Month: July 2012

I’ve been neglecting my cyberpyramid.  I logged on and there it stood…abandoned like a bankrupt building site…tattered Tyvek building wrap flapping in the breeze.

I’ve been distracted.  Life threw me a curve ball and I’ve had to wait for a better pitch.  I am 26 days away from the last treatment which will close the chapter on my brush with breast cancer.  Can’t come fast enough, as I am anxious to put Humpty back together again.

Everything has always come easily to me.  So when I was served this slice of humble pie with a side of irony, it didn’t go down easily.

The week after my surgery was rough.  I was trussed up like a crown roast and my arms were useless.  Thanks to the thousands of squats and lunges I have done in the past few years I was able to get up and down just by using my legs…but it wasn’t pretty.

In the middle of the third night after I came home from the hospital, I woke and sat up too fast.  The pain was off the charts and I called for my sister even though she was laying two feet away from me.  I went down the hall to the bathroom and turned on the light.

I stared in the mirror and a thin little girl with slicked back hair stared back.  She looked scared.  I had never seen myself looking frightened.

Was this the same Cynthia who sat on the floor of Woolworth’s when she was 12 years old and refused to leave until they called the police because she caught the manager using a sign to brutally squash the little white mice that had escaped from the pet section…even though she volunteered to catch them and put them back.

Or the teenage Cynthia who threw her popularity under the bus when she insisted on walking to school with the girl no one wanted to be associated with simply because she was Jewish…

There was the Cynthia who moved to Manhattan with $250 dollars in her pocket determined to work in the movies….

The same Cynthia who became a stuntwoman, getting set on fire and hit by cars and would stand at the top of the stairs, wait for “action” and tumble down them backwards landing in the exact spot for the camera to get the shot.

The Cynthia that I know I am would never let this little girl in the mirror be afraid…and I knew at that moment that I was going to be just fine.

My sister dosed me with some Oxycodone to ease the pain.  Turns out oxy and I don’t really get along.  It makes me paranoid and…blunt.

I made several phone calls in the middle of the night to warn people that my sister intended to steal my gall bladder and was trying to choke me by giving me food that had pointy edges.  I wouldn’t eat Saltine crackers because they were square, but Oyster crackers were all right…see what I mean?

I don’t remember much.  I do recall getting up in the middle of the night and wandering around outside looking for some permanent markers to draw a mustache on my daughter while she slept.

I figured it was time to start cutting back the dosage, especially after I told my sister, who I had taken to calling Baby Jane, that she had a fat ass and the pockets on the back off her jeans were the size of backpacks.

Putting Humpty back together again has not moved along as fast as I would like.  Because I had a Stage 1 cancer with no lymph node involvement, the pathology was sent for the Oncotype DX test to determine the likelihood of recurrence.  The scale is 0-100.  If you get a score of 0-17 you are in a low risk category and chemotherapy is not necessary.  Irony always seems to be part of my “mettle” and in true form, mine came back 18.

My oncologist, Dr. Karl Rogers, or Dr. Yummypants, as I call him (for obvious reasons if you got a look at him) recommended a short course of chemo just to make certain I never have to deal with this monster again.  I kicked and screamed…and reported to chemo camp.

I am in good hands.  I have weathered the side effects well and try to keep my whining to a minimum.  Mostly I am tired, and for me that has been the worst of it.  I keep my running shoes by the door…ready to go as soon as I can get my engine revved.

My reconstructive surgeon, Dr. Roosevelt Peebles, continues with the sculpture of my “Frankenboobs”.  He and his surgical assistant Michele are awesome.  He is not easily rattled and didn’t even blink an eye when I pointed out that he must have missed the class in raising and lowering surgical chairs…a comment I quickly retracted since I don’t want to end up looking like a Picasso portrait.

Nothing moves as fast I would like it to.  I am a patient who lacks patience and it has been frustrating.

I am treading water right now…but it won’t be long before I swim for shore again.  As for my cyberpyramid, there is not enough done and so much more to say…

I leave you for now with one of my favorite quotes by an unknown author…

“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over…it became a butterfly.”

Day one hundred and sixty three…humble pie has a really dry crust.

Cynthia Neilson