The weird feeling on the ‘other side’ of this fight

Jenny at the Tenaciously Teal event in Oklahoma City on April 28, 2017. PHOTO: Charlie Neuenschwander Instagram: @charlien.photo

Jenny is always beautiful. But she, along with 12 other women, shined especially bright on April 28.

Jenny participated in a fund-raising fashion show event for Tenaciously Teal — Carepacks and Cocktails. It was an outstanding event, and we were blessed to be joined by family and friends there to support one of the stars.

Jenny doesn’t like the spotlight, so she was uncomfortable with all the attention, but I think she had fun (see the professional photo — please click to enlarge that photo!).

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The saga continues…

So, if you will remember that in my update blog a couple weeks ago, I talked about not being able to breathe on Day 1, 2 and 3. After that, I wound up with this dry cough that would never become productive. I thought I might have caught a virus or something.

Two and a half weeks after my surgery, that cough was still there and becoming more and more pesky. I couldn’t get through sentences without coughing, and the cough would sneak up on me so covering my mouth was near impossible. After spending a day in meetings coughing all over everyone, I decided to see if my family doctor could give me a cough suppressant or a steroid…or something so people wouldn’t think I was coughing flu germs all over them!

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Hysterectomy pathology is in

I waited as patiently as possible all week for the pathology to come in. By the end of the week, my patience had faded and my worry had fired up. On Thursday, I spent a long time researching whether benign tumors/cysts were ever smooth. Dr. Wayman described mine as smooth (unlike cancer), but was it impossible that it was cancer?

I remember when I went for my biopsy right before my diagnosis, and the nurses were talking amongst themselves. I heard one say, “Is it vascular?” and the other said it was. It was code for something…I was sure of it. They left me alone in the room right after that, and it was all I could do to not jump off the table to get my phone and start Googling “vascular mass in breast.” Was vascular good? Bad? Continue reading

Day 6 Update on Hysterectomy

Day 6 after my hysterectomy – the first day I feel fairly normal.

Going into this surgery, I promised myself I would be gentle and patient with myself. I rushed things back in April (and in past surgeries), and I regretted it very much so I wanted to be sure I took my time getting back to 100%.

So for anyone who might be going through this surgery, I thought it would be good to document my experience thus far.

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2015 is going to be a good year

So, I wrote a really long blog post the weekend after I got home from the hospital. Things got busy and hectic and I never posted it so I just posted it and back dated it. Sorry for cheating.

On Friday night – two days after I got home — Alan and I went to do my meds around 9:30 p.m. To add to all of the craziness and bad luck that has gone on lately, my line was clogged. Apparently your blood can tend to clot around the foreign object that you have in your body. We knew one side was clogged, but when the other side was clogged on Friday, the only option was to make a trip to the ER.

I cried.

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Home and on the mend

We pulled in to our garage around 2:30 a.m. on Thursday morning after a looooong week at MD Anderson. We were beat.

(So was poor Krisan who was so kind and stayed with our kids until we got home even though she had to work the next day – I got lucky when she and I met almost 20 years ago.)

Before leaving, Alan took his PICC line test that allows him to give me my meds and clean and change my dressing. It is really important that we are very careful to keep it sterile so the process of changing my dressing is VERY tough. They require him to demonstrate his abilities while a nurse observes.

Here are some pics of him as he tested:

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