Gotta update more!

I was just reading back a little through this and realized I repeat myself a LOT. I gotta stop doing that! Hmm. Maybe updating a little more often will help with that a bit. ;)

For now, I just wanna say how much I enjoy visits from my favourite people. Yay! <3 On a less happy note, I'm in a LOT of pain right now. Blah. Just took some naproxen & tylenol. Got my heating pad here, too. I'm waiting it out a bit more but if this combo doesn't fix things soon, I'll cave and take an oxycodone, as I've been in pain all day and trying to keep it at bay with those other meds doesn't seem to be working. Oxycodone is heavy stuff, but the silver lining is that I get to take oxycodone. I was prescribed 20 of them to take every 4-6 hours but I've only taken 3 the whole time I've been back from the hospital as the side effects are pretty intense; they don't mix well with another medication I'm on. On the plus side, WOW do they make me giggly! Watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia after taking oxycodone the other night is probably the hardest I've laughed while alone in a long, long time. What a ridiculous night!

ALL the updates!

WHAT?! I haven't updated in over 2 months?! Whaaaat. Since I last updated, I went to Calgary & Banff (Calgary was nice, Banff was amazing, I've always wanted to go there, but I felt sick the whole time), I worked a lot (tiring!), I had some very successful blood tests (yay!), and my husband finally came home from his 7+ month tour! (9 months really, because of his other contracts...) Yay, he's HOME. <3 AND! And and and annnnd...I had my hysterectomy! YAYYYY! I had been trying to get one since I was in my 20s, so to say that it's amazing that I've finally gotten one is quite the understatement. The pain my periods have caused me throughout my life have been so terrible it's always been hard to describe, but ever since I've had leukemia it's been a little easier to explain to people; my cramps hurt more than the chemo did. So. Yeah. My periods ruined my life. Not to mention they weren't just a few days a month (which is still WAY too long to spend in that amount of pain), but the cramps would often last 2 weeks out of the month, every month. So yeah, enough of that shit! Finally done with that. I got my surgery on April 8th, which is exactly a week ago, plus a day. The surgery went really well, and I only had to stay in the hospital overnight (standard procedure). I was able to go home the next day.

So now I'm home recovering and all is going well, but I've been regressing a little in terms of pain because I'm just so bored and restless and I've been moving around my apartment, constantly tidying up and things like that, even though I'm not supposed to. I mean, I'm supposed to move around, so I do (though my apartment is REALLY tiny and there's not exactly a helluva lot of room to move around in here), and I've gone for a couple of short walks (it's perfect as it's finally spring! SPRING!!!), but I'm not supposed to bend in certain positions, which I can't help but do. The thing is though, my apartment gets so messy and dirty so fast with my husband home now, and I'm so used to my apartment being spotless (when I had it to myself for 9 months I cleaned it pretty much every day) so I can't stand to leave it the way it looks. And I'm just so restless. I know it's not fair to compare recovering from a hysterectomy to recovering from cancer, but I have nothing else to compare it to! Of course I'm going to compare the two, it's only natural. It's the only other experience I've had in terms of recovering from something from the hospital. And compared to cancer and going through chemo, recovering from a hysterectomy is a breeze! I mean, this time my blood is oxygenated. When I was going through chemo, I was neutropenic, I had no blood cells, I had no energy, I felt so sick and out of it all the time. But now all I have is some pain (and they sent me home with pain-killers, of course!), but I have alllll the energy. So in my head, I translate that as feeling well. Haha! I can't help it. And plus, as I mentioned above, it's spring. I LOVE SPRING. And I've been waiting for it for so long to get here, I just wanna run around outside and be crazy! Plus I'm so excited to start this new life without my uterus, a new life without pain. A new life that doesn't involve me constantly curled up with a heating pad and constantly chewing on advil (or stronger pills) and constantly cancelling on people, backing out on plans...a life that's pain-free. It still hasn't full sunk-in; I've been dealing with this pain since I was 12 years old, so that's 22 years now. It's going to take awhile for this to become real to me. But it's so exciting, and I feel like I have so many adventures ahead of me!

Anyway, all this to say...I'm very happy and life sure is good right now. <3

"I heard that starlight causes cancer."

I've been doing a LOT to try to cut down my intake of potentially carcinogenic chemicals in my day-to-day life. It's difficult, but it's something. I just wanna live, dammit!

Subject line is from Family Guy, btw. ;)

You're so brave!

Why do people often tell me I'm brave? Is that a knee-jerk reaction to someone with cancer? I genuinely don't mean to dismiss anyone's comments if they are heartfelt, nor trivialize them, but I really want to know. I'm clearly scared all of the time to the point that it's taken over my life. Though many say being scared has nothing to do with bravery, how about the fact that so much of my day revolves around waiting for it to be late enough to justify getting high off sleeping pills? Is that something a brave person does? What is their definition of brave? Does it involve someone who needs to get high to feel better? Someone who stresses themselves out to the point they can no longer reason properly? Someone who rants daily on social media? Other people I know on Facebook have cancer. None of them rant about it. I'm the only one. How is that brave?

From no hours to too many!

I keep wanting to come here to write about how down/anxious/angry/upset I am but then I'm not always sure what to write. Hmmm, this is not the first post where I've said exactly this!

I'm tired of nightmares and spooky dreams. No nightmares last night, but my dreams were definitely on the creepy scale. Ahhh. Tiring. I've been waking up exhausted all week.

I called in sick super last-second to a subbing job on Friday. I was just so beat, totally wiped-out. It wasn't at the school I normally work at, and in fact I work a LOT at "my" school next week, so I want to save all my energy for that. I feel like I'm going to faint soon. I'm so overwhelmed. I went from not working at all to working TOO many hours. Subbing is exhausting. It's just so draining. It definitely has its moments, and I'm incredibly grateful to be able to sub, and work with children in a school setting and be paid for it. But, it's not like teaching at all. At all! I really miss teaching. For some reason, I'm having a more difficult time with subbing this year than I was last year, which was my first time back on the job since the hospital. It could be for a variety of reasons, I guess.

Anyway, it's just so taxing. I can't imagine doing this 5 days a week, nor would I. 3 days a week I think is OK. It's such a demanding job. For what it's worth, at least I can make my own hours. A little perk to this job, I guess!

The thing is, I'm happy when I'm at work. Even if it's not a good day, it's still better than staying at home and stewing in anxiety. But at the same time, it requires a lot of mental AND physical energy, which I simply don't have. So I can't keep working full days every day, or else I'll have a full burn-out for sure. So I can't accept every day offered to me. But I kind of need to, because I really, really, really, really need the money. But I shouldn't, because health comes first, and if I tire myself out too much, I really won't be able to work! So it's just a never-ending, nonsensical circle of bullshit.

So much anger

I think one of the main emotions that has stewed during my remission is anger. Not so much anger at the cancer itself, but the almost constant anxiety and frequent fear I've been experiencing during remission tends to settle into a kind of demented stress that elevates into the most intense rage I can't describe. I have noticed that anger is easier to deal with than fear, so I can't help but wonder if my brain turns the fear into anger for at least partly this reason.

That being said, I'm fed up of people telling me how I should feel. That anger isn't good for me or that I should be positive. Do you have cancer? No? THEN SHUT THE FUCK UP. I mean that sincerely. So I guess this post is a note to all of those people who have told me that I shouldn't be so angry all the time. To those who talk about choosing to be happy and not dwelling on fear or dark thoughts, as if that's something I've chosen to do. I can't choose to be less angry, less scared, or less stressed, but you can certainly choose to mind your own fucking business and be more tactful.

That is all.

Waxing poetic, Zopiclone edition

This post will have such a different tone than my last one! In my last post, I had just returned from Miami with Mike, and Christmas vacation was just beginning! But now it's long since finished, and I'm back at work (as much as I can be; I'm starting to get called in often, but perhaps not as often as I would like) and my lovely husband is back on tour and I miss him so much, it's awful. The loneliness is crippling. I found it so much harder to part ways this time around for a number of reasons. Well, on the bright side, at least I'll be seeing him again in just under one month's time, in Calgary. Maybe not the most exotic of places (haha!), but still, it's a place I've never been to. I've never been to Alberta, period! And this is part of my own country this time. Good ole Canada. It'll do me some good to see more of it. In the meantime: working whenever I can! I just wish it were more steady work...

Well, I love my life overall and I'd say that generally I'm certainly a happy person. I'm just going through a time in my life that's quite rough. I know it'll pass but the interim is just so miserable. Being so lonely while I'm so anxious about every little cold or flu symptom I get (as one might imagine, at this time of year, can be quite common), just makes the anxiety inflate about tenfold. And with the ballooning anxiety stems the incapacity to think properly, which is only feuled further by "chemo brain", something a lot of people don't understand. The combined result is just such a toxic mixture of the most frustrating melancholy, something I could maybe attempt to begin putting into words, but only when sleeping pills haven't already been scrambling my brain to such an intense degree.