califmom

Look What Came In The Mail Today: The Internet Says, Fuck Cancer!

Two hundred twenty-four photos grace this poster with a message of “Fuck Cancer!” That’s a lot of middle fingers telling the big C to get out of town.

You made Bob’s day and you made mine, friends and family from around this third rock. Your love is large.

Looking forward to hanging this on the wall at Stanford.

A special thank you to marleymarley and gorillasushi for their work on this project. Marley, I love you more than many flavors of stinky cheese. I haven’t smelled gorillasushi, so I can’t be sure, but I’m guessing he rates higher than say, a stilton.

Since quite a few people have asked for a poster of their own, there are plans in the works to make a version of this poster available for purchase on Zazzle. I’ll let you know when it becomes available.

Filed under “yet more weird ways cancer has touched my life”: My blog was recently featured on CBS 5’s Eye on Blogs by Britney Gilbert: Matters of Life and Death.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Transplant On Hold: The Plan (califmom.com)
• The December Moms (califmom.com)
• Snapshots Of Cancer (califmom.com)

Snapshots Of Cancer

To pass the time.

To stay focused.

To remember moments.

To document progress and setbacks.

I take pictures of our days.

They’re almost always taken with my iPhone, so the quality is not great, but that’s not the point (see above).

Rarely are they posed.

The angles are odd, like my life…crooked, mixed up, confusing.

Surprising things show up in some of the shots…things I wasn’t expecting, some good, some not. Like our life.

And I take pictures of the love, even the kind that arrives in the mail from far-away friends.

Oh, and food, because I’ve become Bob’s personal Make-A-Wish Foundation when it comes to his culinary desires.

I don’t have a picture of his CT from this week, but the unofficial word is that Bob’s tumor that was of the greatest concern is shrinking thanks to the radiation he started receiving. We’ll be meeting with the doctor at Stanford next week to discuss how to proceed.

Thank you all for your prayers, messages, care packages, meals, entertaining our kids, and, and, and…you leave me overwhelmed by your awesomeness. We wouldn’t be here without you.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Make A Wish (theredneckmommy.com)
• Transplant On Hold: The Plan (califmom.com)

The Countdown To Transplant Day

March 2nd.

That’s the official transplant date. If all goes well. If there are no delays. If. If. If.

I wonder if that's why I can't sleep at night, keep getting bed spins, have crying jags, and my stomach is eating itself.

My life, our lives, will be defined by BEFORE TRANSPLANT and AFTER TRANSPLANT. The day of the transplant is called Day 0. It is referred to as the patient’s re-birthday.

In the six days leading up to the transplant they will be giving Bob three days of high-dose chemotherapy to kill off as much cancer as possible and kill off his bone marrow to make room for the new stem cells to take up residence and “reboot” him. In layman’s terms, they stop short of killing him, taking his body down to ground zero.

On transplant day, he will get 1-2 bags of the blood his brother will have donated—the stem cells that have been collected via apheresis and a long day in a Barcalounger. The blood will contain heparin to prevent clotting and will drip in without a pump, just using gravity. Basically, the transplant is like a blood transfusion, quite uneventful. The magic happens in the days and weeks that follow.

Bob will be admitted to Stanford February 24th to begin this process. I’ll be staying with friends who’ve graciously opened their home to me until we move into our long-term housing when Bob is discharged from the hospital. We’ll be required to live there for 100 days so that he can be monitored for any complications, specifically Graft Versus Host Disease (GVHD)—the main risk for patients receiving bone marrow or stem cell transplants. By then, I should be kickass at boiling water, a requirement of his low-microbial diet, and he’ll be a pro at fastening his sexy HEPA mask he’ll be required to wear any time he goes out in public, along with his Medic Alert bracelet (although I’m thinking of getting him the necklace on a blinged out chain…something subtle).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Biopsies And Breakdowns (califmom.com)
• 2009: The Year I Maybe Could Have Done Without, Or Not (califmom.com)
• New discovery may expand availability of bone marrow transplants by stopping fatal complications (scienceblog.com)
• Calming Cells Fend Off Immune Attack (technologyreview.com)

My Inspiration To Endure

I share half of my father's DNA and none of his political views. He's somewhere to the right of Rush Limbaugh, and yet we can civilly occupy a room together. He spends the requisite time asking me when I plan to chisel the Obama sticker off the minivan while I try my best to make sure my eyes don't get stuck "like that"--in that permanently rolled back position.

Politics aside, we have a lot in common. And he'd do anything in the world for me. He has. He continues to. He'd do anything in the world for his country. And he has. He enlisted in the Navy knowing he'd go to Vietnam. He didn't wait to be drafted. He was the only son in a fatherless family, having lost his dad at an early age. He chose to serve as soon as he graduated high school.

In the forty years I've know my father, he's told maybe 3 short stories about Vietnam, most of them light and funny. Until this year. Now, for whatever reason, he's ready to share. It started with him sharing a twenty some photos around Veterans Day. This progressed into a blog of the 100+ photos he has from Vietnam--photos my brother and I had never seen. Stories we'd never heard.

I helped him upload the photos to Flickr, create a slideshow to embed on his blog, and locate groups of other Flickr users with Chu Lai photos from the same era.

He's also set up a blog for his time in Adak, Alaska, the year before he shipped out to Vietnam. Both blogs contain some amazing shots, taken by a teenager who married my mother in 1966 and became my father three years later. By some amazing combination of faith, fate, and hard work, he and his teenage sweetheart (my mom) are still married over 40 years later. Looking at these pictures makes me realize just how young they were and how much they've endured.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Veterans Day: Honoring My Father (califmom.com)

Biopsies And Breakdowns

Tuesday we’ll be starting our day at Kaiser with a bone marrow biopsy for Bob, then heading off to Stanford for a number of classes, appointments, and tests.

He’ll be signing paperwork for medical trials. I’ll be taking a caregiver class along with my back-up caregiver, my most awesome sister-in-law, Theresa. Bob will be doing some more blood tests, I believe.

Monday he had blood tests and a pulmonary lung function test. Later in the week it’s another PET scan.

We still have the housing issue to resolve.

The kids are both exhibiting signs of stress, which means Bugs tics are off the hook here at home and Peanut is in full-blown angsty teen mode, convinced we’re ruining her life because she can’t have friends over if they’ve been sick or around people who’ve been sick. All of this is normal and expected. And all of it sucks. For them. For us.

It’s not fair.

It isn’t.

It’s not fair that their father has cancer.

Life is not fair.

It is a shitty thing to learn when you’re eleven and thirteen.

It’s a shitty thing to learn, period.

And as the transplant date comes closer, and the reality of what that means, the possibilities, the risks, the future, comes into view, I need the support of my magical unicorn friends and my real-life friends. Because I’m falling apart.

It’s time for those funny notes you guys send, emails, text messages…those little things that keep me going. Throw some prayers in if you’re so inclined, too.