A Few Things To Think About

I had trouble coming up with a title for this post but then when I thought back over the last couple of weeks this title caps it all off nicely.

Over the last month I have been doing quite a lot of brainstorming and networking to get JBeanies out there. I have brochures in various clinics around the lower north island and a couple of Cancer Societies are coming on board and putting the word out there about my product. One branch has ordered a dozen straight off; so I am really pleased about that. One lady who bought a beanie a few weeks back, suggested to me that I should make gardening sleeves (which she had seen on Good Morning whilst she was waiting in reception at chemo). She thought that they would be ideal for women like ourselves who have had lymph nodes removed through surgery and have to go to great lengths to protect the limb from cuts, scratches, insect bites and sunburn whilst working outside. So I have taken that on board and have made some of these and intend selling them though my JBeanies website, once I have photographed them. Of course once I decided to make them I had to think up a name for them and came up with Green Sleeves! Pretty cool eh!

I am done with my wig. I don't wear it if I can help it. I even treated myself to a nice new hat last week. My hair is getting thicker (not thick enough to go without a hat though) and my eyelashes are growing back.

Well, last week's chemo was number 11. This last regime has gone really fast for me, although I will be releived when it is finished with. I am starting to get really tired now as the district nurse predicted I would. My bones ache (which is another side effect) but then that could be old age creeping in, not just the chemo. I suppose after having chemo for the last six months, it is starting to take its toll. The travelling in and out to Wellington once a week is also quite tiring; well not so much the chemo itself, but the looking round the shops afterwards. Monday and Tuesday nights I am tucked up in bed by 7.30.

As I sat having my infusion last week I looked around at the other people there, all for the same reason. In this room it doesn't matter if you are young or old, black or white, rich or poor, highly successful or unemployed, male or female. Cancer does not discriminate! It can effect anybody. And you know what? We all probably thought that Cancer is what happens to somebody else. And here we all are....the somebody elses. Then I see and talk to people who have it real bad but you would never know by their great attitudes and positive spirit. I look at other people who look really sick and hope beyond hope that my monster has gone. Never to return. When I walk out of the clinic after my last infusion next week, I hope I never have to go back for chemo ever!

Moving On Up

As most of you know, my daughter Nicole and her partner Brad moved back home early this year to help out whilst I recovered. Yesterday they moved out into their lovely new flat at Paraparaumu Beach. For me this signifies one thing. I am through the storm. For the past nine months I feel like I have been living in a vortex that has resolved around nothing nothing but cancer, cancer, cancer. Tossing us all around to face the unknown. Things seeming to spin out of our control whilst other peoples lives just carried on the same. And now after such a ride I feel like I am coming in to land. I feel like I have been on some strange holiday but not really remembering it but at the same time feeling like my old self again. In a strange way it feels like I am emerging as somebody new. I still have three shots of chemo left and my thyroid operation but I know that the race is nearly won. A whole year has gone by.....but where??? There is really not a lot of good stuff that has happened in the past 12 months; not many photographs have been taken for me to scrapbook. In a strange kind of way I will miss the little network of medics that I have got to know well. I told the nurses at oncology that I will have to find somewhere else to go on a Thursday when my chemo is over. I have met some wonderful people there; the nurses, the volunteers and other patients.

I seem to have become a bit of a celebrity at the Blood and Cancer Centre, it appears. I was sitting in the waiting room last Thursday, minding my own business, when the Cancer Society volunteer rushed up to me and said that she had been looking for me everywhere. She said that she had ladies having chemo who were asking whether I was here today with my beanies. The volunteer asked me if I had them with me, to which I replied, yes. She then said for me to hand the bag over to her so that she could take them down to the ladies to look at. She hardly gave me time to remove my lunch out of the bag before she took off down to the chemo ward.

Thanks to this lovely volunteer I now am allowed to display a mannequin sporting one of my beanies in the actual chemotherapy rooms. This wonderful volunteer promotes them to almost everyone that comes in for chemo. She is an angel.

But getting back to Thursday.....every time I sat down in my laz-y-boy she would come around and ask me to go and meet this lady and that lady who all wanted to meet me and buy my beanies. It's getting a bit out of control. Now I have been asked if I would like to make miniature beanies for premature babies at the neo-natal ward. I didn't know where to start with the sizing but according to the internet, using an orange for measurements is pretty close. Look at these cuties.