Friendship

I was surrounded by my friends and family this week/weekend. Not completely by design but through a serious of planned events culminating in mostly a 48-hour period. Included in these events were:

• A casual dinner at the Taylor's - a pot luck last Tuesday - the chili was wonderful!;
• A fantastic dinner at HASH HOUSE A Go Go (which Steve lovingly deemed Claim Jumper on crack) with two of our closest friends, Jennifer and Andrew Schlesier;
• A brisk morning walk with one of the smartest women I know, my friend Lisa;
• A fantastic afternoon of pampering and friends, making me feel like "Queen for a Day", put on by Danielle Kremer and Barbara Miller - WOW! is all I have to say;
• All topped off by a SOUPER Party at the Garcia's, complete with tequila and Girl Scout cookies.

I am a seriously lucky woman with seriously awesome friends and family. Steve and I are both lucky. (Steve was also treated to an afternoon at Hooley's with Jim Miller and a clan of guys that mean the world to both of us.)

Tomorrow, my mom will be taking me to chemo session number four. I have a nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not so much for the process of chemo itself but because of the inevitable side effects to follow. The unknown is what scares me now. There are many unknowns these days.

However, when I am with my friends and family, my mind is at ease, or at least shift gears. I feel like I am a part of something important, a chain of support that extends past my struggle with cancer. A chain of support that has always been there, but its importance has been suppressed by the mundane of the every day, where I may have been just too bothered to partake. Ironically, now I am hanging on. In the end, I know what ever happens on my journey, this chain is what will save me and it will be this same chain that supports my friends through their current and future struggles. Now, that I see how integral each link in the chain is, how we are all connected, I do not think I will ever let go again.

Below is a picture of Madison taken yesterday by my friend Stephani Dennis. It is so beautiful that I wanted to share it as a part of this blog entry. Please visit Stephani's website for more of her work. I hope you love it as much as I do!

It's Good to Go to Work....

It is good for me to go to work. There. I said it. Today, it was especially important.

I have had a bit of a cold lately. Just enough to make me a little more tired and a little more cranky. It is bothersome, but then again, I have been rather enjoying the sound sleep I have been getting due in part to the night-time Tylenol cold medicine I have been taking. Yesterday, I made it through the day OK. However, today, I needed an extra hour of sleep and a slow morning.

Because I was around the house, I decided I should finally call about obtaining a second opinion for my mastectomy. I am lucky to have had some awesome offers from some very special people to help me get a referral for a second opinion. Special people in the medical field. People who know people. That being said, I already knew who I was going to call. Dr. Hansen. Maureen and Galen Hansen lived across the street from Steve and his family since Steve was two years old. Dr. Hansen is a retired gynecologist and as I have mentioned in prior entries, I have spoken with him several times about my treatment, since I was diagnosed.

I have been procrastinating making this call for more than a week. Today, I found out why. Going through the process of talking about my mastectomy in an official manner - its clinical aspects and my chemo treatments - brought back all of the emotion from the day when I first learned I needed to have one. My procrastination was definitely a defense mechanism.

Just when I am ready to crawl under a rock, could have easily convinced myself to crawl back in bed and succumb to my seemingly growing depression, my work ethic saved me. I am so proud of the work that I do. While this pride was not in my actual thought process this morning, there are several work projects that I planned to move forward this week. Not one of them can be completed from under a rock.

My colleague at Rady Children's Chadwick Center for Children and Families emailed at 10:47 last night some information I needed for a grant. Chadwick Center is currently in the throws of their San Diego International Conference on Child and Family Maltreatment. There are more than 1,000 attendees, and I know my friend is working really hard right now to make this conference a reality. Since he cared enough to work into the night to send me the information for my grant on top of all his other responsibilities, I thought that the least I could do was get myself into work today to turn the grant around quickly. Plus, wouldn't it be nice to check something off my list?

So, I did my crying on the way to the office, a little bit after I got there and then, focused on my grant. If I am lucky, it will get funded and Rady Children's Trauma Counseling Program will be able convert its seven standardized assessment tools to a new electronic format, which will help them more efficiently and effectively evaluate and treat traumatized children. Keeping my eye on that prize helped me today. Tomorrow's grant: challenge grant funds for Anderson Center for Dental Care to help Rady Children's cancer patients and their families learn to deal with dental issues that result from their chemotherapy treatments. Now isn't that ironic?