy to see. They used a radioactive med. and injected it in 6 sites around the nipple, the med. would then flow through the nodes and up the chain of nodes, marking them for the surgeon to see. The only bad part was that this hurt some because they couldn’t use Lidocaine.
Then it was off to pre-op, some friends came in to see me off. Along came the anesthesiologist with a syringe of stuff…..and I didn’t remember anything until I woke up in the recovery room. They moved me to my room after that.
Since I had 7 nodes removed, the first was infected with cancer cells, the rest were not, I had a drain into my axilla, (armpit area) to drain fluid that the absent nodes could not.
I stayed overnight and went home the next day. Very mild pain in my book, but others I’ve talked to said it can be higher. At a follow up appointment 4 days later, they removed the drain, which felt soooooo good, as I’d started to heal around it and it was irritating !!
The week after, I had my 1st appointment with my Oncologist. I’d researched the hell out of my pathology results, so I went prepared to say the least. I knew I’d need chemo, because of the node involvement. The appointment went fine, all my questions were answered. She wanted to start the chemo about a week later so I decided to get an infusa-port for ease of getting my doses. The procedure was relatively easy, just outpatient, in and out in a few hours time. I figured I’d rather have the device used than get frequent pokes into my arm for IVs and Lab draws. It ended up on the left side of my chest, just above my left breast.
My first chemo treatment was on 8-28-2006, it wasn’t too bad, I fully expected to feel horribly sick and terrible. I really didn’t. I was surprised. It took about 4-5 hours and then I went home. I still wasn’t sick yet, and still didn’t really feel bad at all, until the next day that is ! That next day I felt like I had been ran over by a Mac truck a few times !
Chemo helps but here’s a few pointers that may help: 1. Drink lots of water, at least 64 oz. each day, more will flush the poisons/toxins out sooner. 2. take stool softeners everyday if needed, my first round of chemo stopped my intestines like I swallowed concrete !! Trust me, that sucks. 3. Take nausea meds. EVEN if you don’t feel nauseated, it can hit quick and then it’s too late. 4. Frequent snacks/grazing can help nausea a lot. 5. Never….ever….ever…ever……EVER !!!! give yourself an enema during chemo. I was sooooo constipated and hadn’t gone for over 5 days, none of my info. from the Oncologist said not to, but it’s a HUGE No-No !!! It caused an even bigger drop in my White Blood Cell count and led to a 5 day hospitalization in isolation so my WBC’s could recover.
Thats it for today, I will cover more in the coming days. As always, I hope this helps. Thanks for reading and sharing.
God bless you and yours,
Meredith – RNC ( I’m running for President, in case you hadn’t read that post : ))
Hello again,
Many of you who have visited this blog probably know that I am a person of integrity and strong moral values. I truly believe that I am the right person to lead this nation for the next four years, therefore I have recently began my campaign for the office of President of these United States. I fully intend on giving Barack Obama a run for his money as I will be running as an Independent and pursuing history to become the first female President of this great country, and putting the power back where it belongs, in the hands of a woman ! I have included a short video for your viewing pleasure, just click the link below ! Please remember me when you go to the ballot in November, God bless always !
Meredith – RNC ; )
http://www.news3online.com/index.php?code=3HxM217fnm1BAu971W51
I thought you may enjoy these, she was a great woman who spent her life serving others. God bless.
Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other. And in the home, begins the disruption of peace of the world.
I am not sure exactly what Heaven will be like. But I don’t know that when we die and if comes the time for God to judge us, He will not ask, “How many good things have you done in your life?” Rather He will ask, “How much love did you put into what you did?”
In light of heaven, the worst suffering earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.
It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.
Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
Love cannot remain by itself… it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action, and that action is service.
Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.
Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high vocation, and its many responsibilities. Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.
The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.
Hello,
Today, I wanted to start an entry to my story of dealing with breast cancer. I hope that you can find something in this entry to help you if you’re dealing with this disease yourself or have a loved one going through it. As always, feel free to comment anytime, others will certainly appreciate it.
I was 35, had a four year old boy and a wonderful husband. For a number of months I had a tender spot in my breast that came with my periods. The little bugger really ached at times. I thought it was a cyst, as my mother and grandmother had many breast cysts. I didn’t have much cancer in my family, so that definitely couldn’t be the problem, right ? I had a great grandmother who got it when she was 85, recieved treatment and still lived until she was 93 and eventually died of natural causes. I also had a second cousin who had early diagnosis at age 35, and is now 6+ years cancer free.
I had my yearly OBGYN appointment the next month, so I waited until then and brought it up with my midwife. Now I couldn’t really feel a lump but she could. She said she couldn’t tell what it was, but that a mammogram would. She had the secretary call and get me an appointment set up for a few days later. I left out of there not too worried. I’d even had my midwife give me a prescription for prenatals, as my husband and I had just decided to try for another child.
Come the day of my Mammogram, I still wasn’t all that worried. The pictures definitely showed a mass, not a fluid cyst, as I had hoped. Right after my mammogram they had me slide to another room for an ultrasound of the bugger, which was when I saw it for the first time. It was a little roundish thing that measured 1.6 cm. The tech said it was definitely solid. Now we started to wonder. I was scheduled for a biopsy three days later. I went home to report to my hubby what they saw. We both had kept saying it was just a cyst, it’s not going to be anything worse. So much for that.
I had my biopsy three days later, the procedure itself was pretty easy. The radiologist numbs the area very well, then injects a large bore needle with ultra sound guidance into the core of the mass and then take samples which didn’t hurt much at all. Wanna talk about a great day, on my way home from the biopsy the fuel pump on my car went out, to the tune of $300.00 !! Oh boy, what a great day !
I had to work the next day, and was a little achy, but do-able. I got sent home mid-day because of low census. I was lying on the couch resting and at about 3pm or so the phone rang……………. it was my midwife. She said she couldn’t find me at work and asked me if I had the chance to check my biopsy results on the computer at work. I told her no, and the next words that came out of her mouth changed a lot of things in my life. She read my biopsy results with all the medical jargon, then let me have a few minutes to digest everything. At that point it was about 3:30 pm on a friday and she had a receptionist on another line getting me in to see a surgeon asap. My appointment was set for five days later. Pretty much impossible, but was extended as a professional courtesy I suppose. I was really in a fog. My husband was working nights at the time and hadn’t got up yet. After our conversation my midwife told me I should go wake him up and let him know what was going on. She also gave me her cell phone, home and work phone so I could call her if I had any questions.
After I hung up the phone with my midwife I called my mother and told her the news. She was a little shocked but was very calm and supportive. The rest of that day was a little foggy as well. I called a number of people and then started researching my type of cancer online. I was now officially a cancer patient. It was really kind of surreal, I felt normal, but was in shock and numb from the news. I new my life was going to change drastically in the next few weeks. I didn’t sleep much that night, tossed and turned, brain going a million miles a minute trying to wrap trying to get a grip on all this new information.
5 days later I sat down with the surgeon along with my mom, husband and mother inlaw. He said that with my pathology and type and size of cancer, that it had probably been there for about five years, slowly growing so there was no rush to get it out today. We discussed mastectomy versus lumpectomy, all the pro’s and con’s of each. He said I’d need an oncologist depending on results of the node removal during my surgery to see if the lymph nodes were affected and how many. I left out of there with lots of questions answered and scheduled my surgery for approx. one month later, in order to save sick time for the surgery.
I continue on some more on this in the coming days.
God bless,
Meredith – RNC
Hello everyone,
It’s been a few days since my last “real” entry, I had to take a couple of days off and take my son to the beach. You’ve got to enjoy them while they are young ! Anyway, today’s entry will cover some myths about breast cancer and my personal experience with it. As always, I would like to encourage your participation, whether it be from personal experience, professional experience or if you have any questions and concerns. Thanks for reading, I hope you find this useful.
There are some myths regarding breast cancer that people believe, that may affect their choice to do exams or get medical care. These myths are dangerous and they are untrue !
The first is that you can only get breast cancer if it’s in your family history, that it’s hereditary. Yes, there are specific cancers that are caused by a gene mutation and can be passed down in family lines, but the majority are non-genetic, caused by any number of reasons, environmental, exposure to carcinogens or other harmful substances. Some have no specific reason at all.
Another myth is that breast cancer only happens to “older” women. Usually considered post-menopausal in nature. Not true. I was diagnosed at age 35, and I know many women, ranging from age 26-40 at diagnosis who will agree that this rotten disease is not just for “mature” women.
Yet another myth is that breast cancer doesn’t hurt. This is also untrue, as certain breast cancers, specifically ones that are hormone receptor positive can make tumors swell with the hormone fluctuations of a womans mentrual cycles.
Personally, my diagnosis of breast cancer at age 35 was with no direct family history, having discovered my tumor as a sore spot that throbbed with my periods. This trashes those myths, and there are many younger women with similar stories.
So the bottom line is, DO YOUR SELF EXAMS MONTHLY, get your yearly exam with a physician to check your breasts, no matter how young you are, and if you feel ANYTHING that even RESEMBLES a lump, be agressive with your doctors until they listen to you and get a mammogram ordered immediately.
Thank goodness I didn’t have to argue with my doctors, but some believe these myths and say “lets just watch it” or ” it’s nothing”, remember it’s your health and your life, take charge of it.
In a future post I will discuss my personal “ordeal” and experiences with this rat bastard disease. : )
Heres more great information for you if you’d like check them out, there are a bunch of great stories and examples for you to research.
As always, I hope this helps. God bless,
Meredith – RNC
Here are some great quotes by Erma Bombeck, she was an intelligent and interesting woman. Enjoy !
Erma Bombeck Quotations
• People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you’ll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.
• No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there’s a wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.
• My theory on housework is, if the item doesn’t multiply, smell, catch on fire or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one cares. Why should you?
• Education is so important when it comes to domesticity. I don’t know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows.
• Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the ‘Titanic’ who waved off the dessert cart.
• Giving birth is little more than a set of muscular contractions granting passage of a child. Then the mother is born.
• When mothers talk about the depression of the empty nest, they’re not mourning the passing of all those wet towels on the floor, or the music that numbs your teeth, or even the bottle of capless shampoo dribbling down the shower drain. They’re upset because they’ve gone from supervisor of a child’s life to a spectator. It’s like being the vice president of the United States.
• It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.
• My mother phones daily to ask, “Did you just try to reach me?” When I reply, “No”, she adds, “So, if you’re not too busy, call me while I’m still alive,” and hangs up.
• Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-rearing, they are unemployed.
• When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, “I used everything you gave me.”
Hello yaw,
I need to start working on my southern draw, although I’m not so sure they have it in Texas. Anyway, today I will be writing about cirumcisions and why you may want your child to get one, and why you may not. As always, I hope you find this information useful and would like to encourage your participation.
CIRCUMCISION -
There are many differing schools of thought on this subject, we will look at them all as we go over the facts. You’ll need to weigh the risks versus the benefits and other factors such as culture, religion and personal preference will affect your decision.
First and foremost, what is circumcision ? It is a procedure in which a pediatrician removes the prepuce of the foreskin, or the skin that covers the tip of the penis. This is usually done 18-24 hours after birth.
During circumcision the infants arms and legs are restrained. A local anesthetic is generally used, and the pediatrician does the procedure in about 5-10 minutes. The foreskin is loosened from the glans of the penis, and a Gomco clamp is used to protect the glans of the penis from any injury. Sometimes the Dr. can use other methods such as a Mogen clamp, or a plastibell procedure. Ask your pediatrician which one they use and they can answer any questions you may have.
After the procedure, if a Gomco clamp ( the most common method ) was used, you will need to use vaseline and gauze for 2-3 days after, with each diaper change. This protects the sensitive skin of the glans from the pressure of diapers and the ammonia in urine.
Pro’s and Con’s -
Several potential benefits of circumcision appear to be supported by most studies. Boys who have been circumcised are less likely to have urinary tract infections, ( UTI’s ). Also, it appears to reduce the risk of STD’s in men , protects against penile cancer later in life and may reduce the risk of cervical cancer in female sex partners.
There are some disadvatages also. The infant may experience pain, have increased bleeding or infection at the site and scarring/malformation of the penis is rare but also possible. Also, parents may feel some guilt.
If you choose not to have your son circumcised, there are some things you’ll need to know. Keeping the area clean with soap and water helps reduce the risk of problems and infections. In older boys and men, the foreskin slides back and forth over the penis allowing for cleansing, but from birth through age 3-4 it DOESN’T RETRACT. Don’t force it to retract or you could cause damage and problems to the penis. Once he is older he can be shown how to detract the foreskin and cleanse his penis properly.
I know that deciding is not easy, but with this information I hope it helps make it a little bit easier. As always, feel free to input your comments and experiences.
God bless always,
Meredith – RNC
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