The Humble, Heroic Liver!

Chemo # 6 down! 2 to go! John took so many pictures that felt like Angelina Jolie without the lips (but my tongue felt pretty thick from the drugs). And Christina didn't get woozy at all! And since Charity is not working this week, she got to come too. We all talked the whole four hours, they made chemotherapy fun, despite the fact that I forgot my Pente game and a deck of cards. When this is all done, it will be so nice to look back on all the pictures and remember this whole amazing experience. John, Christina and Charity can even make chemotherapy fun!

Through all this, I have really learned a new respect for the body. Fr. Walter Ciszek points out that the body often gets a bad rap among Christians; being blamed for every sort of vice, as if the will and the reason held no blame! I remember feeling a real compassion for my body after the first biopsy. As anyone who has had a needle core biopsy knows, they don't just take one or two tissue samples, it's more like twenty! And since I'm so flat chested, they really had to work hard to get those. You are lying face- down on a table with a hole in it, and they pull your breast tissue through the hole and put you in a mammogram machine, squeezing that poor little unassuming orb for all it's worth. Then they take the samples with a hollow needle. It certainly wasn't fun, but it was not horrifying either.

The next day I was standing in front of the mirror- my poor right breast was bruised purple and yellow, so full of needle holes so close together that it looked like an incision. Who would've though that that breast, previously so unnoticed would now be so horribly manhandled and subject to the most rigorous scrutiny? Our bodies- working so hard to protect us with so little recognition or gratitude! "If it offends thee, cut it off!" says the bible; I had been so eager to get on with the surgery and remove the source of those silent, deadly tumors but in this moment I felt a strange grief to know that in a short time, I would be removing that breast which had been with me for so long. And replacing with a ziplock bag filled with saline.

Then today my recent blood work came back; the nurse said they were still a bit concerned about the liver. Working so hard to filter out all these toxins I've been pumping into it (I THINK that's what livers do, maybe a biology wonk can correct me if that's wrong...) that there is a possibility of needing to lower the dosage, change drugs or postpone chemo at some point. But it's not highly likely, considering those numbers have been fluctuating during this whole time. Pobrecito, little liver! Thank you for all your hard work!



This post is all over the place. But, hey, blame the chemo brain; or better yet, blame the chemo drugs. My brain is just doing it's best to cope.