Musing on Life, death, and everything between

 I've never been overly vain about my looks. For most of my life, I have roamed outside of the societal ideal, and I've been mostly okay with that, but I *was* very vain about my hair. I loved my hair! I loved the color, length, softness...all of it! I mostly wore it up and out of my face, but I was obsessive about taking care of it. It took me seven years to grow it from a short pixie to halfway down my back. Now it's gone and I'm left with a big, bald head. 👩🏻‍🦲  It's been too hot to even consider a wig, so mostly I walk around with nothing covering my head. I'm not wild about looking at pictures of myself right now, but aside from that, baldness has offered me freedom. My body is a battleground right now. What does it matter if I look sick? I am, in fact, very sick. I expected some glances or judgement, but I've experienced nothing like that. People have been kind about it. Or they don't care at all. All this to say that while I am not glad I have

 I was in North Carolina for the week, and it was lovely! I was here this time last year and I was a very different person. Much more carefree, much less anxiety, and more energy. Life felt simpler and mortality felt much farther away.  I've always been a glass half full kind of person and I'm almost always looking for bright spots in my life. Cancer has been no exception. I will admit that it has been a lot harder to find bright spots in my life these days, but I'm still trying because otherwise life becomes unbearable for me. In that vein, I did several very short walks, swam in perfectly cold rivers, and enjoyed a day on a beautiful lake. I also had some hard days.  Thankfully, all the people in my life (the easiest bright spots to find) have be infinitely kind and patient about sitting with me while I have my bad days where I just let myself wallow in the pain and sadness of losing the life I built for myself and learning to live with the one I've been given. Right

1 chemotherapy treatment down, 5 to go.  I got there at 7:30am and left at 6pm...it was a long day. Mostly uneventful aside from one incident where I was having trouble breathing and sweating so much! I had stomach cramping at the same time, so they stopped the chemo and gave me extra steroids and meds to stop the stomach cramps. After that it was smooth sailing for the most part. It was scary to feel like breathing was hard, but I was expecting worse than that, so I felt like I could roll with it.  I was told I should be trying to avoid sharing a bathroom or at least wiping down surfaces, so I feel a lot like a poison dart frog.  I don't have anything profound or insightful about the experience...I just have a bunch of questions.  I'm only 48 hours post chemo, and I'm wondering when the worst side effects will set in. And when I can expect to start feeling better. And whether all this is just a bandaid covering a bullet wound that will stay with me for the rest of my natur

Having stage 4 (most likely uterine...results pending) cancer is about to become my whole personality for a while. Sorry about that! Or maybe not all that sorry? When I worked at Trader Joe's 14ish years ago, I had a man tell me he found out his cancer was terminal when I asked him how he was. I remember wondering why he was shopping and why he would share information with the 24 year old kid on register.  And then I was told I had cancer. I, of course, went food shopping. I could feel the earth sliding out from under me, and I wanted something normal.  When the cashier asked me how I was, I wanted to blurt out that I had cancer, but I stopped myself, because it seemed unfair to unload all of that onto someone who literally just wanted to finish their shift and go home. Throughout this whole process, I have been wishing I could just stop time. Just pause everything and breathe. Or sleep. Anything but think about the road that lies ahead. But life doesn't stop. I still have to e

  Recently, I've started to pair down. I've thrown out or donated a huge chunk of my stuff, and I still have so much! An entire apartment full! 2 bookshelves, 1 clothing dresser, 1 linen dresser, a game cabinet, all my cooking stuff, holiday decorations, a closet full of clothes, a bed with lots of stuff underneath, extra wallets, watches, jewelry, towels...the list goes on. This is what survived my first cull; the stuff I'm not ready to donate. But why!? Anyone who's interacted with the world around them at all can see that there is lots of stuff.    There is so much stuff! And because we have so much, we need stuff to organize our stuff, and ways to keep track of our stuff, and storage lockers to store the extra stuff until we need it, and bigger houses for more stuff.   Don't get me wrong: I really enjoy using the stuff I have! Last year, I bought a rice cooker/crockpot/steamer, and the other day I was able to start cooking dinner while I went to grab the last

    I have a fantastic imagination (I should note here that the word fantastic isn't meant to be a synonym for "really good"...more like "unreal or based in fantasy").  As a child, I spent hours in my room imagining I was on adventures or had run away.  Once (okay...more than once), I cut the tip off of a feather, squeezed the ink out of a whole bunch of markers, and proceeded to write a few letters to my imaginary family in rudimentary cursive.      I have not lost this ability, and it can be useful.  Like I've mentioned before, I have to talk (or write) to process things, and sometimes I'll have imaginary conversations with people before I actually talk to them.  This helps me figure out what I want to say and how I want to say it (downside: I look a little crazy).  However, i t isn't always a useful thing for me, and sometimes it's downright harmful.  But before I talk about my specific brand of imagination, I'm going to look at easy