Visit To The Thyroid Surgeon

Last Tuesday I had an appointment with the surgeon to discuss when I would be having my operation. We decided that I would book it for late October, early November. He ran through the basics regarding the surgery and then gave me his business card so that I could get in touch with his surgery to book a definite date.

The next day I looked in my bag for the card but could not find it. I looked in my tote bag, it wasn't there either. I looked in the car incase I had left in there but it wasn't anywhere to be found. A couple of hours later I went back and looked in all these places again but still could not find his card. The following day, at work, I decided that I would 'google' his surgery and find his telephone number. Well, what I found was not what I was expecting. A search pulled up articles on this surgeon which were about how one of his patients had died whilst in his care. He had perforated her bowel and was found by the Medical Council, to have shown negligence in looking after her at Wakefield Hospital. The patient was admitted to Wellington Hospital and died five days after her surgery. The surgeon has since been prohibited from working at Wakefield Hospital. Cripes!!! So needless to say, I did not ring his surgery and book a date...in fact I will be finding another surgeon. I have not come all this way through breast cancer to die on the operating table having my thyroid taken out.

The strangest thing was, when I got home that evening, here was his business card, in my tote bag, where I had looked for it twice before. If that is not divine intervention.....then tell me what is!

Where To From Hair

Thursday 23rd September was officially my last day of chemotherapy. It was a strange feeling that I would not be coming back and I know I am going to miss some of the people that I have met whilst having my treatment.

In the morning before my chemo appointment, I had an appointment with a specialist at the Womens clinic with regards to my fibroids. He doctor said that he was most unimpressed by my fibroids and didn't actually know why I had been sent there. He decided to see me again in March when I would have an ultrasound to see if the fibroids had grown at all. As long as they aren't giving me any trouble, then he was quite happy to leave well alone. In other words, if it ain't broken, don't fix it.

I then went on to chemo ward. I gave Margaret, my Cancer Society Volunteer angel a bunch of flowers to thank her for all that she had done for me. There were a lot of women that I had met over the six months that wanted to see me before I left, so it was a very busy afternoon.

If you remember a few posts back I had made some premature baby beanies. Well my contact came to see me whilst I was having chemo and told me that the hospital shop had decided to sell these cut little hats on my behalf, so I pretty pleased about that.

So I walked out of the oncology ward feeling somewhat of a free woman, although I know I am sure I will go back and visit from time to time. I went home and cooked tea and opened a bottle of bubbly to celebrate.

Also if you remember back as far as six months when I blogged about the orcas and how they inspired me to face six months of chemotherapy. Well I have added a new charm to my Pandora bracelet to commemorate. I couldn't find an actual orca but I think this little whale is close enough. At least I know what it means. The little angel next to it is the charm that my daughters gave me for Xmas last year. It was this little angel that was to look after me whilst I recovered. I think she did her job extremely well, don't you think!


I have pretty much ditched my wig now as my hair is sprouting like new spring growth. I think I mentioned a few blogs back that I had bought myself a new hat. Well here it is.


So now I have lots of things to look forward to.
1. Shedding the 5kgs that I put on whilst having chemo
2. The growth of JBeanies
3. My cousin Helen arriving from the UK on 15th October for eight days
4. Holiday up north with my husband and cousin, doing all the touristy things
5. My hair growing back; and it's off to a great start.

You've Got To Have a Nipple Or Two!

Well it's been a little while since my last post. I seem to have been extremely busy getting on with lots of things so I intend to post about three different things this weekend.

Firstly, my very long overdue post about my new nipple.
At the end of August my daughter and myself went to my plastic surgeon's rooms at Bowen Hospital to have my old/new nipple grafted on. It was really quite funny as my surgeon held up the lid from a vivid marker and held it against my new breast and asked me if it looked in about the right place. After he had decided where it should go he injected my right boobie with two lots of anaesthetic. Boy did that make my eyes water. He also numbed the new breast.

He then set about cutting off the top of my nipple....this I could not watch as he started slicing with the scalpel. Once he had cut it off, he put it down on the trolley next to me.

What a strange sensation, seeing part of your body detached and laying there. The strangest thing was that once it was cut off and the blood drained from it, it went a normal skin colour.
He then stitched up what was left of the old nipple. Then he cut a hole in my new breast for the new nipple to sit on. The hole was cut so that the blood vessels could attach themselves to the new appendage. Then with a tiny, half circle needle, he delicately stitched it on to it's new home. Now after a month it is completely healed and is the correct colour. And no, I don't have any feeling in it but my new boobie looks a bit more normal with it's cherry on top. I go back on the 28th of October to get the final stage done which is the tattoo of the areola.

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.

Half Way There

I had my sixth lot of paclitaxel yesterday....goodness me, the time is flying with this. Everything is going really well with it and have no side effects. The chemo nurses call me a little star because of this. The only problem occuring is that by this stage in the treatment, the veins in my hand know what is coming every week and are starting to shrink away from the needle. On the fifth session, the veins were not behaving and I had to have one inserted closer up the hand by the wrist bone.....boy did that make my eyes water. This time they tried another one but with no success so they had to go in by the wrist again. If these naughty veins don't get their act together I will have to have a PIC line put in which is a long tube down the vein of my arm which is ultrasound guided. This will have to stay in place until my treatment is finished. Another method is to have a port-a-cath inserted in my chest which is put in under general anaesthetic, hhhhmmm not to keen on being put out again, so we will just have to see how it goes.

Other than that, life has been quite busy. I have been making beanies flat out and getting in touch with different agencies who may like to help me market them. For the link to my website, click on the JBeanies tab at the top of the page.

I had my new nipple created a few weeks ago. Once my dressings are off I will be posting about that and putting up photos for those that are interested.

So I am now half way through the paclitaxel and have half a new nipple. Good things certainly do take time.

Up And At 'Em

Well, time is flying.  I have been so busy lately that I haven't got around to posting.
I had my 3rd round of Paclitaxel last week.  I didn't have any reaction the two previous times so I was allowed out of the ward and into a laz-y-boy this time.  I also only had to have half of the antihistamine.  So I am now over a quarter of the way through.  I have had relatively little side effects, just a little tired, but what's new!  I feel almost 100% again and am back cooking meals, getting groceries and doing a little bit of exercise.

You regular bloggers may remember a few posts back that I was busy making chemotherapy beanies.  Well I have gone one step further with this concept and have gone into mass production, if you will.

I told the wonderful Cancer Society volunteer at Oncology that I would like to start making them for other wearers and she has helped me immensley in getting this off the ground.  So far she has given me email addresses of four women who may be interested.  Over the weekend my lounge became a sewing factory and by 6pm Sunday evening I had cut out and sewn 17 beanies, all in beautiful bright colours.   I have also put together my own little business card and am in the process of completing a flyer.  My darling husband has built me a website and if you click on the J'Beanies tab at the top of the page, it will take you to the link.

These beautiful beanies will also be available through this blog at $12.50 each.
I have gone with a jelly bean theme because of:-
1.  The bright colours that I will be using are similar to jelly bean colours
2.  The play on the word beanies and beans
3.  The 'J' obviously being my initial.

I have also approached our local Cancer Society and they are interested in perhaps displaying them for me.

So out of a bad situation, perhaps a new venture will be born. Wish me luck!!