I realized I haven't updated in a while. I think I'm not cut out to do a blog, but fortunately, there aren't huge numbers of people reading this and waiting for updates.

I went to the doctor last Monday, and everything's fine. My CA-125 is something less than 2, and so low they can't calculate the exact number. That's really good, since anything under 35 is considered normal. I go back in three months, so now I have a couple of months of not worrying. Hopefully. Although, I still get a little paranoid about any new little aches and pains.

I've really got to get back to Weight Watchers. My clothes are starting to not fit, and that's including even the largest in the range of sizes I have in the closet. It's really depressing, and I refuse to buy any bigger clothes. I'm just not going to. So I guess I either lose weight or I'm going to running around in a bathrobe all the time. I don't think that would go over real well at work.

Anyway, I guess that's all for now.

I just got home from work and thought I'd take a minute to post. I go back to the doctor in just over a week, on the 22nd, and I'm getting nervous. I don't know why. As far as I know, there's no reason to be. They'll do a CA-125 test, which hopefully will be normal, and then the dr will do my exam, and hopefully that will be normal. No big deal. No reason to think it won't be normal. And yet, I'm worried.

Other than that, life is good right now. I'm going to be doing something a little different at work, and while it will be more boring sometimes, it'll mean getting weekends off, and most of the time I'll be off work earlier than I am now.

Anyway, I don't really have a lot to say right now, so I guess that's it.

Well, I haven't written in a while, but there's not a lot going on in my life, really. I'm busy working most of the time, and wondering if I need to keep my job or look for something else. I love the people I work with, and I love my actual job, but some of the office politics involved just drive me nuts, and the way the folks in charge are handling some things just seems downright wrong, although they've been very good to me personally. I just can't decide whether it's bad enough to go to a different job. Plus I have to worry about stuff like insurance now that never seemed like that big a concern before. Anyway, I guess I'll figure it out.

What I'm not sure I'll figure out is the whole dating thing. I've never dated much, and I've never had any kind of serious relationship. I have a lot of trouble letting down my guard enough for people to really get to know me, I always have been like that, and now I think it may be even harder. So this guy I've gone out with a few times is nice. But people keep asking me about it like I'm supposed to know right now if he's Mr. Right, and I just don't know. He's a nice guy. Right now, as long as he's ok with taking it slow, we'll be okay. I feel like I need to tell him more about the cancer and how it's made me feel and how worried I still am sometimes, but I don't want that to be the whole focus of conversation for too long because it's overwhelming to think about for any length of time, even for me, and I've had most of a year to try to come to terms with it. And even though I told him I had cancer, I didn't go into any great detail, so I've still got at least one really, really major point to mention - that I can't have kids. When I told him about the cancer, that was really our first date (unless you count when I met him, but I don't, because I was chicken and dragged my sister along) and somehow a first date doesn't seem like the time to say, oh, hey, by the way, I can't have children. It just seems a little presumptuous somehow to mention it that early. I thought I'd mention it Saturday when we went out (3rd date, if you're wondering), but he started talking about kids and handing stuff down to his first born, and even though I guess that could have been a great opening, somehow it seemed like the wrong time to say anything.

Anyway, I work this coming weekend, so I won't see him until the weekend of 10/6, probably, if then, since apparently he's going camping with a bunch of people he knows. I was invited, but I'm not much of a camper, plus camping with a bunch of people I've never met before really doesn't sound all that appealing.

It's 2 am and I'm up because I can't sleep. Earlier I was thinking about a lot of stuff, and I was crying, and I hate that - and now I'm going to start again. I mean, there's nothing wrong with crying, we all do it sometimes, but I just feel like I spend way too much time on it right now. All week I've been emotional and grumpy and just not quite myself, almost like PMS, except I don't get that anymore, so I don't know what the deal is. I have a theory, one that I really hope is wrong, but I'll just have to wait and see. I think it has to do with going to the dr's office. I had to go back today to get my port flushed -- just to get my port flushed, no blood work, didn't actually see the dr, just the nurse, no big deal, right? I thought it was no big deal. I don't really mind it too much, it's just getting stuck with one more needle, shouldn't be a big deal. But I feel like all week I've gotten more and more agitated. I hope that's not it, because if it is, I'll be like this one week every month leading up to getting the port flushed, not to mention how bad it's going to get when I've actually got to go in for a checkup next month.

Anyway. Hmm. Transitions in writing were never my strong point, so let's go with --
And Now for Something Completely Different.

So I've gone out with this guy a couple of times, and he's nice, and I'm trying not to screw this up, because it's kind of nice to have someone to go out with, but it's really hard, because I'm not good at relationships anyway, and now I feel like I have all this extra emotional baggage -- like I didn't have enough anyway -- and it just seems completely unfair. Unfair to him, I mean. He seems like a nice guy, and here I am being all indecisive and moody and defensive, but I don't know what to do about it. We're communicating mostly by email, which is hard too, because even when I don't mean to, I sound terse and unhappy, and unfortunately, I don't usually realize how it sounds until I've sent it, and then it's too late to do anything about it. We had the "I have cancer" conversation already, although I didn't go into a lot of detail, but at least he knows, and he didn't run away. That's a start. I don't really want to dwell on that one thing, and I really hate talking about cancer if it sounds like I'm using it as an excuse, but I do feel like it's an important part of who I am at the moment, not so much by choice, but because it's just too recent and in many ways ongoing, even though I'm not in treatment now. As my next dr's appointment gets closer, I suspect I'm going to get more nervous and more irritable (and probably more irritating as well) and I want to be able to explain to him how I'm feeling and talk about it, but I don't want it to be the focus of every conversation.

Well, now that I've rambled on and on and on, I think I'm going to go take a bubble bath and try to sleep for a little while.

The future?

I don't know that I have a lot to say. I'm starting to feel almost normal again. I still get tired, but not all the time - it's just that it doesn't take much to make me tired. I'm just trying to be normal, but I feel like I should be doing more somehow. Like somehow this whole cancer thing should have made me want to run out and do something big - run a marathon, write a book, I don't know what exactly, but something.

If I don't make some kind of drastic change, does that mean that I missed something important, some lesson I was supposed to learn from this? That's what people seem to do after cancer, they quit their job to do something they always dreamed of or they decide it's time to climb Mt. Everest or something else major like that.

Is it wrong that my entire goal, to the extent I have any control over it, is just to live my life like a normal person and eventually forget that I ever had cancer? Not that I could actually forget that. And for now, I've got doctor's appointments every three months, I have to get the port flushed every month, and I don't know exactly how often we'll be doing follow up CT scans. Not to mention the hair that's there to remind me every time I look in a mirror. But at least there is hair now, that's a huge improvement over none at all.

Of course, it's hard to make big plans for the future anyway, when I'm still not sure I've completely accepted that for now, I don't have cancer. And my doctor seems pretty certain it's going to come back at some point. I would so love to prove him wrong about that, but he is the doctor, and presumably he knows what he's talking about. It is just a little bit scary that he would say that IF I make it to five years without a recurrence, we'd have champagne. I'm going to have to remember that, though. I wonder what they'd think if I showed up with a bottle of champagne at the doctor's office five years from now?

Good news!

I'm officially cancer free! I went to the doctor yesterday, nothing showed up on the CT scan, so for now at least, I have no more cancer. I go back to the doctor in three months for my next checkup. Now I just have to figure out how to live my life between checkups without worrying too much about the cancer. I think my doctor is convinced it's going to come back at some point, and obviously I'm worried about that, but I have to go on with my life as if it's definitely not, or I'm going to drive myself crazy with worry. I'm not quite sure how to do that though. Sometimes I can forget for a little while, but never for very long, and then it all comes back, and I start to worry again. I guess that will lessen some over time, assuming it doesn't come back.

The joys of waiting

I go back to the doctor on Monday. Hopefully everything will be okay. I'm trying to come up with my questions for him. I always feel like there's stuff I'm supposed to ask that for some reason I just don't come up with, or sometimes that I'm just scared to ask. I have my CT on Friday, so by the time I go Monday, he should have results. I know there shouldn't be anything that would show up on the CT, but I'm still worried. I suspect I'm going to be worried for a long time to come when it's time to go to the doctor.

On a more positive note, my sister had her baby last Friday, so I'm officially an Aunt! She had a little boy, Kasen, and they're both doing fine. He was 7 lbs 3 oz and 20 1/2 inches long, and that's even though he was three weeks early!

Anyway, that's all for now. I'll be here waiting anxiously until I go to the doctor, even though I know the chances are that everything's fine.