Fighting off the scary, scary, scaries

(I had a quirky post started on the subject of my mother and a very funny conversation we had a week ago Tuesday after she and my father had spent 12 hours in the emergency room — the ER wasn’t funny, nor was the reason for the visit, but my mother is pretty funny when she’s feeling bad. Not crying is really my only job right now — being strong and upbeat so that they don’t know how sad and scared I really am — and the black humour we share helps. But it’s hard, so very hard today.)

In an attempt to treat the cancer in her body, my mother will be undergoing three rounds of chemotherapy, followed by surgery, and then three more rounds of chemo. I don’t know what specific type of chemo she gets; I just know that she gets it for something like six hours at a time, and that it is particularly toxic. In the time since she had her first round three weeks ago, she has lost all of her hair and has taken to wearing biker hats instead of scarves or wigs. (She picked up her first wig, a lovely shade of dark brown that she has never in her life ever had, at the Cancer Centre this past Tuesday.) We use the “kidney stone scale” to judge how bad she’s feeling — if she feels less sick than when she’s passing a lot of kidney stones, it’s OK. Her “OK” would flatten me, though. She’s a far stronger person than I am.

This past Wednesday, she went in for her second round of chemo. Within minutes, she had a severe anaphylactic reaction that, among other things, caused her airway to close. They gave her epinephrine, antihistamines, oxygen, and I don’t know what else, and when she was able to breathe again, started the chemo back up.

Late Wednesday night, she sat down on the couch and couldn’t get up again because her left leg had a palsy. My Dad carried her back to bed and the next morning, after she slipped onto the bathroom floor while trying to get dressed and Dad couldn’t pick her up, they called 911. The EMTs took them to a different hospital than usual. After seeing that the x-rays of Mom’s knee showed nothing wrong, the doctor told them it was probably just an side effect of the toxic amounts of chemo she’d just had and sent them home.

By this morning, she was starting to have trouble with her left hand so my oldest brother and my Dad trundled her off to their usual emergency room. Where they learned that she’d actually had a stroke yesterday. A small one, but a stroke nonetheless. (Wouldn’t it have been nice if, oh, I dunno, maybe the ER doctor from yesterday had have considered “stroke”? Nothing like waiting an extra 24 hours untreated.) She’s going to have to stay in the hospital for at least a week and undergo physical therapy. I know little beyond that.

I’ve been talking to my parents every evening for the last eleven days…

I’m a little afraid for tomorrow’s call.

But it’s a dry cold…

So, uh, yeah. I’m an idiot.

I find it annoying to zip up my parka. (I overheat really easily and having to keep unzipping/zipping it just bugs me.) So normally I wear a fleece jacket underneath the parka. Today, I was feeling really warm when I left for work and, since I’d planned on taking a cab to and from work, I decided not to wear the fleece jacket. Even as I made that choice, I knew it was a mistake but I pushed on anyway.

After work, there were no cabs at the taxi stand near my building, the taxi stand that always has cars at it. By the time I discovered that, I had three choices: walk back to the office and call a cab from there, stay outside and call a cab, or take the bus home. I decided on the bus. Unfortunately my gloves and scarf were buried under a lot of stuff in my backpack. The idea of standing in the cold and wind digging through everything to find them was not enticing. It’s only going to be a few minutes, says I. So what if it’s -19 Celsius, -32 with the wind chill.

The first five minutes I was actually quite comfortable. (I told you, I run hot.) Then the wind caught me and I started to feel the cold. (I’m sure the people at the bus stop thought I was insane — or ill — standing there with my coat open, v-neck shirt doing little to stop the wind.) Three bus rides, two very chilly transfers, and a loooong walk through the wind tunnel in front of my building, and here I am, with a wind burn* that I didn’t even know I had until I noticed that the tip of my nose really hurt. (Actually, it hurts and it itches

So, yeah. I learned today that standing or walking in -32 degree wind chill without proper clothing is a bad idea. (I know — bit late in life for me to be learning that lesson.) Researchers have apparently determined that below -27, the risk of frostbite increases exponentially — at -40C, it only takes 10 minutes exposure for you to get frostnipped, the precursor to frostbite.

* Did you know that there’s supposedly no such thing as a wind burn? According to many, it’s really just a sunburn, caused by the wind stripping the UV-protecting sweat and moisture from your skin. I think that’s BS. I’ve had sunburns and other heat or scalding burns before. A wind burn is different. It’s more of a friction burn, kind of like a carpet burn.

I’m going slightly mad…

I’m in some kind of messed up head space.

Things are going reasonably well for me right now. I’m working in a new (short term) contract, my EI finally came through, things are generally OK. But I have a permanent low-grade headache and general unwellness that I just can’t shake. I feel frazzled, despite not really being overextended. And I seem to alternating between insomnia and narcolepsy.

More importantly, I am constantly near — or actually in — tears. Over nothing. Over anything. Happy things, sad things, mundane things. It’s an overwhelming and sudden sadness that has no actual form or substance. It might be subconsciously related to my mother’s illness, but it’s certainly not consciously about that. It might be hormonal or chemical, but it’s been going on for a couple of weeks now and that would be odd for the usual imbalances.

All I know is that I recognize this place. I’ve been here before, and I don’t like it. (Or, rather, I don’t like not having control over it. It’s a subtle difference.)

It’s not depression, not really. It feels more like being steeped in someone else’s sorrow, if that makes sense. (Have you ever been around someone who leaks sadness or anger to such a degree that you begin to feel the same thing, despite not being sad or angry yourself? That’s kind of what it’s like.)

Sweet, sweet sleep

During the slow, rerun, unemployment days of Christmas and early January, I found myself generally going to bed reasonably early and only setting my TV-as-alarm-clock every now and then. The nights when I didn’t set my alarm, I slept according to the pattern I’m slowly coming to accept is my “norm” — which, left to my own devices, with no alarm clock or phone calls intruding on my sleep, is about nine hours. (Seems like a such a waste a time. Ah, how I envy those people who only need a couple of hours of sleep a night. Alas, that is not my lot in life — I can function temporarily on little sleep but takes less and less time to catch up with me these days, a sure sign of advancing age.)

Now the television season is starting up again (let’s forget the whole “too much TV may mean earlier death” thing), I start a new (short-term) contract job tomorrow, and I find myself considering whether or not to go to sleep at a reasonable time. (It’s a twist on the Sunday night insomnia that I usually suffer from.) It’s insanity, I tell you. A sane person would think “Yes, a good night’s sleep would be a great start to the new job.” Still, I suppose I’ve never claimed to be sane.

A slight tangent: Tonight, I listened to a free teleseminar given by JJ Virgin, a high profile nutrion coach. The ultimate goal of these types of seminars is obviously to entice you into signing up for a course or program. It’s a fairly standard type of marketing these days, accompanied by the stereotypical “sales letters”. Her programs are very expensive and not something I could sign up for even if I wanted to, but the teleseminar was quite interesting and moderately educational. In particular, she had some excellent points about getting 7-9 hours of sleep a night. It reminded me that I feel better physically and mentally when I get the amount of sleep my body clearly requires. Much as I like it, I don’t want to live on 5-Hour Energy.

Anyway, while looking through her site during the less interesting parts of the call, I came across mention of a product called the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach. It consists of a bedside display unit (see image to the left) and a sensor headband that you wear when you go to sleep. It tracks and monitors your sleep patterns and helps you to determine the lifestyle issues that are affecting your sleep. Given my perpetual sleep issues (even my so-called “uniterrupted sleep” is interrupted — by the cat, by my neighbours, by weird dreams, by aches and pains, etc.), it looks like a tool that would help me figure out just how many times I actually wake up during the night. It’s actually not as expensive as I’d expected: it’s only $249 US. Alas, that’s still out of my price range at the moment, but it’s good to know that there is something out there that can help people with sleep issues without timeconsuming visits to their family doctor and/or a sleep clinic.

“C” is for mystery

The various doctors and pathologists involved in my mother’s diagnosis and treatment can’t seem to agree amongst themselves. As more information slowly trickles in, I can finally understand why they’ve been confused.

This bout of cancer was initially discovered by Mom’s urologist while reading a CAT scan of her abdomen (related to her chronic kidney stone problems). He proclaimed that they were not going to worry about her kidney stones, that her cancer was back, and that he was going to refer her to her oncologist for more information.

The oncologist and cancer centre doctors didn’t (and still don’t) know exactly what kind of cancer they were looking at, though there were murmurings of it perhaps being ovarian, or maybe something from her last breast cancer. The first biopsy is “inconclusive”. A little judicious Googling showed that ovarian cancer does match many of the physical symptoms my mother had been experiencing. But still no one could confirm anything and we couldn’t quite figure out how an upper abdominal biopsy fit in with ovarian cancer. A second, larger biopsy ultimately proved that, yes, there is indeed cancer but not what kind (though the doctor doing the biopsy helpful — and very casually — suggested that it was probably colon cancer, which is what killed my grandmother when my mother was ten years old).

(Sidebar: In the weeks leading up to the results of the second biopsy, my mother was extremely ill. In light of the cancer diagnosis, this had her wondering if perhaps things had progressed farther than anyone realized and that she wouldn’t make it to Christmas. She was in agony and couldn’t keep anything down. She also started experiencing chest pains, the kind of dry cough that makes you throw up, and shortness of breath — much like a pulmonary embolism — and I asked her to please go the ER. She decided to wait until her next doctor visit. Her oncologist, when they met to discuss the second biopsy results, finally convinced her to go to the ER because they couldn’t start any treatment until my mother was feeling better. At the hospital, they rehydrated her and gave her one of those marvelous Gravol shots plus some good old morphine. She sounded positively perky for the first time in weeks when she called me that night. The next day, with the help of the IV fluids they gave her at the hospital, she passed a total of 18 kidney stones, including one that was larger than a raisin. So much for not worrying about them.)

Today, Mom and Dad finally got word about how this will be treated, though I think the doctors and pathologists are still fighting it out over the complete diagnosis. Dad said that for the first time the word “omentum” was mentioned in regard to the cancer. I’d never heard of it before but now that I have, I think I have a better understanding of why the doctors couldn’t make up their minds.

The omentum is a layer of fatty tissue in the abdominal cavity that is attached to the stomach and lies over the intestines. If you find cancer cells there, they could have come from so many neighbouring organs and tissues. Without practically ripping open the abdomen, I’d expect it would be difficult to be 100% sure of the origin so they have to make educated guesses, and one doctor’s educated guess is another doctor’s hooey. One says “ovarian cancer”, another says “colon cancer”, and another says “leftover from the breast cancer”. (I’m inclined to think that it’s probably ovarian cancer, for a number of reasons, including the symptoms that my mother has been suffering over the last year or so and the fact that ovarian and breast cancer are linked. She gets regular colonoscopies (the doctors have been quite diligent about searching for colon cancer in light of the family history) but hasn’t had pelvic exams with the same regularity. (She had a hysterectomy, though not an oophorectomy, when I was about 15 years old.))

The two bouts of breast cancer my mother survived didn’t scare me. Breast cancer tends to have a higher survival rate than many other cancers simply because we are so hyper aware of it that it gets caught at an earlier stage than many of the others. Ovarian cancer, on the other hand, frequently goes unnoticed and undiagnosed for so long because its symptoms are common to a large number of other ailments. Thus, even though it is highly treatable if caught early, it has a high mortality rate. (It is apparently the fourth most common cause of death in women in the United States, though I haven’t yet found the source of that particular statistic.) If it is indeed ovarian cancer, then the fact that it has spread to the omentum would mean that it is at least stage III, which has a 20% 5-year survival rate. Scary stuff.

Still, we don’t have the whole picture yet so there’s no point getting scared now. (Well, there’s no point getting scared regardless, but you know what I mean.) She’s waiting to find out when she’ll have to go in for chemo. After the initial rounds of chemo (however many that will be), then they’ll decide what else to do.

This is why it’s hard to be vegan

And why I admire people who are able to commit to the lifestyle:

National Geographic News: Sharks Killed for Oil Used in Swine Flu Vaccine

Vaccines being made to protect people from swine flu may not be so healthy for threatened species of sharks. That’s because millions of doses of the pandemic H1N1/09 vaccine contain a substance called squalene, which is extracted from shark livers.

Animal products and by-products are hidden in so many things…I don’t know how vegans keep up. (I’m guessing impulse buying becomes a thing of the past.)

I’ll huff and I’ll puff

Holy crap!

Now I really believe it’s Winter in Ottawa.

I was woken up at about 2am this morning by the sheer force of the wind blowing against my windows, and by the sudden drop in temperature in my previously-warm apartment — at about 10pm last night, it was -4 degrees Celsius; within a couple of hours, the temperature had plummeted by more than 10 degrees and the strong, chilly winds from the northwest, which is the unfortunate direction that all of my windows face, had kicked in.

At 3am, in the face of the 59 kph winds that were making me dream of natural disasters, I finally gave in and got up. (The cat is thankful, I’m sure, since I decided to be useful and clean his litter box while I was up.) The winds are slowly dying down, but as they do, the temperature is dropping more: it’s now 5:00am and the temperature is -17, with a wind chill of -30.

All I can say is “Brrr!!!”

A book addict’s worst nightmare

Historically, my book-buying addiction has been somewhat mitigated by the following:

• I don’t like to shop in physical book stores — when I browse, I end up buying stuff that I don’t really want just because; online, I tend to take longer to decide what I’m going to buy (and I like being able to search without having to hunt for a kiosk or a clerk).
• Amazon and Chapters require a credit card — and even if I was going to use one, I feel obligated to buy $39+ worth of books at a time in order to get the free shipping, and I can’t always convince myself that I should be buying that much money’s worth of books, despite the fact that my Amazon.ca shopping cart — an ersatz wishlist — is 27 pages long (yes, I know Amazon has an actual Wishlist feature but it’s more convenient to use the shopping cart as one instead; and yes, I know that a 27-page shopping page could be considered a symptom of hoarding — like there was any doubt of that *snort*)
• Online stores that take Paypal tend to be based in the US (like Barnes and Noble) and charge fairly high shipping to ship to Canada
• Buying books on eBay tends to be a crapshoot. Most charge exhorbitant shipping charges and many of the book sellers with the most feedbacks are really all different faces of the same seller (who charges a fairly high shipping charge similar to Amazon.com for its basic service — which can take months to get a book to you and you won’t get any answer to your emails — but offers a premium, astronomically-priced shipping option that ships in a couple of days and allows you the privilege of actually contacting them). In case you couldn’t tell, I’m a little bitter about this particular group of sellers because you don’t find out that they’re related until you go through the checkout process. My advice? DO NOT buy books on eBay unless you’re buying from a small seller.

I’d thought that Better World Books would be my downfall, because you can frequently find used copies of books you’re looking for at a reasonable (or lower-than-reasonable) price, and their shipping to Canada is $3.98 per book. Cheaper than most US sellers if you’re only getting a couple of books, but the shipping adds up. That ultimately held me back somewhat. And the shipping time definitely isn’t Amazon.ca calibre, understandably so, but it still can be a determining factor.

Now, through a number of friends who’ve used it, I’ve found the Book Depository, a Guernsey-based site offering free shipping worldwide and in many cases, significantly cheaper prices than any other place I’ve seen. If it’s half as nifty as it looks, I may just be completely overwhelmed by my addiction.

I just placed my first order with them (for a single book I’d been looking for) so we’ll see what the cost really is — in terms of shipping time, wait, customs, etc. If it’s even half as fast as Better World Books, which is fairly slow, I’ll still be a happy — if poorer — camper.

The old waiting game ends…

and a new one begins.

Last night, we learned that my mother does indeed have cancer again. This time, it’s ovarian cancer, but that’s really as much as we know. We don’t yet know the type or the severity. But we do know that she will have to have a couple of rounds of chemo before they operate to remove her ovaries and any abdominal lining they think they need to once they get in there. Then she’ll probably have to have more chemo. She’ll find out more in the coming days.

It really hasn’t sunk in — I was more happy last night to learn that she’d finally gone to the emergency room for her kidney-stone-induced nausea and dehydration on the way home from the oncologoist — but it scares me that she’s talking in terms of just wanting to make it to one last Christmas or to see her first great grandchild born in June. She said that kind of thing the last two times, but it still worries me that she thinks less “I’m going to survive” and more “Hope I live just to xx goal”. Don’t get me wrong. Goals are good. I just hope she doesn’t think she’s done fighting once those goals have passed.

Guerrilla Xmas cheer

Improv Everywhere is a performance art comedy group that stages missions — essentially highly-organized, good-natured, mostly pseudo flash mob (plus some genuine flash mob) pranks — on the unwary for the amusement and entertainment of them and the rest of us. Check out their blog for details, pictures, and videos of their 100+ missions, which are always an awesome romp. Or, if you want to avoid the behind-the-scenes look at how the events happen (though, why would you?), you can always skip right to their YouTube channel.

Their latest caper, the Guerrilla Handbell Strikeforce, is a testament to how uplifting small, seemingly random acts of joy-giving can be.

Standing around in the cold, ringing a bell and hoping people will donate to the Salvation Army can be a rough gig. Having a bell choir unexpectedly show up to join in is going to boost your spirits, no matter how grumpy you are. (Unless you reeeallly hate bells and/or bell choirs.) The look on the Sally Ann bell ringer’s face says it all.

Joy to the world, indeed.

(As an aside, the comments on the post for this mission frequently stray into whether the Salvation Army is a worthy organization since they don’t allow gay people to join. Ithinkyernuts’ comment that “[...] hating people who hate gays is still hating” is something worth keeping in mind — if you want less hate in the world, you need to start with yourself.)