Wanna know about Ray-Dee-A-Shun?

I have one week down of radiation, four to go. Going through radiation has been so much different than going through chemo, and I mean this in the sense of my attitude and point of view. The time before going through chemo felt so ominous, I was scared and trepidacious. I was talking myself through that period with positive thinking and a favourable view point. Radiation however is something I'm simply barrelling through. I'm not putting much energy into thinking about it as it's really not a big deal. I knew it wouldn't be going into it and it's proving me right. Yes, I get a little redness in my chest area where the radiation is being aimed, and yes I've felt a little bit tired from it, but I can deal with a little redness when I'm not getting shot full of ridiculous-sounding names (There's no 'red devil' with rads!) and I can certainly deal with being a bit tired these days after previously being pumped full of insomnia-inducing and mood-altering and ass-expanding steroids.

I've heard the cliche 'compared to chemo, radiation is a cake-walk' and they're right. That's an apt cliche. I'm not trying to tempt fate by putting the cart before the horse in my thinking, but I think I'll be okay. The effects are apparently similiar to severe sunstroke. It'll probably get a bit worse as treatment progresses. The area getting treated will probably eventually blister and it'll be difficult for me to put on clothes, bras will be impossible and mobility will be compromised. But then treatment will be over and I'll be able to 'get on with it.'

I haven't put on my wig since my birthday, which was over a month ago. I'm not going to say that I regret buying it as it did offer me anonymity when I needed it, but I just don't care now. I go everywhere freely -even to the office- with just my hat and prickly head. My facial hair all but disappeared, and is now coming back. I found a long eyelash yesterday and was pretty pumped about that. My eyebrows look funny as they're mostly non-existent except for a few sporadic hairs that stubbornly clung to my face. Typical of something attached to me I think.

My hair is slowly growing back. Last week it was getting quite bushy, but it looked weird and felt like baby hair as the hair that didn't fall out was a bit longer and finer than the hair that was growing back, so Shawn and I once again shaved it. I want it to start growing back uniform and this act certainly helped. Soon I won't be getting the glances from kids at the mall, or the empathetic stares from seniors; I'll mercifully just be another face in the crowd, albeit a heavier version.

Let's address that: I was on Entertainment Tonight Canada a few weeks ago. I was on TV and the sound bite they used was the exact one I wanted them to. It was me talking about how even when I went to the mammogram office with a requisition from my doctor, they didn't want to give me the mammogram because I was 6 months away from my 30th birthday. I feel that by doing that, I have in a way accomplished one of my goals about being open about my diagnosis and bringing awareness to the fact that when the medical community talks about early detection being our best defence, that it isn't just that easy to take the steps necessary for early prevention. I should be proud of myself that I accomplished that. But unfortunately that feeling is overshadowed by seeing myself on TV. I was told that I would be shot from the chest up, but they included a clip of me walking through a hallway -which was a full body shot. I was overcome with embarrassment and anxiety when I saw myself. I was angry that they used that shot. I didn't need to see myself like that on my big screen TV, seeing that I took up half the screen and I apparently waddle instead of walk. I saw every one of my 50 extra pounds on that screen. I was shocked. I don't think I realized I looked like that. That isn't who I saw when I looked in the mirror. It is now so I don't look in the mirror as much, unless I'm doing so just to feel bad and sorry for myself, which does happen, I'll admit.

Isn't it awful that I have this outlook? That I am so hung up with my own vanity that I have allowed a split second image of my weight gain to overshadow such a powerful message? I think I've taken the reality of gaining weight worse than the reality of a cancer diagnosis. What does that say about my personality and my character? I'm disgusted with myself over this, both in the fact that I've gained all this weight as well as the fact that I succumb to negative thinking about it. It's truly sad, I know.

There are much deeper issues with my weight that I've dealt with my whole life, and I'm not getting into that here, but I'll say that I'm very hard on myself in that facet of my life, and I'd really appreciate if no one who reads this mentions it to me. I'm writing about it to see the words I've written and try to combat these self-deprecating feelings, not because I want to talk about it with anyone. Trust me and believe me when I say hearing others give me positive thinking inspirational messages does nothing more than aggravate me. This is a life long battle I have fought before and only I will help myself through it, which will make the victory that much more meaningful.

I have been really open about not having actively reached out as far as support, but I was contacted about being in a research study group regarding the sexual aspects of life after diagnosis as well as the sociopsychological effects. I was contacted right about the time I started chemo, and I agreed to take part in this study. It would be an hour of my time for one night a week starting in late February. My answers and feedback would impact treatment options going forward after your diagnosis. I was compelled to participate in this study. It would be a group of us sitting around in a circle talking about our issues. I would finally get some treatment for my feelings. I was excited about this and the more I thought about participating, the more positive I became about it. I would get to talk about my issues, and could even use the guise of cancer. What I mean by this is that I had issues before cancer (weight, self-image, etc) but now because of cancer I'd get help with that. There were two parts to the study. Everyone would be sent surveys to fill out over the course of a year. After you sent back the first survey, you would contacted to find out when the study group would start. There would be a small handful of people who would be randomly selected by a computer to participate in the control arm of the study (which means you would still have to agree to fill out the surveys, but you wouldn't get to benefit from the actual participation of the group). I was assured that this was a small percentage and most people obviously got to participate in the group. I just last week received the survey, and spent about an hour early one morning filling it out, checking the boxes that most pertain to my thoughts and feelings. I was crying while filling it out. Some parts just hit a nerve or chord with me. Things I hadn't even thought were affecting me were really bringing about strong emotions in me. Now I'm really looking forward to participating in the study and am really happy that I agreed to do this. I know it'll really help me deal with a lot of my issues, and in a private setting with others who are also going through what I am. I envision the help that I will offer and so positive as I'm sure they'll want to hear what someone my age has to contribute to this line of thinking and will want to engage me as to how I am dealing with these issues. I would assume that my age would be of great benefit to them on this point. Not to say older women don't have sexuality issues, but you get what I'm saying. I finished the survey and put it in the mail, anxiously awaiting the phone call that would instruct me on next steps.

I received the call two days ago. They had received my survey, thanks for sending that back. She starts talking to me about the control arm, and how I've been randomly selected by a computer to participate in that aspect of the study. I don't immediately get what she's saying, but it eventually becomes clear; I am in the placebo group. This basically means that I'll be helping them by filling out the surveys over the year, but I don't receive the benefit and therapy of being in the group. You've got to be kidding me! Statistically, this was such a small chance, but why did I allow that reasoning into my thinking? Have I not learned that statistics mean little to me in my life and have 'statistically' been piled against me? Yeah, I'm angry and upset over this. But I let out a big sigh and resign to this fact as well. I guess I shouldn't get upset about this as there's obviously nothing I can do about it, but it's the feeling of a carrot being dangled and then yanked away. I didn't get to taste it yet my mouth watered at the site of it.

This way of thinking is most likely why I've lately been absent on this blog. I've taken a little bit of a break from this writing thing for many reasons. One being that I've been back at work and when I pick up my computer it's to do what I get paid for. Another reason is that I haven't needed the outlet quite as much for myself as I'm glazing over the whole radiation aspect of treatment and just barreling through it to get to the finish line. I already have to talk about it every day with family, close friends, or people who ask me about it daily, which is draining enough without me having to visit this blog and also on top of everything write about it.

I can sum it up here. I go to the cancer centre attached to Lakeshore Health Centre in Oshawa every day, Monday to Friday. Shawn drops me off and goes to the coffee shop around the corner to read his paper and wait for me. We do this to save ourselves the parking expense, which is actually more than we originally thought it would be, and this way Shawn is still there for me as he wants to be but not every day sitting around a waiting room and spending a small fortune to house our car for an hour. I swipe my card at the electronic station, I sit down in front of the jigsaw puzzle I've been working on for the past week, a volunteer offers to get me coffee, juice or tea, which I usually decline, and then a radiation therapist comes and gets me. I'm only in the waiting room for a few minutes. The longest so far has been 11 minutes. They take me to my 'pod' and I change, everything from the waist up, take off my boots, put on the gown, put my stuff in a locker and sit down and wait again, pick up a magazine. They come out of the pod and call me in. I jump up on a gurney-type table that has a massive machine attached to it. This room looks like something out of Alien. It's a big sterile room with a huge foreign machine in the centre. There are radioactive warning signs everywhere, there's a big laser beam thingy on the ceiling and when I lie down, it's usually positioned so that the green light is on my forehead, which freaked me out the first time I lay down. I position my right arm above me in the straps they have and tuck my left hand under my butt. Two people hover above me and talk gibberish with their numbers and codes, and then they put a cold gel-like pad over my scar, where the laser will hit. The first time I went through this, I was waiting for a laser beam to shoot out of the device I can see above my head, the one where the green lights shoot out of. I thought that this is where the beam of radioactive light would enter my body from, but this is not the case. I held my breath the first time, but apparently those green lights are simply to align the coordinates and make sure my chest is positioned properly. The machine that twirls around my body is where the radiation comes from. That makes sense, but you fear the worst in these situations and ludicrous scenarios dance upon your conscious thoughts. Of course, simply asking the question is an obvious answer, but not one that occurred to me in the situation. My first day was all about getting it over with, not getting flooded with information. I didn't care, I just wanted to go through the process and see for myself what happened. I was anxious to simply get on with it. It was on my fourth visit that I finally started asking intelligent questions like 'where does the radiation come from?'
The longest part of the process is them setting up the machine so it is positioned correctly. Then they leave the room and the machine whirls around me and feeds radiation into me. I don't see this and I don't feel this. It's similar to getting an xray, except I'm lying down and told repeatedly to stay still. Which is always exactly the time that my nose gets incredibly and unbearably itchy. This process takes all of 7 minutes; 5 minutes to set it up and about 2 once they start process. I change and call Shawn and go wait upstairs for him to come and get me. It's about a 30-40 minute experience from the time I leave the car to the time I get back in it.

This is how it goes every day.

I can't promise to write much more on this forum. One because it simply is too exhausting for me now to have everyone knowing and talking to me about my deepest thoughts. I really felt the need to do that and educate people on what I'm going through, but if I'm going to continue being honest, I'll admit I find it pretty annoying now. I cringe now when my blog is brought up, mostly because people want talk about something so personal that I've written. That wasn't my intent with this. I wanted to inform, not engage. But you can't control that and I took that as part of the process of me writing and posting it publicly. But with all the other issues I'm going through right now, I've felt the need to distance myself from that aspect of my life; this aspect of my life.

I think I've done what I set out to do, which is inform and educate. I thank everyone who has taken an interest in my story, whatever your motivation to do so was. I am now concentrating on getting through radiation without feeling the need to write all about it. I need to eventually concentrate on my own health and perception, and I'll probably write about that, but right now I think that'll be too private to post. I'll owe myself honesty and I can't truthfully say it would be that way if it's on a public forum, and then that would negate the whole therapeutic purpose behind it. Weight is a personal demon for me and one that I find hard to be strong and positive about. I may post that whole process eventually, but only if I'm successful with my efforts! :D

Thanks to all of you who've followed along this quest for self-awareness. I feel that I wrote all this for a purpose. It's certainly not over for me, and know that all of your positive energy is reaching me and propelling me forward so I am able to tackle the next phase of my life, recovery.

Kelly McIvor

See me on ET on Friday!

I know I know, it's been awhile, hasn't it? Well, I really have no good excuse other than I've been back at work for the past little while and have found it difficult to sit down and update some entries. My apologies to all of you who have contacted me inquiring if I'm done writing. Mmmmm, not quite yet.

I had a wonderful time over the holidays spent with close friends and family. My Christmas was pretty much exactly how I described it in my last post; Craig and I got spoiled as usual, we had overstuffed pillowcases and played games after all the presents were opened, I got whooped by my brother at 'Scene It' which was quite shocking to me as I'm an ace with movie trivia (obviously I'm blaming this defeat on chemo brain!), then we enjoyed a nice dinner at the house with friends, Shawn came by after dinner and picked me up and that was another amazing Xmas under our belt.

The next day, Boxing Day, was our 'Anniversmus' which was our 3 year anniversary and when we exchanged our Xmas gifts (hence the name). We'd decided that going forward we wouldn't buy each other Anniversary gifts, we'll just buy a big ticket item and consider that our gift to each other. It gets crazy with both our birthdays and our parents birthdays and Christmas AND our anniversary all literally within one month (December 7th-January 7th) so this makes sense for us. As it happened, I ended up being wide awake and getting out of bed at about 6am on boxing day, so I decided I'd go shopping as it was so early and I was wide awake and stores were actually open already, so I headed to Future Shop. I got there before 7am and the place was a zoo! I grabbed their flyer and rifled through it as I walked around to see the crazy deals, but nothing piqued my interest. There was a 20 person line up just to speak with a sales rep in the electronics dept, there was a crazy line up to check out and even a line to simply leave the store if you had merchandise as security was going to check your receipt. Shawn and I had already decided that we were going to purchase a TV for our bedroom as our gift to each other as the one we currently use is an old RCA I've had for about 15 years and it's the one where the VCR is actually attached to it, so definitely time for an upgrade, but anyway, the real deals at future shop were on the huge LCDs and plasmas and that's not what we need so I walked around sipping my XL double double for a while and then left. In the same plaza there was Canadian Tire and they didn't seem as busy, so I headed over there to walk around and this is where I hit the jackpot. Their doorcrasher deal was a 32" HD LCD flat screen for under $500 and there were only 50 at each store. I headed right to the electronics and chucked one of those bad boys in my cart! Extremely pleased with myself, I looked around for more deals and found lots more! After not being able to possibly fit anything more in my cart (actually, having to pile everything I had at the cash and then run through the store desperately to grab the 75% off ottoman), I cashed out and left in the best mood ever! I was on a deal high so I got home and unloaded the loot and wanted to have it all set up by the time Shawn woke up. I think I was home and unpacked before 9am! My dad ended up calling and came by as I had movies that he wanted to watch, so he stayed for a while and as I was saying bye to him, Shawn came down and saw the TV and looked at me like I was a nut job when I told him I'd already been out Boxing Day shopping but was super happy when I showed him what I got for under $500. We had a great day together and spent the rest of the week hanging out and seeing our friends. On New Year's we really wanted to keep it low key and didn't care at all if it was just him and I taking in New Year's from our couch, but we ended up going over to our friend's house and spent New Year's with them. They did a Chinese hot pot for dinner, which was absolutely fantastic! We were told that they'd do dinner and it would be a fondue. To be honest, neither of us were particularly looking forward to that, neither of us has even tried fondue, and the idea of eating melted oily cheese that bread is dipped into sounded to me like gut rot in the making, but I was curious to try it since I never had. Turns out, it wasn't technically fondue, it was just prepared using 2 fondue sets. Katie had cut up and marinated chicken, steak and pork, with different kinds of vegetables and white rice. Basically you throw the veggies into this simmering 'hot pot' which is just chicken stock, and you skewer whatever meat you want and stick it right into the pot to cook, then you spoon the vegetables over your rice and take out your meat after a minute or two. At the end of your dinner, the chicken stock and all the leftover veggies are poured into soup bowls and you drink it. The marinade from the meat gives it a kick and the whole experience was yummy. It was honestly the best way to eat socially in my opinion! It took us hours and we just ate slowly as it takes way more time to prepare and we could just relax and cook as needed. If I were single, I'd eat like this all the time! It's similar to Korean BBQ, but the one time we tried that neither of us enjoyed it much as neither of us like seafood or fish of any kind and everything -even the veggies- tasted like fish to us so we didn't enjoy it. But this was awesome! I say I'd eat that way if I were single because Shawn wasn't as impressed I don't think. He enjoyed it, but he'd much rather throw all the meat in and be able to eat quickly as opposed to this method. I think it'd drive him crazy to do this at home. We were planning on playing board games, but Katie and I both had quite a bit of wine and were both asleep on the couch shortly after midnight, which was fine as it gave Shawn and Marcos (or as we call him, Tido) time to hang out and catch up. Is it just me, or have board games garnered a new resurgence? I can't count how many people have told me they played board games on New Year's Eve. This to me is great news as I love board games and am super-excited over my gifts of Scene It, the new Cranium (I overplayed the old version) and Jenga. Now it'll be cool to play so more people will want to, be warned if you're coming to hang out. Anyway, Tido has been Shawn's friend since they were kids, and I know Tido through another mutual friend and it was at Tido's birthday a few years ago that Shawn and I first started talking and eventually dating. We actually brought Milo with us and surprisingly he was very well-behaved. He was fast asleep on the floor at our feet well before midnight.

This past Monday was Shawn's birthday and he was adamant that we not do anything to celebrate, so as is his and his mom's tradition, we went to Tucker's Marketplace as they give you a free meal on your birthday; since Shawn and his mom have the same birthday, it's been my treat the past couple of years ;p

Oh my, as usual, I'm off topic. The reason for this post was not only to catch you up to speed on the last few weeks, but also to say that I've been filmed for ET Canada and it'll be airing Friday January 11th (2 days). Here's my 30 seconds of fame so if you wanna check me out, watch Global at 7pm for their segment on breast cancer. I got to meet Camilla Scott who used to be a Canadian talk show host as she was being interviewed on getting a mammogram and I happen to be friends with a producer for ET Canada who called me a few weeks back to ask if I'd be interested in telling my story on camera about my mammogram experience (if you don't know what I mean by this you can read alllll about it back in my July entries; you'll know them from their titles...). My friend had been following my blog so she wanted to include my story in her segment. At first I said no as I was totally freaked about being seen on TV. I mean, of all times in my life to be on Entertainment Tonight, it's gonna be bald and bloated? uh uh. But, I immediately reconsidered and told her I'd do it as rational thinking prevailed. I've said I want to advocate for young women getting mammograms and now I have a forum to do so, and it's viewed by quite a few Canadians I would assume, but I'm gonna turn that down as I don't want to be seen on TV by my peers while I'm this overweight? How vain and selfish and ridiculous! This is simply who I am right now and I don't apologize for it. I had a momentary lapse of vanity but thankfully it passed quickly. If people want to have an opinion, or snicker, then why should I allow that to affect me and my decisions? It's quite obviously my own issues with self-esteem that would stop me, and I simply won't allow that. I have a message and I have a story and I would not be doing myself justice by hiding from this. It's not who I am and I won't allow my internal struggle with myself to supersede my need to inform other woman about what I went through in regards to getting a mammogram. This opportunity came up for a reason and I won't hide.

And I didn't, I taped the segment, and I have no idea what portion of it they'll use, but I answered the questions to the best of my ability and hopefully I don't come across as a tool. It was very surreal talking in front of a camera, if you've ever seen the Friends episode when every time Chandler goes to get his picture taken he has a ridiculous smile, that was how I felt talking once the camera rolled. Ask me about my experience and I'm probably quite articulate, ask me to write about it and I have no problem with expression and verbiage, but get me in front of a camera and all of a sudden I'm a tongue-tied deer in headlights. Anyway, whatever, I'm not so good apparently on the spot, but we'll see how it turned out tomorrow I guess. I'll leave the comments section on this post open, so if you happen to catch it on Friday, let me know what you think, or you can of course email me at kellysjourney@yahoo.ca . I'll comment on it myself once I see it. Here's hoping I don't come off as a tool, wish me luck!