Where in the hell have you been, Debby?

Life happened. That’s where I’ve been.

You may recall that there was a lot of death in my family. My sister Judy in 2007. My mom 10 months later in 2008. Dad in 2012. Then, in November of 2014 my younger sister Lisa was diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer called inflammatory breast cancer. She died two months later in January 2015. It’s a very aggressive cancer and it’s brutal.

I couldn’t write much after she died. It broke me.

Cut to 2017. On June 19, I was diagnosed with stage 3c ovarian cancer. That’s just a friendly wave away from being stage 4. I did 6 months of chemo and learned in January 2018 that I was in remission. Joy all around except that having ovarian cancer is like having the Sword of Damocles hanging over your head. It comes back. Always. Over and over. Mine returned in June 2019. (What’s with June? I fully expect the next round to happen in June 2022.) Again, I did 6 months of standard chemo through my port ending in late December. This time there was no remission. The chemo killed the cancer on my peritoneum and abdominal fascia, but not the two tumors on my liver. It did, however, significantly shrink them. So I started taking oral chemo in January 2020 and I’m still taking it now, twice a day every 12 hours.

I asked my oncologist how long I have to take the oral chemo and she replied, “Until your cancer comes back.” That was a sobering thought. I’ve been taking the chemo 16 months now. So far it has kept the tumors on my liver from growing. The average amount of time/life the oral chemo buys for a woman with ovarian cancer is two years. Eight months or so from now I’ll be very interested to see what happens. Maybe I’ll get a miracle. Maybe I won’t. Maybe the cancer will strike my liver again. Or maybe I will get cancer in my breasts since I’m at high risk for breast cancer. How do I know? We did a little thing called genetic testing. It turns out that I have the BRCA2 gene mutation. This variant is rare and is hereditary. I don’t know if I got it from my mom or my dad. They can’t be tested because they have both passed on. Having this mutation puts me at high risk for breast cancer and elevated risk for pancreatic cancer and melanoma. I’m a patient in the High Risk Breast Cancer Program at the hospital my oncologist is affiliated with, and once a year I see a dermatologist who goes over every square inch of skin on my body with a high-powered magnifying glass.

I neglected to mention that in December 2017 I fell in my kitchen and managed to separate the femur from my hip. Recovering from that took up the first four months of my remission.

As you can see, I’ve been a little busy. Now let’s get down to it.

Last we were here, I was writing a book about my mom and her Alzheimer’s disease. That all changed when I was diagnosed with cancer. Now the book is about my cancer and living with it. In the five years I’ve been working on it, I don’t have much. I’ve completely trashed it and started over twice now. I can’t write when I’m depressed and let me tell you, cancer makes me depressed. Also, with chemo, it’s hard to concentrate and focus enough to write. I have chemo brain and that is not conducive to writing. Then, we have the covid pandemic. You can add that to the depression and the chemo brain. Until I started writing this blog post, I hadn’t written a word in over a year. I wasn’t sure I could still write, but I’m managing to put a lot of words down here, though this is far from the best writing I’ve ever done.

I have so much to do. I’m 67 years old, I have cancer, I’m on chemo, I’m ridiculously fatigued every day. Somehow I have to learn how to find an agent, how to pitch a book to an agent, read through an enormous amount of rejection slips, find another agent, submit the manuscript again, learn what goes into self-publishing if no book company is interested in publishing my book, and the hundred little things that I don’t even know about yet that go into getting a book accepted and published. I’ve got to learn how to promote myself in this blog and on Twitter (that’s me @DebbyAmI) which includes learning to download gifs and videos and how to post gifs and videos and all sort of things. I’m tired. When I say I’m tired, I don’t mean the kind of tired that you get every day. This is chemo-inducing-bone-crushing-napping-3-hours-a-day-cancer-is-wearing-me-out tired. I’m too old for this shit. So the only thing I’m going to concentrate on now is writing the book. The rest can wait for a while. I have to get this written before I die if only for me.

To that end, I’m going out of town for a week next month to see if a change of scenery and uninterrupted time will jump start my writing. By uninterrupted time, I mean not watching so much TV or taking two hours to read the New York Times. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this.

It’s been good seeing you all again. Don’t expect to hear from me every week, but I commit to every month and more often if I can manage it. Before I go, let me tell you the one big lesson I’ve learned in this cancer journey. Time truly is short. You learn this lesson pretty quickly when your mortality is staring you in the face. You want to eat popcorn for dinner? Do it. You want wine with breakfast, dessert before every meal? You want to write a book? Do it. Do it all. Don’t let time run out and end up regretting what you didn’t do.

(I saw that after publishing I didn’t edit the tags and I don’t know how to change them. I’ll do better next time.)