One

Dear Quinn-Bug,

You turned one year old this week. And oh what a year it's been! Like the saying goes about the month in which you were born, you came into our lives like a lion, roaring to be heard. Everyday now you have something new to tell us. Yes, that's right - you're already starting to form words. "Baba" for bottle, "ge" for blankie, "ki ka" for the cats, and "dada" for you-know-who. I asked you to say Mama yesterday, and you responded DADA! But you gave me a big snuggle, so it's okay.

You're always pointing at the world around you now, wanting to know everything's name (or demanding that we bring it to you to examine, usually by seeing if it fits in your mouth). You're testing your independence, throwing your food and tupperware containers and your spoon over the side of your highchair when you've had enough. We either need to break you of that habit or adopt a dog to lick up the mess.

You are walking running all over the place now, usually carrying a toy in each hand. You plow through any obstacle in your way, including the cats. At least you're good at falling down - always on your butt or with your arms outstretched to brace you. You scratched your face on a branch the other day, and I freaked out, worrying about whether you were okay. You? You barely noticed. Didn't let it slow you down a bit.

And that's probably because you were outside. Like your Dad, outside is your favorite place to be, and you'd spend all day out there if we'd let you. We might if there were ever clouds in the sky or some semblance of shade to protect you from the blazing Arizona sun.

It's hard to believe that a year has passed since we brought you home from the hospital, scared out of our minds that we'd break you, exhausted already, hopelessly in love. You've made our family complete, and it just keeps getting better. You are pure joy. I dare anyone to spend any time around you and not feel it radiating from you. It's as if you swallowed a light bulb.

This time last year, we had no idea what was in store for us. Along the way, someone remarked to me that they couldn't imagine going through cancer with a baby at home; I couldn't imagine going through it without you. I hope you never remember your Mama sick, but I hope you always know what strength you gave me - continue to give me - through this journey.

I hope you know your Mama loves everything about you.

Happy FIRST Birthday!

Motto

Before my mastectomy, I had to get an EKG to test my heart, to make sure it would be strong enough for surgery. As I waited in the hospital lobby, I flipped through a Good Housekeeping magazine from last summer, with Michael J. Fox on the cover; the feature article was about the actor turning 50. In his interview, he said that there's a motto in acting that he applies to his life: "Don't act the end."

I find myself thinking of that motto a lot lately, as I adjust to life in remission, as I try to find my new normal. The pain of surgery is gone now, and at six weeks post-op, I've resumed most daily activities. What I'm struggling with now is getting beyond mere survival, getting to a point where I'm not constantly looking over my shoulder for the boogeyman, getting back to life.

In the day-to-day grind of just-get-me-through-this that I've felt so much of the last six months, there has been a cement block of guilt weighing down on me for what I've missed, or haven't had the energy for, or haven't appreciated (or even written down in his baby book) so far in my son's life. I hate it that there were so many days I felt relief at the end of the day, simply because Quinn had fallen asleep and I didn't have the energy to keep up. It's a terrible feeling, not being able to enjoy your days because you are too busy trying to survive them.

And then there's the fear that still rears its ugly head - less often now, but still ugly. A friend recently asked me how I live with that fear without letting it get in the way of all the good moments. I admitted that some nights I find myself crying just giving Quinn a bath, watching him splash and giggle and play with his plastic bath toys. Our lives are so fragile. And then I try to push that fear aside, to let it allow me to appreciate each moment with him even more than I might have before cancer.

In the Good Housekeeping article, Michael J. Fox explained his motto this way: if you know a bus is closing in on you as you stand in the middle of the road, there's still a lot of space to fill between where you are and the moment that bus hits you. In other words, don't act like you've been hit by the bus until it happens.

I'm two and a half months out from chemo now. My hair is returning, slowly. Life goes on, and yet, the axle around which my life spins has been knocked off-kilter. I'm trying to find my new center of gravity, and it's a strange, unbalanced space to occupy. I no longer feel like that bus is closing in on me. And although there are no guarantees in this life, between now and when that bus does someday hit, I have a lot of enjoying my days to get to.

Ping Pong

I was supposed to have a CT scan this morning, so that my radiation oncologist could begin "mapping," or preparing a model for where and at what intensity I'll get hit with radiation. 

But first I have to have my boobs deflated.

Over the past three weeks, I've received weekly injections of varying amounts of saline into the expanders under my pectoral muscles, like ever-growing water balloons in my chest. The goal is to slowly stretch the skin and muscle so that eventually, about a year from now, they can easily insert implants into the pockets they've created. The process feels about as comfortable as it sounds.

But for radiation to work optimally, the surface needs to be as flat as possible. Turns out, they haven't figured out how to bend photons yet. Those physisicts are seriously slacking. So my medical team plastic surgeon is working to expand, expand, expand me just up to the point he has to deflate me for radiation.

Yesterday, when I asked my plastic surgeon what his end goal was - and I meant size-wise - he said simply: "Perfection." He's mentioned more than once how unfortunate it is that I have to have radiation. You're telling me, I think. He's worried about his artistry; I've promised to be diligent with the aloe and shea butter.

Perfect boobs isn't quite the same goal my oncologists have, though, and the back and forth (and back and forth some more) between my radiation oncologist and my plastic surgeon about timing, expansion, deflation, mapping and where I need to be for what appointments when has me feeling like a ping pong ball lately.

Right now, it's looking like I'll have most of the saline removed from my expanders in two weeks, then the CT mapping, and then radiation beginning right around mid-March. But I won't be surprised if that all gets turned on its head and pigs do a fly-by of my house in the meantime.

My Valentine

I'm a few days late on this, but since we're still in the same week as Valentine's Day, I think it's still relevant. When I wrote about Quinn being my savior, my mom gave me a little bit of a rough time about it. She said, "I really think Chris is the one you should be thanking. He's your warrior." And here's the thing: she's right - Chris IS my rock. (Too corny to insert a geology joke here?) So how about I give them both credit? Because those two guys are my entire world.

If you've been married, you know that you never really know what you're getting into when you say "I do" to someone. I might be quoting from previews for next week's episode of The Bachelor when I say that marriage is the ultimate gamble.

What? It's an addictive show.

My wedding day was one of the happiest days of my life. See?

And you think you're making an informed decision, forging a bond with someone who makes your heart skip a beat. Someone who makes you feel safe and shares your dreams and makes you laugh. Someone who embraces your family and friends and you for all the imperfections and oddities and quirkiness, and opens up to let you see those same vulnerabilities in him.

But can you ever know how that person will react when you come home one afternoon with cancer?

So if marriage is a gamble, then I won that lottery. Because when I came home that day with my terrible news, and my knees threatened to crumble underneath me, Chris held me up and then shored me through the roughest two weeks of my life. Not to mention the last six months.

HOLY SHIT HOW HAVE WE BEEN DEALING WITH THIS FOR SIX MONTHS?!?

I guess I ought to thank him.

So thanks, babe. Thanks for letting me cry on your shoulder in the shower and for washing my "hair" when my T-Rex arms couldn't reach above my shoulders after surgery.

Thanks for being strong for me so that I could be strong for myself and for Bug, so that we could get through all of this.

Thanks for all you do to keep our household running (I swear, there will come a time when you're not constantly washing baby bottles).

Thanks for calming me down when I thought our cat had run away, only to discover him hiding in my closet 14 hours later, poor cat.

Thanks for being Bug's best friend (and mine) and for putting up with the emotional roller coaster ride cancer has led us on. We're so close to being done with this ordeal.

I couldn't have made it through any of this or gotten to this without you.

I promise to stop crying daily, one of these days, and to listen when you say that "cancer should be the one crying." And I think eventually I'll stop worrying about recurrence, that ugly word. How about I promise I'll love you for the rest of my very long life?

Because we beat this. We won this war. We have the battle scars to prove it. And I might be quoting yet again from The Bachelor when I say that if we made it through this, we can make it through anything.

Radiation

I met my radiation oncologist, Dr. Finkelstein, yesterday. I'm exhausted, and spent most of the meeting crying between rounds of questions and answers and a tour of the facility. After chemo and surgery, radiation will be step 3 of 3 in fighting this disease, and - as Dr. F put it - is hopefully superfluous. But just in case there are 2 or 3 rogue cancer cells floating around in my chest wall or nearby lymph nodes, the radiation will do them in. Current imaging only shows groups of cells once they've formed their own country; a household or small town would go undetected. Radiation eradicates those small cancer communities.

I'll have somewhere between 25 and 30 treatments, 5 days a week for 5 or 6 weeks (with weekends off for good behavior). From what I understand, radiation works because the photons they shoot into me scramble the DNA of the cells (both normal and cancerous) in the targeted region, damaging them pretty severely. While normal cells can repair themselves, cancer cells are not so good at that function, and so they die when their DNA is this disrupted.

It never ceases to amaze me that cancer treatment is in essence about as much cell damage as possible without killing the patient. How much can your body handle? One piece of good news: the cancer was on my right side, so they don't have to worry about hurting my heart in the process. I like to think that means there's no risk my heart will get broken here.

Dr. F did warn me about the side effects of radiation. There are the immediate ones - from fatigue to skin irritation - as well as the possibility of delayed side effects, such as an increased risk for certain other types of cancer down the road. Like when I'm 80. I told him if I'm around when I'm 80, I'll kiss him. That set off a whole new torrent of tears.

For women with localized disease, radiation is proven to help prevent recurrence. Where there isn't much data is for women like me, who present with advanced and aggressive disease. And the statistics they do have are ugly, quite honestly. So I ignore them. When he was fighting pancreatic cancer, my father-in-law frequently said that statistics are great for the general population, but they don't mean anything for the individual patient.

And as confident as I feel most of the time that cancer is totally out of my body, that I'll get to watch Quinn grow up, get to have a long marriage with the man I love, that this was a fluke and is never coming back, talking yesterday about the real possibility that cancer could come back put a huge lump of fear in my throat. I ran out of vocabulary, and just kept repeating to Chris through my tears: Fuck this fucking fuck disease.