Post-Holiday Update

I hope everyone had a good holiday. I know I did.

I spent the holiday with some of my family on the other side of the state. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to make it, at first. I'd had chemo on Thursday, December 21, and I made the 3-hour drive over on Christmas eve. I felt great when I woke up that day, but spent most of the two previous days sleeping.

I think I paid the price for all that rich food though. I've been feeling slightly off (queasy, but not sick) ever since. And, due to a weird nightmare that woke up me the other night at 5AM, my sleep schedule is all off now. I seem to be sleeping during the day and not sleeping at night. Sigh.

My goal is to get everything back on schedule tonight. And I need to get more active because I think that's part of the queasiness. I really haven't done anything but sit on my rear end since I got home after Christmas.

It looks like my surgery date is going to January 29 now. My plastic surgeon is on vacation around the time I was hoping to schedule it (January 19/22). My doctor has told me that the reconstruction is a tougher surgery than the mastectomy. He is planning a six-hour surgery (yikes!), and I will be in the hospital for four days. Last time, I was supposed to be in the hospital for a day, and I ended up being there for 2 1/2 days. Of course, that was probably because I was sick the entire first day due to a reaction to the morphine. Note to all future medical staff: don't give me morphine.

It's hard to believe that this part of the journey is so close to being over. I have one more chemo treatment, then onto reconstruction. That's when all this extra weight I've been carrying gets redistributed to my left breast, my hair grows back (again), and I can start feeling like I can get on with the next phase of my life.

Oh, by the way, I want to share this. A friend of mine recently mentioned a natural alternative to chemo called paw paw (or pawpaw or papaw... I've seen it spelled all three ways). It's a fruitHe's going to be bringing me more information on it. However, from what I've read, it seems to be effective against what are known as "multiple drug resistance" cells. These are the cells that don't respond to chemo. Since I still had live cancer cells in the breast tissue and lymph nodes that were removed during my surgery, I wonder if this would be effective in helping to ensure no cancer returns elsewhere in my body.

For most of my treatment, I've been very focused on treatment through modern western medicine. I really wanted to add some energy work and alternative treatments to that as well, but I just got so overwhelmed by everything that I was doing with modern medicine, that I didn't want to add more to the pile. But, I'm thinking that now that I'm moving on to the next phase, this might be a good time to add in some of those alternatives.

I think these can help me on multiple levels, the first being that I'll be continuing to fight for my health and well-being. I think that will give me the peace of mind of knowing that I'm still doing something and just not waiting around to see if I survive the next five years. And, if there is still cancer in my body that has resisted any previous treatments, this will allow me to continue combatting it even though I may have exhausted some of my other options. And, finally, it hopefully will also help my body overcome some of the trauma inflicted upon it by all the cancer treatments I've undergone to date.

I'm going to be looking into several alternatives, including energy field work, for going forward, so I'll post what I learn as I learn more.