My Great Breast Cancer Adventure

Pot Roast-a-Rama

This is gonna be short. Yesterday I finished making the beef stock. After 72 hours, I ended up with around 2.5 quarts of stock, and I can't even say it's delicious. We'll see. I'm going to try sipping it again today. Dutiful me.

But moving on: There are three pounds of beef marinating in buttermilk in my refrigerator. They have been there for four days. Today is the day I will take them out, pat off the buttermilk with paper towels, and cook the meat slowly, with carrots and onions and potatoes, for many hours, until I have a finished and delectable pot roast fit for even the weakest digestive system. This sounds more like a fall or winter endeavor, I know, but I'm on a " Hurrah-I-CAN-eat-meat-if-it's-grass-fed-and-if-I- cook-it-right-and-if-I-combine-it-with-the-right-other-foods, including fats!" kick, so am paying no attention to the weather. That gourmet subtley will come later, I presume.

Wish me  (and Jack, who is my main guinea pig) luck. So far Jack is doing pretty good on my new diet. I have turned him into an oatmeal convert, but getting him to eat sauerkraut (even the smell of it makes him gag and then faint) is going to take a while longer (which is why I have no choice but to live to be at least 103).

Yoga on the Horizon

Lenore was listening for the sound of her own blood. But the voices from outside had wiped it away. She had no clue where the next clue would come from, and it was probably too late to unlock the box of secret dance steps. Mother fucker and oh dear, you could die before learning the tango.

Lately she'd been finding herself in bad company when she least expected it, like yesterday, when she woke from the wrong dream, checked her emails, and found herself under attack from a psycho woman-hating bipolar stranger, or, worse yet, when she looked in the mirror and saw the very same Lenore she had seen twenty-four hours ago, now thundering into a bloodlessly habitual reaction, her anger ruled by the fat smell of a dumpster far below the surface.

She needed to stay calm in order to hear her blood. She had to remember how to be as quiet and as still as a glass of milk before attempting to drive her jeep of language through the muck and the mud. But she was lost on a random hillside in her living room, and it made her nervous. She needed to break through the towering wad of cotton balls, grab the syringe and plunge the needle in. She needed to eat a raw, red slab of fetal memory. She needed a thick hemorrhage of red to lead the way. The disease was progressive and relentless. She needed the researchers to understand her cancer's broken chains of DNA, and then learn how to fix them.

Could she transform her backed up fears into blood? What if she marched straight into the deepest territory of her own brain and struck a vein? That would be good, wouldn't it? That would mean life.

What Ms. K Said. . .

As I sip my tea, to which I have added a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar and three drops of Lugol's iodine, I contemplate what my friend Ms. K said to me during last night's late-night phone conversation (I called her at 10:30 p.m. NYC time, and she was still awake and willing to talk, bless her heart).

Ms. K. said that she had been thinking about how, now that my initial whirlwind of breast cancer "what am I going to DO? urgency" has subsided, it may become harder for me to deal with the daily requirements of my treatment protocol, because that protocol has to be integrated into the rest of my life. I'm at the juncture where I have to figure out how to regain balance between the ongoing "breast cancer battle" and everything else. 

For the last several months, I wasn't even trying to maintain any balance; "everything else" got put on the back burner, as I focused all my energies primarily on CANCER CANCER CANCER - my daily life revolved around doctors, research, surgeries, recuperations from surgeries, more doctors, more research, consultations, lab tests, MRIs, health insurance problems, more health insurance problems, ensuing personal financial problems, medicines, blah blah blah.

There was no question that my life was out of balance but, in an odd way, the imbalance made life easier. A fiery sense of "do or die" urgency carried me swiftly forward, allowing me to ignore the things I normally wouldn't have ignored: Work demands, social demands, creative urges. I wouldn't allow myself to see them. I had my blinders on.

But that tunnel vision phase is over now. It's time to begin reshaping my life with an eye toward creating a workable balance between "breast cancer protocol vigilance" and all the other regular stuff of life.

This reshaping, noted Ms.K, might be more difficult than I expect, given that I tend to dive whole hog into whatever I feel most consumed by at the moment. I have a way of leaping from one extreme to the other. Example: I've gone from surviving on a freezer full of Lean Cuisines and a cupboard full of cookies . . . to making my own organic chicken and beef stocks from scratch, pre-soaking all my grains and beans and nuts in filtered water, making homemade lacto-fermented drinks and vegetables, eating only raw dairy (including homemade curds & whey), and using only Celtic sea salt.

"You're going to have to establish a balance," Ms.K said, "or you'll be in danger of overwhelming yourself. If you overwhelm yourself, it'll be harder to keep it all together."

So that's my challenge: Find a balance I can live with. Walk a lot, but don't try to walk to China. Eat well, but don't attempt to start grinding my own grains and baking slow-rising sourdough bread — at least not in the next two weeks. Keep two blogs, but know when to stop writing and move on to jogging on my "cellerciser."

Speaking of which....

Boo Hoo, Poor Me

It's 11 a.m. and I'm just back from acupuncture, where today I got the special "electrical" circuit thingies (cords) attached between some of the needles. This was because when Efrem asked me, "How are you feeling today?" I said, "Okay I guess. I mean, physically I feel pretty good, but. . . I'm really stressed out right now. I feel emotionally drained. I feel pressured by all the demands of my job. I feel pressured by friends who want me to give more to them, emotionally, than I am able to give right now. I feel pressured by clients who want me to give them more than I can provide. I feel pressured by MYSELF, to do all this good stuff to make my body healthier and fight the cancer - and yet still find the time to relax, play, and have a social life. And a love life. Oh, and I also feel intensely pressured by money worries; all the medical expenses have been mounting so fast it makes my head spin, and my business isn't doing well at the moment."

That was the gist of it, although I forgot to tell him that I also feel angry, frustrated, confused and resentful (as opposed to merely wildly pressured and emotionally exhausted). Oh, and one more thing: I also feel creatively stymied. My life as a writer has withered away to almost nothing. I want to be writing more.  I hate that I'm not.

So. Efrem gave me an extra electrical acu-zapperooey designed to help me relax. That was nice. It did help, and I sure as hell needed it.

He also painted iodine on my tummy. It's a bright yellow'ish orange rectangle above my belly button. If it disappears in 12 hours or less, that means my body is iodine deficient. Many women with breast cancer, it is now being learned (mostly by "alternative" doctors, not by oncologists) are iodine deficient. (In fact, almost everyone in our culture is iodine deficient, since they started taking the iodine out of our salt. Even if you don't have breast cancer, you may very well be in need of more iodine, the lack of which can cause numerous problems.)

I've been taking Lugol's iodine drops for the last couple of months, but am not sure whether I'm taking too little or too much or just the right amount. This tummy test will be helpful.

I will now reward you for listening to this whine of a post with. . . .

. . . .A photo of my tummy!

Plus one of my kitty!

My Anti-Climactic Treatment Protocol

Now that I've made it through the high drama of my initial breast cancer diagnosis followed by two surgeries followed by fearful preparations for chemo followed by the deplorable cancellation of my health insurance followed by my own doubt-filled cancellation of the chemo followed by an eventual reversal of the health insurance cancellation followed by a reversal of my decision to cancel the chemo followed by a reversal of that reversal — I can see how this blog has become considerably less exciting to read. Much more goodie two shoes: Oh look at me, everyone! See Jane walk. See Jane cook. See Jane on the Pilates Cadillac. See Jane gobble her sauerkraut. See what a good little alternative health girl Jane is becoming. See Jane learning lots of new stuff about eating and exercising and de-stressing!

Not exactly mesmerizing.

All that former back and forth, "will-she-or-won't she?" stuff made for a better story. Was I or wasn't I going to opt for the treatments that sounded so awful? And if I did, would I be able to keep posting to the blog, describing my experience as I dragged myself through the deadly poisons, day by day, week by week, month by month? How would I hold up? What would I learn? What would I teach others about what I learned? How would I change, above and beyond the obvious loss of all my hair? Life and death. Especially the threat of death. Mortality. Mesmerizing.

But I ended up not going the mainstream traditional treatment route. Instead I choose to lead my tiny band of readers into a healing world ruled by long walks, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, Pilates, sauerkraut, raw butter & milk, grass-fed beef and poultry, mistletoe injections, CO-Q10, curcumin, mushroom extracts, kombucha tea, and a whole slew of other alternative treatments.This new path may be exciting for ME, but I doubt it's all that exciting for my readers. Let's face it, hearing about someone's first-person account of what it's like to battle insensitive doctors, fight with the evil health insurance company, struggle through the maze of our medical system, and undergo chemo and radiation is more fascinating than hearing a first-person account of how wonderful it is to make crispy nuts, shop for pill containers, and walk three miles every day (okay, not every day - more like every other day).

I wonder what I could do to keep it interesting to others as well as to myself. (Note to self: Become a better writer? Duh. Yeah, that might be a good place to start...).

Beyond Crispy Nuts and Lacto-Fermentation

Sun sun sun!  Vitamin D Vitamin D Vitamin D! We lay ourselves at your feet and moan in ecstasy. You pour your heat into our backs and we purr.

This afternoon Jack and I played hookey from working for two hours - one of the perks of Self-EmployedDom - and walked over to our friends Doug and Barb's house (aka The Great Plotnik's and Ducknik), where our other friend Mary Ann and her visiting-from-Kansas friend Ginger were also awaiting us.

We sat on The Great Plotnik's SUNNY Noe Valley deck overlooking a magnificent SF panorama, and yapped a lot, and drank really good coffee, and ate apples and cheese and crackers, and took pictures of each other.

GP and D told us about getting up at 4 a.m. and going to the earthquake extravaganza this morning. There was some gross baseball talk that Mary Ann (baseball maniac that she is) obviously LOVED hearing about (think spit and snot). And ex-San Franciscan Ginger reminded us of how fortunate we are to be living where we live, when she recounted her tale of attempting to serve some bleu cheese topped with a raspberry salsa at a meeting with her co-workers. Nine out of twelve people wouldn't even TRY it.

The moral (for me if for no one else) of this wisp of a story: Make more time to hang with friends, even if you have a ton of work to do and even if you are afraid that if you stop working for even two tiny hours, your entire business will fall apart.

One of the most difficult things I have to face up to, as I strive to create more balance in my life (and thus in my body), is how unbalanced my life had become as a result of starting the Writing Salon. For the last seven years, I have worked constantly (obsessively), as most small business owners are prone to do. Whenever I had to choose between work and play (i.e. having a social life), I chose work. As a result, my friendships suffered. Not healthy. Not healthy at all. Nor wise.

This reparation of friendships-that-I-allowed-to-fall-by-the-wayside isn't going to be an easy thing to "correct." Making crispy nuts and ginger carrots, or injecting myself three times a week with mistletoe (or doing many of the other "healing" things I've written about) are a snap in comparison.

So. This afternoon of hangin' with friends was, for me, a rare treat and delight.

Jane in the KITCHEN? Oh My God

I often find it most difficult to write when I have the most to say. My life of late has been so full of new experiences, I don't know where or how to begin talking about them. I suppose that's why I haven't posted to this blog since last Thursday, four days ago.

Advice to Self: Begin here, begin now.

So: I'll begin by saying that having breast cancer has thrown me into a whole new realm of exploration and creativity, and the creativity part hasn't necessarily been focused on writing.

BIG example: I've been giving myself an all-consuming crash course in cooking, using Sally Fallon's 675-page Nourishing Traditions cookbook as my guide (see link on left "books" sidebar). Nourishing Traditions is not just a cookbook, it's also a history, science, medical, sociological and political book. In the last few weeks, I've referred to it a dozen times a day, not just to look up recipes but to read all sorts of information about nutrition, often in a historical context.

In the last month, starting with REALLY simple, basic stuff, I have made my own:

1. Crispy nuts (soaked in salt overnight, then dried for hours and hours in the oven, low heat, on cookie sheets with parchment paper on top of them because they aren't stainless steel and I now know that aluminum is a no-no)
2. Curds & whey (from yogurt, using a stainless steel strainer and "floursack" cloth - both new purchases)
3. Oatmeal porridge made from SOAKED rolled oats (soaked overnight in yogurt, kefir or whey)
4. Beet kvass
5. Ginger carrots (my first-ever homemade lacto-fermented vegetable condiment, using some of my homemade whey, a meat hammer [another first], and a mason jar, which I had to go out and buy at Sur La Table. I could have gotten it at Cole Hardware, nearby, but Jack and I were already at the Embarcadero farmer's market searching for and learning more about grass-fed and FINISHED beef, poultry and eggs)
6. Homemade chicken stock (using organic everything, filtered water, etc. etc.)
7. Sprouted sunflower seeds to go in my "high enzyme salad" (another use for my set of six mason jars - seed sprouting, which feels exactly like a second grade science project)

That's my tip of the iceberg for today.

Beet Kvass (looked beautiful, tasted awful; but I think I did something wrong and am going to try again:

Ginger Carrots (haven't tasted them yet; they're still fermenting away!):

So True, So True

". . . Sir, a man does not love to go to a place from whence he comes out exactly as he went in." — Dr. Samuel Johnson.

Sources

Lenore swallowed her African tea laced with pure, raw cream and thought about Lascaux, the birthing of art from fertile cave walls.

What were her sources of strength, of wisdom, of art, of faith in life and in herself? Where, she asked the cold evening air, did the heart of radiance beat? She thought about the sources, the alchemies, the turning of metals to gold.

The whey dripped out of the organic yogurt, down through the floursack cloth, past the strainer, and into the red ceramic bowl. The curds (homemade cream cheese), stayed behind in the strainer. She couldn't believe she was making her own curds and whey. Or quark and whey. Quark was the German word for such curds. She was learning all the healthy, healing words.

The cat watched her settle into bed, decided to join her, decided to come up close enough to stare with chatoyant eyes at her hand lifting the cup of tea then setting it back down onto the bedside table. What a fascinating hand, said those eyes. What a mesmerizing cup.

What alchemy had she wrought with raw cream and tea, cat and blue cup?

The sources were many. Porridge with cultured butter. Sea salt. Fish oil. Wayward cells. A new cast iron pan and wooden spoons. A new understanding of how her blood-sugar-regulation worked  — the delicacy of that mechanism. An unexpected gift of wild purple ginger.

Fermented cabbage was becoming a mainstay. She also soaked her almonds and oats, sprouted her seeds and legumes for making lentil and black bean soups from homemade broths. The full moon had risen above her stove. Do what feels right, it said. You have not gone crazy. I understand your concerns entirely.

Healthy Communication Between Cells

This afternoon I l was given a lesson in how to inject myself with Iscador, an extract made from the berries of mistletoe — a strange and wonderful plant that, unlike almost any other plant, flowers and bears fruit in midwinter.

". . . . In order to solve the dilemma posed by cancer, we must alter our metaphors and transform our thinking. Rather than view cancer as something akin to terrorism, let us consider the idea that from the perspectve of the natural world, cancer is a winter experience. It occurs in people with a lifelong history of low body temperature and it is antagonized by the warmth process of fever. . . .

". . . . Amazingly, while many substances can either kill cells (such as chemotherapy of all sorts), and many substances can alter the immune response (such as interferon), only mistletoe does both. On the one hand, mistletoe extracts selectively kill only cancer cells, leaving no collateral damage. On the other hand, mistletoe normalizes the immune response and helps restore healthy communication between the cells. Evidence for this twofold action has accumulated in more than 70 years of intensive research, which clearly shows that mistletoe extracts work in a more selective way than any other therapy known. Furthermore, mistletoe extract raises body temperature, bringing warmth to a winter condition. It is for these reasns that mistletoe extract is one of the most widely used medicines for cancer in the world. today." — Thomas S. Cowan, MD (The Fourfold Path to Healing)

I plan to fall asleep tonight listening to the dreamy rain patter on my roof, and thinking about mistletoe as my newest and most exciting metaphor.

Crispy Nuts

Progress Report:

Well, um, it didn't take me long to figure out that a diet of pills, herbs, vegetables, grains, tofu and soy milk wasn't going to work for me long-term.  At first I thought I didn't have a choice  (slow learner that I am), because this was the diet that the Block Cancer Clinic recommended, and I was still afraid of recurrence. I had rejected chemo and radiation, after all. I couldn't reject their diet recommendations too! These recommendations were perfectly in keeping with the current nutritional guidelines that are popular in our culture right now, i.e. lowfat foods, lean meats (or zero meats), and minimal dairy (or zero dairy).

But after a month and a half of living a life organized around my pill-taking schedule, and eating foods that I never looked forward to eating or preparing (no meat except small amounts of fish and chicken breast; no dairy at all except an occasional egg), I'd had it. The pills combined with such a radical diet change left me dealing with indigestion, bloating, gas and irritable bowel syndrome on a daily basis, and I realized I'd never be able to live this way for the rest of my life. It was stressful, not restful, and affected my energy as well as my spirit (lowered both). I wasn't convinced (instinctively, intuitively) that I was on the right road to better health or a stronger immune system.

Taking 75 supplements a day was, for me, insane. Not deriving pleasure from eating also made me crazy. AND: I knew that if I wasn't properly digesting and eliminating my food, then I wasn't getting the full benefit of the nutrients, anyway - not by a long shot. What a waste of effort, not to mention time and money!

This isn't to say that I don't think that that particular diet program might not be suitable for some people. In fact, I'm sure it IS, because different people need different diets. There's no one-diet-fits-all, not even for cancer patients. It goes back to what I keep having to learn over and over during this process: Each person's body is individual and unique. Each person's mind and spirit is individual and unique. Each person's cancer is also individual and unique, and it follows that each treatment program must be customized for YOU, on every level - mind, body and spirit. This means that you have to fully participate (not just rely on your doctors) and learn to listen to your own body. You have to pay attention to your intuitions about your body, just as much as you pay attention to intuitions about other aspects of your life.

This feels really daunting to me! Listen to my body? Intuit its needs? You've gotta be kidding me. No, wait. Make that, I'VE gotta be kidding me.  Only I'm not kidding me. 

I recently promised to write a relevant post about nuts, but now I am out of time because I must work, on this lovely Sunday, to try and fill Writing Salon classes. The enrollments are freakishly low, which I attribute partly to the rain and partly to tax season. It's scary. So I'll leave you with these shots of my latest batch of "crispy nuts," which are symbolic of the new direction I'm going, food and healing-wise.

I'll explain more later about the significance of Crispy Nuts. (Hints: The Weston A. Price Foundation. Enzymes, enzymes, enzymes. Common sense, common sense, common sense. Also: Studying the traditional cooking wisdom of our ancestors, and analyzing the eating habits of the world's healthiest peoples. The synergistic superiority of good eating versus supplements. Lacto-fermentation. Good fats versus bad fats. Good meats versus bad meats. Good dairy versus bad dairy. Sally Fallon's fabulous cookbook: Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.)

Gotta go eat some bacon and eggs now. With toast and lots of butter.

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Health" rel="tag">Health</a>

Excerpt from "Cancer Girl"

Since I overslept (so wonderful, after so many months of not sleeping well at all!) and have to leave for Pilates soon (yay!), I'm going to cheat a little today and post an excerpt of something that I posted a couple of months ago. It's what I would have read at last Sunday's reading, if any of the readers hadn't shown up, say, because of the stormy weather. It would have taken me 6 1/2 minutes to read out loud. All the readers showed up, however. So I'll post it here, instead.

Excerpt from "Cancer Girl":

    Her arm kept aching and throbbing beneath the numbness that radiated out from the incision wound, forcing Lenore to think about the cancer even though she would have preferred to focus on the upcoming party. It seemed so unfair that one could go to such trouble to cut out the offending tumor, only to be left with the threat of recurrence at any point, in any place. Bone or brain. Spine or lung. Colon or intestine.
    Over and over and over, her cells kept replicating and dividing, the bad along with the good. But could she blame them? Not really. They, like Lenore, were merely doing the best they knew how in order to stay alive.
    She had to wash some things before the party. Wine glasses. The dirty tub. The dusty chest of drawers. The kitchen floor. Her hair. Herself. An hour before the guests were to arrive, she got into the shower. Her hair would be easy to wash. That was because yesterday she had gone to the hair salon and said, "Cut it very very very short. I am moving toward bald." It would dry so fast, she wouldn't even need a blow dryer. Her scar was aching along with her arm. Swollen, red, numb around the edges. She washed herself carefully, tried not to disturb it.

    After the party was over, and she was alone again, standing in the mess that was her bedroom, she reached down to pick up her high heels and put them back into the closet. One of them was lying on its side, on top of the copy of her latest pathology report, on top of the word metastasis. Damn. This cancer was impossible to decipher on so many levels, a maze of facts that added up to a mystery that no one, not a single person in the world, had yet been able to fathom, and her scar would not stop aching.

    The next morning she felt like crawling between two slices of bread, where she would be able to smell the yeast, feel the texture that was like no other, press her cheek into a thick, smooth, cool square of butter and rub it back and forth. Over and over and over. She began to see the day as a clock made of bread and butter, a house made of bread and butter, a dog and a dress and a lover— all made of bread and butter.
    She saw sequins sparkling in the light of bread and butter. The sequins made purple and green prisms of color that shimmered and danced on the inner wall of her forehead. Her forehead chakra came alive with the light of bread and butter, beams of all that was wholesome, basic and good.
    That night Lenore went to bed early and woke up at 1 a.m. She laid awake trying to go back to sleep but finally, after a bout of talking to her imaginary panel of obnoxious, conservative, mostly bearded spirit guides who sat behind a conference table in the sky directing the twists and turns of her life, she turned on the light. At 2:30 a.m. she looked down at the book on her bedside table: The Hidden Messages in Water, and she thought, There are hidden messages everywhere. Hidden messages in the middle of the night. Hidden messages in my hair. Hidden messages in my cat. Hidden messages in my past. Hidden messages in my breast.
    She had liked the oncologist she'd been to see the day before. Oncologist #3. He had listened, and seemed to understand and empathize with her confusion and frustration at being given so much conflicting information. Unlike Oncologists #1 and #2, he hadn't dismissed the majority of her questions as a waste of his time and hers. He had said that he couldn't give her any definitive answers, or even anything close to definitive. But at least he had given her some honesty.

    The cancer could not be returned or exchanged. That was the policy, and she didn't expect any god, manager or supervisor to make an exception just for her. She had no choice but to find a place for it in her life. Should she hide it on the top shelf of the closet, or display it on the coffee table in the living room? How might she rearrange the furniture to best accommodate this new possession?
    Yes, a deadly cell had invaded. No, she hadn't expected this threat of passing into nothingness. She had hoped, as everyone did, for a quiet bower, good health, her breath dancing in the rain, her mind leaping and smiling across the puddles.
    She hadn't expected so many things in her life —  the way one lover's words, for example (such lovely wooden boats), had kept her loyally tied to him over the decades even when they were bitterly fighting, not talking for months on end. Or her acrobat son's somersaults into heaven, circus feats that had made her heart sweat itself out into her palms. Or her sylvan city cottage with its unrequited love story inlaid into the soft fir floorboards and crazy quilt tiles. Or the multicolored fabrics of the dream that had foretold her future— all those boxes and boxes of remnants left behind in the empty rooms, waiting to be sewn.
    Even what she'd expected hadn't turned out to be the texture she'd imagined. Smooth gray-blue sky had been crusted with glitter. Rushing, raging rivers had been surprisingly dry to the touch.
    Now here she was dancing on the floor of her impending nausea and fatigue. Now here she was meditating at the secret altar of her renewable chi. Now here she was strolling through Bernal Heights on a Sunday afternoon, pointing at the blue flowers twining their way across the neighbor's fence, and exclaiming, "Look, Jack! Morning glories!"
    Standing on the precipice of dose dense chemo, she refused to look down into the gorge that appeared to have no bottom. Instead she looked up toward the craggy rock cliffs on the other side of the chasm, allowing herself to imagine only as far as tomorrow's echocardiogram.
    She took another deep breath. There were hidden messages everywhere. In your oatmeal. In the sky. In your own eyes when you looked in the mirror. She  had always known this. Most of the messages weren't all that hard to uncover. They were hidden, yes, but often only just below the surface. Or they weren't completely covered; you could see an edge sticking out. For Lenore, one of the biggest pleasures in life was finding and listening to the hidden messages. Lucky for her, cancer was chock full of them.

Only Indirectly About Breast Cancer

This past Sunday the Writing Salon hosted a reading as part of the Great Hong Kong Tea Literary Society Reading Series. It had been a long time since our last reading, so long I can't even remember when it was. A year ago? At least.

It felt good to do another one. In fact, one of my New Normal resolutions is to organize more Writing Salon readings in 2006. I was getting too bogged down in paperwork, too overwhelmed by Administrative Hell, back in Old Normal.

Well, no more. I am typing this post as I sit in my living room, in the midst of all sorts of scattered about, un-tended to, unfiled, and even un-read Writing Salon paperwork. Sometimes it's in piles, sometimes just lone pieces of untethered paper, drifting about, drifting about, waiting for me to herd them into some kind of order.

Back in Old Normal, I would have been worried, stressed, overwhelmed, panicky and generally upset about how much work I had to do that wasn't getting done in a "timely" manner. Now I walk by and through it all, often choosing to tend to something that, in the days of yore, I would have told myself I didn't have time for.

Today, for example, I posted some pictures of the reading onto the Events page of the Writing Salon website. This wasn't a pressing, top-priority task. But I wanted to do it because I WANTED to do it. It was fun. It made me feel good to look at the photos, see the smiling faces, and know that the event gave pleasure, inspiration and food for thought to a group of 50 people. What could be better than that?

I'll get to the filing later. One way or another, the administering will happen. It'll just take a little longer, eh? The world won't end if I don't answer every email or return every phone call lickety split. Ladeedah, ladeedah!

Ooops!

My last post was Monday, and now here it is Friday. I need more blogging time! And I have a confession. One of the reasons I haven't blogged as much this week was because, for a week,  I stopped participating in my own Round Robin class. The second I no longer had a writing partner, I began slacking off on doing my daily writes, which often evolve into blog posts. I told myself I'd just "rest" for one day. But the one day became two, then three. . . and then a week. I told myself that this happened because I am Such a Very Busy Person Plus I Have Breast Cancer! Well, I am a very busy person, and I do have breast cancer, but that's not why it happened. It happened because I chose, more than once, to spend my time doing things that weren't as productive, creative or satisfying to me as writing would have been. I watched reruns of TV shows that I already knew by heart, for example (Judging Amy). Go figure. So. I'm climbing back up onto the wagon.

I'll see you later, with tales of my last doctor's appointment — this time an "anthrosophical" doctor. On my horizon: Iscador treatments (mistletoe), digitalis, tons of sauerkraut & anything else that has been fermented, and maybe even "spatial dynamics." Who knew that something as terrifying as cancer could lead to so many interesting changes? A day doesn't go by that I'm not exploring something new, something better, something heathier, something happier. I haven't forgotten about the darker possibilities of recurrences, relapses, distant metastases. They're there. Always there. But I'm loving all that I've been learning lately. And I owe it all to a little cell in my breast that went haywire.