Extra crispy!...and "Roseanne Roseannadanna"

Yesterday as I was being "radiated", I started giggling. From out of nowhere, the words, "extra-crispy" entered my mind. Probably because on the right side of my chest, I have lots of really dark freckles and I'm about five shades more tanned and burned than the left side of my chest. I'm also sore and itchy, and so I slather on pure aloe gel, hydrocortisone cream and Eucerin cream at night and in the morning. I'm not supposed to put on any kind of cream or lotion or deoderant within 4 hours of radiation because they will act like oil on the skin which then gets "cooked". Lovely. Actually, it really doesn't bother me much...it's just kind of different.

For the last 8 days I get something called a "Boost" (no, that's not the drink that you might have with your extra crispy dark meat Kentucky fried chicken...hmmm, why am I relating things to food??? ; ) What that means is that only a smaller area around the lumpectomy incision gets the radiation, for super-duper killing power for any cancer cells that might be lurking around the original site of the cancer. Hopefully there are none, but if there are, they get super-zapped.

I finished reading a couple of books this week. One was, "The Idiot's Guide to Breast Cancer" and the other was Gilda Radner's autobiography, "It's Always Something". Gilda died in 1989 within a couple of years of being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The critiques that were written on the outside and inside covers of this book said it was filled with her humor and spirit. There was some humor and joy in her story, but for the most part, it struck me as a pretty darn SAD story of someone who went through a lot of hellish experiences and recurrences and then died too young. Of course, cancer treatment back then was not nearly as sophisticated as it is now.

I'm not sure how I would react if I were told in the next few years that my cancer had recurred. Right now I would say that there's no way in hell I'd go through chemo again, but one never really knows until faced with something what you'd actually do. The will to live is really strong, but that also has to be weighed against the quality of life.

I'm trying to put these morbid thoughts out of my mind, and apparently it is very normal to think these kinds of thoughts when your treatment is completing or completed. Even if your prognosis is good, you still can't go merrily along your way pretending that everything is ginger-peachy and nothing has happened, because with cancer things are still not that definitive. But you have to put it out of your mind as much as possible so you can live for today. I'm told that these fears ease as the years go by, as you go to checkups and find, hopefully, that you are cancer free.

When this all started, I told myself I would not let this disease define me, and I still don't plan on that happening. I'm going to do my best to recover and get on with my life, thankful for every day that I have. I'm going to live the rest of my life as fully as possible, regardless of how long it is.