Laura's Landing Place

When I learned that my cancer needed chemotherapy, I came to it with very strong ideas about how things were going to be: I will continue to work.  I will not allow this to dominate conversation. I will not feel sorry for myself. I will not complain. I will make sure my son and daughter are solid in their assurance that I'm fine and that I will be better than ever afterwards. And all that is well and good, except it didn't leave any wiggle room, it was too rigid. I realize now that I need more of a sliding scale, if for no other reason than to mitigate the guilt I feel when I'm not functioning at 100% and it affects others.  But I guess the biggest reason is that I need to acknowledge that this is a very unpredictable animal and I need to be prepared for that.  Because it doesn't matter how much research I do, or talking to others who've been through it, or having lived through it when it was my Dad - nothing could adequately prepare me to be in the center of this e...

Hello! I want to say THANK YOU to all of you who have sent supportive messages to my husband and me. I do read them all. I'm very lucky to have the support that I do . I know that just about everyone has someone special to them who has experienced cancer, and some of you have experienced it personally. I watched my Dad die of lymphoma 16 years ago - absolutely heartbreaking.  But the way I see it, mine is not a sad story. My cancer is in a part of my body that is not a vital organ. These breasts did their job and fed my two kids and they're done now. At this point they're just ornamental. I have no emotional attachment to either one. It's like a relationship gone bad, time to cut it loose and don't look back. I feel absolutely certain that I will be cured once all this is done. And I will go on with my life like normal. I will someday be a Grandmother (the cool one), I will retire to someplace warm with Husband (yes, he knows), and we will live happily ever aft...

Hello! Welcome to my online living room, where I'll come to put my feet up and write about.... write about... write about - wow, I just discovered I don't even want to type the word. It's such a harsh sounding word. Cancer. An ugly word. When I see it written, I imagine it as a moving, growing, hideous looking organism. And I'm gonna kill it dead.  Not the other way around. I'm learning as I go. And I've learned that I need to put my energy into ME, and not worry about keeping up with phone calls and texts and visits and providing updates on demand. This is my solution. If those close to me would like to know where I'm at with this thing, here ya go! And it goes both ways - I write when I feel like it, and you read when/if you feel like it. Win win! Tomorrow is my first chemotherapy treatment.  I'll have it once a week for 12 weeks with the hard stuff, then it'll taper to once every 3 weeks for awhile. But I'm getting ahead.... and how in...