Monday, July 18

Quote of the Day:  “We are new every day.”  Anonymous

Exercise Log:  Today I awoke to meet friends at 6:00 A.M. to walk.  Kathy C., Patti, Linda, Denise, Kathy E., Sue O. and me.  We walked over to the diagonal above Wasatch and then back again along Wasatch Blvd.  My chest gets tight when I walk for extended periods.  I really feel fatigued when we go up hills.  3.15 miles.  

Saturday night, Suzanne Harmon and Ann Benton brought us dinner.  Delicious chicken and rice, beautiful spinach salad with berries and fruit with a poppy-seed dressing, rolls, and Fat Boys!  Alex has especially been the lucky recipient of all these meals.  He is going to miss them!  Ann and Suzanne have been the kind of friends you know are thinking, caring and worrying about you.  I so appreciate them for that.  How lucky I am to have people like that on my team.  They have each called me at times when I needed a boost which just tells them they are listening to the spirit.

Rosemary Wixom came by last week with homemade salsa and chips.  It was the best salsa I have ever tasted- chocked full of vegetables including avocado.  I haven’t been able to eat spicy foods with the chemo side effects but this tasted fabulous.  It was gone too quickly.  I mostly loved visiting with her.  We share Maggie and Kate as grandparents and I couldn’t think of a more wonderful family for my grandchildren to be nurtured by.  Maggie is so cute when she talks about “Grandma Rommey”.  Rosemary is such an amazing person that you’d think one would be jealous of all her fine qualities, actually, she makes me want to be a better person and I just admire all that she does!

Just one more Maggie story.  Maggie was over the other day and when she returned home Mary asked her “How is Grandma Joanie?” to which Maggie thought about for a few seconds and then replied “Well, she’s still bald.”   Not one day passes that I don’t just laugh at some cute thing that she says.

Drains are still a part of my world.  I have too much fluid to remove the last two so I will call on Wednesday and hopefully they will remove them then.  Just one more annoying thing on this trek of healing.  I’m just praying that these implants sometime soon will feel normal and allow me to sleep with comfort.  It’s funny how you miss just the simple pleasures of sleep and how you own body feels.  

I visited the ob-gyn doctor- she specializes in cancer and she is the surgeon to do the oophorectomy or hysterectomy.  She comes highly recommended and I was so impressed with her office and manner.  She apologized for keeping me waiting and explained everything really well.  She said that the difference between doing one operation vs. the other is that with the hysterectomy they take your uterus and sometimes cervix.  There is some tissue left after an oophorectomy that could allow for ovarian cancer because it’s attached to the uterus and has to be left but it’s so minimal.  Oophorectomy is out-patient, hysterectomy is over-night.   Hysterectomies typically take between 4-6 weeks for recovery.  I am leaning towards doing the big one- just because it would mean all that tissue is gone that could possible lead to  cancer.  Sure, some of my decisions are somewhat fear based but I asked her what she would do and she said the hysterectomy.  By doing these surgeries, it brings my ovarian cancer lifetime rate down from 60% to 1-2%.  Isn’t that amazing?

Here’s one example that made me really like her.  When she first came in the room, she said that I looked really good for just having surgery.  I explained that I was a runner so I was in good shape before all this occurred and she said “No, You are a runner”.  I made me realize how much my life has changed and how many things have been taken from me and even how I am doubting myself.