Friends and Family

I must say... I have the best friends in the world. I know... everyone thinks that, but my friends have really been a bedrock for  us. As soon as I broke the news, we started getting letters and cards and surprise hats in the mail. I have worn every hat I received, read and re-read every note, card and email. On those days when I felt like hammered whale poop, all I had to do was look on Facebook and there was some funny something posted that made me laugh. I can't begin to explain how much it means to me to know how many people out there are praying for me.  Our friend Deborah sent me a box of my favorite soup mixes. Diana brought me bags of dark chocolate from the people at our church.

And my family... Mom and Michele have been wonderful. Mom sat with me for every chemo treatment even though I slept through all of them. They made sure I took my meds. They took me to appointment after appointment, remembering to tell the doctor about side effects that I forgot to mention so that I got the best treatment possible. Robbie (my brother in law) and his girlfriend Cynthia visited with yummies to make me feel better.

Then there came the hardest part... telling our son. See, he is currently living with his grandparents and attending college in PA. When he moved there, his Aunt was also living there and she was in the final stages of a different form of cancer. Her death was not easy. So, when he heard cancer, he immediately thought I was at the same place his aunt was. He was ready to drop out of school. He called constantly. Finally, we bought him a plane ticket for him to visit over thanksgiving. That also happened to be what we called the bad Chemo week.

See... my Chemo happened for the first cycle on an every other week schedule, so one week I had what is known as the "Red Devil" and that made me sicker than sick. Well, his visit corresponded with that week. How unfair that the week of Thanksgiving I would be on the chemo that made me not want to eat, and my son would be here. So, my acting ability had to come in to play.

I have to say, I am a pretty convincing actress. It's all the years in retail. I can be the most extroverted, happy, caring person in the world as I listen to complaints, concerns and disgruntled arguments from customers. Therefore, acting like I was 100% healthy for a week while my son was here was something I felt pretty confident I could do.  I just needed him to be reassured enough to go back to PA and stay in school without worrying about me dying.

Did I mention that chemo kills your tastebuds? Well... it does. The only things I could taste were Dark Chocolate and jalapenos. Obviously, neither of those are part of Thanksgiving. So, we did the big dinner and everything went well. The week went by without him suspecting how awful I felt. He returned to school a much calmer young man, and I breathed a big sigh of relief. One potential catastrophe averted there.