Category Archives: CAncer

CAncer, family, Healthy, Illness, Marriage, Uncategorized

A Wife’s Merry-Go Round

Leave a comment

One of the hardest parts of being a survivor’s wife is living in a world of what-ifs.  What if the swollen lymph nodes are not because of strep throat?  What if that rash isn’t just poison ivy?  What if the cancer comes back?  I worry every day that we won’t recognize the symptoms.  I am constantly on alert.

Even in my heightened sense of awareness, there are certain times of the year that trigger what I would consider to be a near panic.  One of those times is the couple of weeks leading up to a routine oncology appointment.  When the office starts calling to remind my survivor about CAT scans and blood work , my anxiety begins to build.  As the date of the appointment grows closer, my stress level climbs like a thermometer in August.  What if the CAT scan comes back inconclusive and we have to wait for PET scan results?  What if the blood work shows elevated levels?

Even harder than worrying is trying not to let it show.  I’m supposed to be the strong one.  I got us through three years of what-ifs.  I should be able to handle waiting for a little appointment with our favorite doctor. For the most part, I think I’m being successful in managing it all, but then I find myself sleeping less at night and being more short-tempered with the kids.  I have to remind myself that they don’t understand – they have no idea what is going on.  They also survived such a difficult time in our lives, I owe it to them to protect them from the worry.  Sometimes, I just have to take a step back, breathe and enjoy a nice glass of Riesling, all while refocusing my energies on what’s important.

We survived another oncology appointment today with a clean bill of health and for that I am eternally grateful.  Now to tackle the next 6 months as a better person than I was yesterday…

Stronger

 

Advertisement
CAncer, Healthy, Illness, support, Uncategorized

Finding the right cause for me

Leave a comment

I am a big believer in giving back.  There are millions of causes out there, and it’s hard to know which ones really invest in the causes you are passionate about.  There are regular Facebook posts and news reports related to the shady activities of charities that claim to raise money for worthwhile causes.  Some of those reports are more disappointing than others.  I am always disappointed when I see reports of funds being mismanaged by organizations claiming to support veterans and children. I wonder how people can exploit the suffering of others and still sleep at night.  I sure couldn’t!

Of course, over the past few years, I have been much more aware of charities that support cancer research and families who have been plagued by the disease.  I support several of my friends and family members when they participate in various Relay for Life events. can see how these funds are invested back into local communities and supporting them has been very rewarding.

Lately, I have been searching for my own cause to support and have finally found one that not only aligns with my personal mission to help eradicate cancer, but also encourages me to continue my quest toward being more fit in my 41st year than I was in my 31st year.  The Great Cycle Challenge raises money toward ending childhood cancers.  It challenges riders to commit to riding a set number of sponsored miles in the month of June.

Great Cycle Challenge

 

Right now I have committed to riding 100 miles, which is still a little scary to see in print.  Mother Nature is not being very cooperative in helping me to get outside to ride, so for now I will have to begin my training indoors on a stationary bike. I’m hoping, if my training goes well, to increase that number to 150 miles by June 1st.

To learn more about the Great Cycle Challenge or to support me with a donation, please visit https://greatcyclechallenge.com/Riders/CameronGrant.  Even the smallest donation can help to save a life.

CAncer, family, Illness, loss, Marriage, support, Uncategorized

Everybody needs a little time away…

Leave a comment

When I originally started this blog, I was proud of being the strong one.  I was the spouse who had held it together while our family turned upside down.  I worked full time, was pregnant with our second child, sat in on countless doctor appointments, tucked in our child and never missed a school event.  I substituted for dad during hospital stays and times when getting out of bed was just not possible for him.  I did it all with an unwavering faith that our time as a family was not up.  I KNEW we would beat cancer!  There was no other option.

Several months ago, I came to the realization that I was very capable of being the strong one, but much less capable of dealing with the actual sadness that accompanies illness. One night, after positive results from my husband’s fabulous oncologist, I realized that the only time I cried about everything we have been through is the moment we received his diagnosis.  From that day forward, I put on a brave face and soldiered on.  No matter what happened, I never waivered.  Not once did I let myself believe that we would not win the war the war with cancer. I never broke down. I never let myself feel.

Fair warning to all of the strong ones, being the rock eventually catches up with you.  For me, the moment of truth came from a friend’s innocent Facebook share.  A country music fan, she share the story of Joey+Rory, a duo who were also married.  Joey, the wife, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and had gone home to pass peacefully with her family.  Her husband started a blog to document their journey (http://thislifeilive.com/). I couldn’t stop myself from following. I read about her slow decline from perfect health and viewed pictures of her bonding with their young daughter.  As the posts became more somber and it was clear the end was near, the amount of anguish I felt for this family and my own continued to grow.  I couldn’t help but think that this could have been us.  I could have been the one sitting next to that bed.  Our children came frighteningly close to having to say goodbye to their father. I recognized myself in Rory  – he is the strong one.

Joey Feek passed away this afternoon, at the age of 40.  When the blog updated and Facebook flooded with the news, I felt such an overwhelming wave of sadness and loss – for someone I didn’t even know.  Their story of love and heartache rang so true and real and so much resembled the bond that Dan and I share that for a moment, I was unable to separate the two.  All of my fears, all of the thoughts I never allowed myself to have flooded my conscious.  The tears that I never allowed to fall were unstoppable.

I had forgotten how cleansing a good crying jag could be.  This superwoman just remembered that she is human.

I am still thankful every day that our family was given a second chance at life.  I don’t recognize the life we had 7 years ago, but that’s ok.  I love our life as it is now and I will love our life as it evolves into something new tomorrow.

 

CAncer, family, Healthy, recipe, support

A Little Bit of Fun

Leave a comment

Now that school is back in session, our weekends are usually filled with errand-running and other busy activities that give us very little time to just relax and spend time together.  Today, we decided that puttering around the house was a great idea.

Our 12-year-old daughter’s idea of relaxing is baking.  She definitely did not inherit this talent from me.  I loathe baking.  All of that measuring and waiting just drives me crazy.  I am a much more organic cook – a little of this, a pinch of that, a smidge of this.

Today she decided that she would relax by making sugar cookies from scratch.  I love baking when all I have to do is put the dough on the pizza stone and take it off.  Unfortunately for my healthy initiative, they turned out great!!!

20150919_170329_resized

In case you are a baking-lover like my daughter or just want to try your hand at these great cookies, here is the recipe:

Sugar Cookies

2 2/3 cups of flour

1 1/2 cups of sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon of baking soda

1/2 teaspoon of baking powder

1 cup of softened butter

Directions:

Pre-heat the oven to 375 (350 if you are using a dark or non-stick cookie sheet)

Sift flour, baking soda and baking powder into a bowl. In a separate bowl, cream the butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla using a mixer.  Slowly mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until completely incorporated.  Roll into golf ball sized balls and bake for 8-12 minutes.

Tips: If you don’t know how your oven runs, cook one cookie first to determine timing.  This way you won’t ruin a whole batch.

Also you can definitely bake these on a cookie sheet, but we prefer the texture created by cooking them on a pizza stone.  Not only does the stone pre-heat in the oven for more even cooking, the bottoms are a little crispy and the rest of the cookie is nice and soft.

After they are baked, you can definitely get creative!  Dip 1/2 in tempered chocolate or frost them with your favorite icing.  The possibilities are endless.

Enjoy your cookies and the weekend with your families!

CAncer, family, Healthy, Illness, loss, Marriage, support

Survivor Perspective

Leave a comment

I have been thinking about this blog post for several days.  There’s something I really want to share, but not at the expense of offending anyone who we are fortunate enough to call a friend or family member.  One of the hardest things about being a survivor’s wife is learning a different way of communicating.  The Big C is a scary topic that most people don’t understand.  I know that questions are not being asked and comments are not being made maliciously, but I want to give a little perspective on the emotions and memories that those questions and comments can provoke.

On Monday, we attend a wake.  One of my husband’s very good high school friends passed away.  This was especially difficult for him because this friend was diagnosed with Leukemia around the same time he was diagnosed with Lymphoma.  They had a special bond because they endured months of chemotherapy at the same time and could commiserate about the experience.  Not only was my husband devastated by the loss, he also carried a certain amount of survivor’s guilt – the “why me” of remission.  Although he was determined to attend the wake and provide whatever comfort he could to his friend’s family, he also harbored the fear that people would look at him and silently ask “why did you survive when he didn’t?”.  I’m sure it wouldn’t have been intentional, but I can’t say I wouldn’t have done it had the situations been reversed.

We also knew that this would be the first time my husband would encounter some classmates and former friends since being diagnosed in 2011.  Everyone would want to know how he was doing.  Their concern would be genuine, but they would have no way of knowing that he couldn’t talk about it there.  Too many emotions were already swirling around in his heart.  He really didn’t have the ability to keep his emotions in check while discussing his own condition.

The moral of the story is, if you ask someone who has or has had a potentially terminal condition of any kind how they are doing and their answer is short, please do not be offended.  They greatly appreciate your concern, they are just unable to express their feelings.  My survivor does the best he can to talk about it when asked, but it is a difficult conversation for him.  The best gift you could give any survivor (or survivor’s wife) is compassion and understanding.  They will appreciate it always.

In the meantime, it is important to remember that life is precious; it is also very unfair at times.  No one should lose a spouse or a child or a parent at the young age of 42.  Treat every day is it was intended – as a gift.  You never know when it will end.

everyday-gift-framed[1]

CAncer, family, Illness, loss, support

It’s all in the perspective

Leave a comment

th[10]

Saturday was an interesting day for us.  We woke up at the crack of dawn because my sister, mother and I had the fabulous idea that we should have a multi-family yard sale to purge all of the things we no longer needed and clear out some space for the holidays. I had mixed feelings about this, since selling these things, even to families who needed them, felt like selling memories.  I remembered the first time I took our 12-year-old daughter out for a jog in her jogging stroller.  I remembered changing our son into his first Red Sox outfit in the pack ‘n play.  It was definitely a nostalgic day for me.

After wrapping up a successful yard sale, we were able to check Facebook for the fist time all day.  Part of me wishes we hadn’t.  Our news feeds delivered the message that one of our survivor friends had lost his fight with leukemia in the early hours of the morning.  This news hit my husband very hard.  A high school friend, they had been diagnosed around the same time and experienced chemotherapy together.  They carried a bond that most of us are unable to comprehend.

I suspect that this loss brought a little bit of nervousness.  Even though he has been in remission for over three years, there are triggers that will cause him to become apprehensive about his success.  It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop.  I’m sure that losing a friend is one of those triggers.

For me, this news put the items we sold into perspective.  Even though they carried tons of happy memories, they are just things.  The memories live on in our hearts.  It made me remember what is really important; the people who touch our lives and leave a positive, lasting impact.  Rest in peace our friend.  You will never be forgotten.

CAncer, family, Healthy, Illness, loss, Marriage, support

Swapped Roles

1 Comment

Dan us

I’ve known my husband since I was 8 years old.  Although we drifted in and out of one another’s lives for the first 28 years, the man who I married was not much different from the boy I met in the 2nd grade.  He would give anyone the shirt off his back.  He always thinks of others first.  He has always been a risk taker.  Prior to his back surgeries, skydiving and dirt biking were two of his favorite activities.  The world has always been his oyster and that balanced out my serious, studious nature.  We were always the yin to the other’s yang.

In the face of dealing with the re-diagnosis of several friends, I have watched my husband transition from a free spirit to a much more serious person.  He has become more reflective and sadly, fatalistic.  Today, in speaking about a friend he lamented that “my time is my time”.  I know this is his way of dealing with the reality that if people he knows can relapse, so can he.  I am now the positive thinker that believes with all my heart that we have beat the Big C for good.  Essentially, we have switched roles.  He needed to come to grips with his own mortality and I need to believe that we have a lifetime ahead of us.  I didn’t realize that I loved him until I had known him for 27 years.  Life is not cruel enough to take him away from me before we have the opportunity to make up for lost time. I am going to continue to believe that – and I have enough positivity for both of us.

CAncer, family, Healthy, Illness, Marriage, support

A Recent Reality Check

Leave a comment

Lucky is not something I have been especially feeling lately.  We have stumbled over a few roadblocks and things haven’t been going very smoothly.  I’ve definitely slipped into a rut.  It is very easy to feel sorry for yourself – and much harder to pick yourself up.  I try my best to emulate the old adage “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”, but it can be difficult to be the strong one.  Sometimes, I want someone else to pick me up.  Fortunately, the positive, strong side of me knows that eventually things will turn around.  I hang my hat on the theory that everything happens for a reason and I have only been given challenges that I can overcome. Unfortunately, this is not true for everyone.

Social media has become a great way for us to keep in touch with people who we don’t get to physically connect with often.  Whether we live near or far, we are all busy and struggle to find time to spend with everyone we would like to catch up with. This has made it is necessity to reach out via news feeds and photo sharing.  I love seeing all of the August posts filled with back to school photos and end of the summer beach happiness. These posts lift my spirits at a time when I am watching our first baby prepare for 7th grade and our last baby heading toward what he excitedly refers to as “big school” (and I breathe a sigh of relief that it is only pre-school).  Days like this make me realize how fast life moves and how luck I am to share each and every day with my soul mate and best friend. Cancer did not beat us and for that I am eternally grateful.

At last count, I could count 11 cancer survivors in our extended circle of friends and family – and that’s without really thinking about it.  I’m sure, I could come up with a few more who have been in remission long enough that I rarely use the term survivor to identify them any longer. The number alone is a shocking revelation of how significantly “the big C” has changed my life and my friends.

Social media has also become a way for us to share sad news with our extended network of friends without having to do so face-to-face.  It gives us the ability to prepare the delivery and we can avoid saying the wrong thing or reacting in a way that the person is not prepared for.  Lately, that has happened to us far too often.  Of the 11 people that we do, and always will, consider survivors, four of them have recently received the news that they are no longer in remission.

In addition to feeling horribly for their families – I cannot begin to imagine what they are going through – these diagnoses scare the living daylights out of me.  I know my husband saw the oncologist in the spring and continues to be in remission, but this provides me with the reality check that there are no guarantees in life.  All of a sudden, the memories that I have suppressed of holding hands during chemotherapy sessions and  long nights in the ER have come flooding back.  The fear that every day would be the last has crept back into my sub-conscious. I see the moments of fear in the eyes of my husband that he is going to be next and that’s when I remember that I need to be strong.  I have 3 very important people counting on me.

In the grand scheme of things, we are only here on Earth for a short time.  We need to make the most of it.  Take the life that you have been given and run with it.  Hug your family and friends and be good to one another.  Make memories that will last more than your lifetime – they will be your legacy.

CAncer, family, Illness, support

A Survivor’s Loss

Leave a comment

One of the first experiences I had after my husband became a survivor was of loss. In the traditional sense, we very rarely associate surviving with loss.  As a survivor’s wife I did not experience the same loss as I would have had my husband lost his life, but I did lose something nonetheless.

In 2012, when remission was confirmed and life started to go back to “normal”, I realized that what we both had lost was our optimism. Gone were the days of long-term future planning.  I saw us living our lives from PET scan to PET scan.  It was as if we were afraid to believe that he was healthy. Our lives had become so consumed by cancer; we didn’t remember how to live without it.  His initial diagnosis was so unexpected and so sudden that we were sure that the next time he went for testing, it would be back.

We have come to realize that our children not only deserve, but thrive off of our optimism. We owe it to them to give them a positive childhood.  Although our son is only 2 ½, he is visibly responding to the change in our behavior.  Our daughter, who was 9 when her dad was diagnosed, is becoming a much less serious young lady.  We hate that she had to grow up so fast at such a young age.  This is the time for her to have fun.  We need to lead by optimistic example.

It has been 2 ½ years since my husband went into remission and we are finally starting to come out of the fog. We have already made plans for our summer vacation next year.  We talk about the future.  We are still very aware that life is full of uncertainty, but understand that it cannot control our lives.  Now, we take the time to appreciate the things in life that too often go unappreciated – the colors of the fall leaves, a spontaneous hug or a chance encounter.  Whatever those little things are to you, enjoy them in the moment.