No I haven't forgotten about writing every now and then here. It's just been quite a 'then' since I last wrote. The elections have come and gone and we got what this country needed. A wide sweeping change in the administration. I don't know why but I get tingles every time I hear Barack Obama speak. I was afraid that this country wasn't ready to vote for a black man but I guess this was just the right time for it to happen after what the Bush administration has done to the place I call home.

I had plenty of spirit when it came to the election. Bill even joined me in doing some volunteer work down at the Democrat headquarters. And on election day, he was a runner while I was a phone banker. I hate making phone calls but that's the only thing that I could do given my current decrepit situation. What the title of this entry is about is Christmas and my lack of spirit thereof this year. I decided back just before Thanksgiving that I wasn't going to do much about Christmas this year. I was facing chemo since the little hormone pill I had been taking had stopped working. I was not in the mood to be cheery and merry. To add to the strangeness of Christmas this year, was the fact that Kippy wasn't going to be around for the first time in twenty-nine years since he and his girlfriend Emily moved to Las Vegas last summer.

I was, at least, going to do Christmas dinner with Amy and her little family but then Addilyn came down with viral pinkeye while at her other grandmother's house over the weekend. Elyse and Amy joined the ranks of the sick on Christmas Eve. So Bill had been immensely enjoying the peace and quiet and nonintrusion of family and I had been feeling like a forgotten six-year-old whom no one remembered to celebrate Christmas with. It's weird. I didn't want to celebrate Christmas but my head was full of visions of Christmas past and also full of imaginings of all the families who were gathering together on Christmas and having a great time while I sat here trying to pretend that it didn't matter. I finally started to pull out of that six-year-old pity party around noon. I had a little 3-foot Christmas tree sitting on my computer desk. It's been there all year. But I had decided that I wasn't going to decorate it. But when I woke up on Christmas morning I realized how I missed seeing a decorated tree and presents sitting around it. That was always the best part about Christmas. That moment when you woke up on Christmas morning and it hit you, "Oh, boy, it's Christmas!!!" and you ran out to the living room all wild-eyed to see the tree lit up and to see how many wonderfully wrapped presents were swarming around it. For some reason, I haven't been enjoying a tree in the house these past few years. It seemed rather like an intrusion. So, that's why I didn't decorate my 3-foot tree. But on Christmas morning I was wishing I had. I was talking to Bill about it during breakfast and that's when I realized that my inner six-year-old had been in control for a few weeks. Recognizing that and acknowledging that helped to settle her down and I was able to finally come to peace with my Christmas.

Bill and I may have started a tradition about going to The Spinning Fork for Christmas dinner. We didn't mean to do it this year. But when I pulled the beef out to make the pot roast I had planned, well, we had to change our plans about dinner. I bought it two days ago but it had turned a dark brown and had a strong odor to it. Not a rotten odor but a strong odor. Strong enough to turn my stomach a little queasy. There was no way I could use that piece of meat. I told Bill that I guess we would be heading off for The Spinning Fork again. And we did.

So, as I said, the hormone pill I was taking stopped working. It worked for about four or five months but my last MRI and bone scan done in early November showed that the cancer had grown a little and also attached itself to some new places in my spine plus a few spots on my ribs. Just great, eh? I was also having lower back pain along with the usual chest muscle pains I had been coping with for months, and the same recurring neck pain that had plagued me for months. I sat in the doctor's office and hot tears dripped down on my blouse. The doc asked what was wrong and I said I was just so tired of the pain. That set him to action finally. He wrote me a prescription for oxycontin that I was to take twice a day. This would be my baseline pain controller. Then he gave me another prescription for more percosets of a higher dose. I thought that second prescription was overkill but took it anyway. I haven't used it just as I figured I wouldn't. But I did take a percoset or two of the lower dosage ones that he had given me a few months ago. Like it or not, I had to admit that I needed that oxycontin. I feel like such a druggie now, ha, ha. I've tried to go a day without it but the edge of pain comes back and I'm tired of feeling that.

I did have a hard time adjusting to the fact that I was going to have to start chemo. I could have started another pill but it would take a month for it to start working. He felt that it was a more urgent matter to knock down the cancer right now. I agreed. It also took me a few days to realize that I was mad. I wasn't mad at him. I was mad at that hormone pill. All I could see was two years shaved off my life just like that. It hit me hard that my life was probably going to be shorter than I had thought. So, wham, bam, no thank you, ma'am, I got a port put in the right side of my chest a week later and went for the first chemo session that same day. That was two days before Thanksgiving. It was all a bit much to handle. Things were moving fast but I needed them to move fast now.

My daughter took over the Thanksgiving plans. She cooked the whole dinner by herself. I did manage to make two pumpkin pies the day before the port surgery. I put them in the freezer to keep.

I have to say that my first experience with a chemo treatment was as horrible as one can imagine a chemo treatment will be. All those cancer movies that I used to watch flashed through my mind nonstop. All the melodrama and tragedy that they coughed up I couldn't shake. When one is having permeating nausea for four days straight, nothing is right with the world. The Zometa that they gave me was the culprit for that horrible flu-like existence I had to live in for four days. The Zometa is a bone building drug. I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. I didn't want to have another chemo treatment if it was going to make me feel like that again. I wondered how I was going to get through the next four months. I just wouldn't be able to. I was ready to quit right there and then. And then after two days it started to go away. On the third day, I was hit with extreme exhaustion. Or maybe I had been extremely exhausted for those other two days but didn't realize it. I sat in my glider the whole day and just slept.

The reason I was in my glider was because Bill was in the process of moving the bedroom up to the living room. For months, he had been suggesting that we move the bedroom up there so it would be easier for me to get to the bathroom. I wouldn't have those three little steps to go up. Not that I was doing the three steps because Bill had put in a ramp back in February. But it took more time than I had with an overfull bladder to position myself on the ramp, wait for the ramp to go up, and then scuttle to the bathroom before I leaked all over the place. I had taken to using a walker instead of a cane over the past several weeks because I was trying to heal that right chest muscle. I couldn't get the walker up that ramp that quickly or easily. So, the second day after chemo and I'd struggled with getting to the bathroom, I looked at Bill and said, "Bill, you can move the bedroom now." The poor man absolutely knocked himself out moving all that furniture by himself. First, he had to move the living room furniture into the dining room. Then he had to move the bedroom furniture into the living room. Then he had to move the living room furniture into the bedroom. I really don't know how he did it all. The only thing I could do was sleep and feel sick. But the bedroom is lovely now. We have much more room in there. I was totally frustrated with the old arrangement and more than ready for a change.

The second week of chemo came with some different reactions. I didn't have the Zometa that time. Just the Taxotere which I also had the first time. This time the chemo drug went straight to my arthritic knees and inflammed them so bad that I couldn't bend them. I struggled to stand up and was too crippled to walk away from my bed. I succumbed to wearing a disposable diaper for two days and had disposable bed pads, too, on my bed. Yes, it was that bad. It was completely scary to not be able to walk. I felt like I ought to just check into hospice right then and there and be done with it. I entertained some terribly deep and dark thoughts for two days. They were hard to shake off even after I started getting better again. I didn't have any nausea the second time because the doc added an anti-nausea drip to my treatment. That would have probably just pushed me over the edge.