Sunday, June 22, 2008

What's Going On?

In the past couple of months, I have been phoning and emailing people erratically to catch up on what has been happening to me, health-wise.  It's great to talk, but as a method for keeping everyone in the loop, it sucks.  I've been missing too many of you, in all senses of the word, and I know people get worried when it feels like I've dropped off the edge of the planet.

So I'm going to see if blogging works any better as a way of keeping in touch regularly.  I'll tell you what's up with me, and I hope you chime in along the way so we can catch up with others, too. Nothing fancy.  If I knew how to do that, I'd revive my dormant Face Book account and we could scribble over my walls.  

I'm also doing this to share my experiences with others who may also be living with bowels transformed by cancer.  I've learned a few things since the end of March when my latest adventures started, and I'll try to figure out how to share it so you can find out as much or as little as you want.  I'm planning to include medical stuff, but also my own musings about what it feels like to live with disease that is now making itself  "vocal" in unexpected ways.

Some days it catches me by surprise that I have been living with recurrent ovarian cancer for almost 6 1/2 years.  I've had seven major goes at chemo that put me in the chair or on a bed more than 80 times.  Lost my hair twice, and I haven't felt my fingers and toes properly since last June.  In many ways, my disease has progressed in a text-book fashion, although thankfully more slowly than it does for many.  So the latest adventure, a partial bowel obstruction that occurred at the end of March, came as no surprise.  

Well, that's not true.  It was a shock, but not one of those kinds that come out of the blue.  More like the oh shit recognition that I wasn't going to get past Go on this one.  

2 comments:

Sherri Rinkel Mackay said...

Pat,

Thank you for sharing your journey with us. As ever, you are a great teacher and offer to each of us some light of understanding, even in the hard, dark places.

You remind me Hildegard von Bingen, who made a meditation out of the bowel-
yup, even enlightenment is possible here or maybe only possible here.

Gratefully,
Sherri

Patricia said...

Okay, I didn't know about Hildegard's bowel meditations. What's the scoop? (That sounds like a bad cat pun). This is too good for you to keep to yourself, Sherri.