Part Twenty-Three: Cope and Hope

            I’m getting tired of myself.  Maybe bored with my company, weary of all this focus on me and my cancer experience.  I’m definitely sick and tired of being sick and tired.  But the problem is that it seems all I can do is live through each present moment and write about it.  The writing helps me cope, and the writing helps me hope that I am helping someone.  But, to be honest, I’d much rather be at the beach.

            Instead, I am enduring the hundred-degree heat in my air-conditioned house.  On Tuesday, though, my daughter and I made the trek to Tulsa for two doctor appointments.  The air conditioning in my car is not nearly as good as in the house.

            We arrived early for the one p.m. appointment at Breast Surgery of Tulsa because we had anticipated slowdowns due to lunch-hour traffic.  Evidently, no one was going to lunch in the extreme heat.  I was not sure what to expect from this six-week check-up with Dr. LaNette Smith, who will do my surgery after I’m done with chemotherapy, but I knew I would enjoy seeing her.  She is the most compassionate physician I have ever met.  She carefully listened to my woes and discouragement and never once told me it wasn’t so bad.  That brought me so much comfort.  And then a more tangible sense of comfort came when she did an ultrasound examination of the tumor:  it is pulling away from the chest wall, which is precisely what is needed to be able to remove it.  For the first time, she said the word “lumpectomy” instead of “mastectomy,” and that gave me hope as well.

            We left her office with almost two hours to spare before my next appointment.  Fortunately, there is a Panera’s right down the road from her office.  Dana and I shared a meal and drank coffee to revive us for the rest of the afternoon.  In the company of my daughter, time passed quickly.  OCSRI was less than a fifteen minute drive down the highway, and we arrived there on the dot of three, I believe.

            I was there to see my nurse, Deb, who wanted to check how I was doing after the reduced chemo dosage of last week.  Dana and I reported on my miserable fatigue of the first four days after the treatment as well as the hopeful bits of feeling a little better and stronger on Monday and Tuesday.  Deb shows her compassion more in the mama bear sort of way, reminding me to keep fighting and not give up.  There is only one more treatment with this heavy-duty, hard-hitting chemo combination, and then come the twelve weekly treatments, which are usually better tolerated. 

            Wednesday was hopeful, too.  In the morning, I asked myself what I really wanted to do, and gradually shaved down the list to a manageable size.  I went out to eat a much-longed-for sandwich at Jude’s, dropped in on my pastor at the church, and then stopped in at Hopestone, where a perfectly lovely volunteer (and breast cancer survivor) helped me select five different turbans. 

            Later, when I left the house to give my son a ride (how wonderful it was to feel well enough to do that!) I drove off without anything on my head.  “Driving bald,” I thought, and started laughing—and turned around to go back home and put on one of those new turbans.  Still later, having supper with my daughter and her family and still wearing my new headgear, I answered my three-year-old granddaughter’s usual question, “Where’s your hair?” and let her pull up the back of my head covering to see and feel the back of my bald head. 

            Today (Thursday) I celebrated my 61^st birthday by going grocery shopping at Aldi’s.  It was a positively liberating experience.  Later this afternoon, a couple from my church are bringing me a meal.  In the evening, a friend is going to treat me to a delicious frozen custard.  And on Sunday, we’re having a family meal at Dana and Shawn’s house to celebrate my birthday and my son Joseph’s birthday (how can my “baby” be 31?). 

            It is beyond wonderful to have some days of feeling better after so many days of feeling lousy.  These days of hope help me cope.