Life With Mets

I have metastatic cancer. Bone mets, actually. (Like many cancer patients, I am on a nickname-basis with my disease.)

I work a few hours a day, play mom to two young men, now ages 22 and 16, exercise, garden, and spend time with friends.

At the moment, my bathroom is home to a litter of three abandoned kittens that I am caring for until they are old enough to be adopted. When these kittens find homes, the feral cat rescue will hand over another litter. I call this kitten therapy.

My life is pretty normal. Most of the time I'm happy. If there is an underlying edge of anxiety about my health that never quite goes away, well, so be it.

I am more tired than I would like to be. This is the hardest thing for me to accept about living with metastatic cancer: I don’t have enough energy to do all the things I want to do.

Sometimes it is worse than at other times—my energy level varies with the drugs I am on and where I am in the treatment (Toward the end of a six-month series of treatments with Taxol or Navelbine, for example, I am lucky to have four or five hours of good energy a day. The rest of the time, I am resting or sleeping.)

Some nights I have trouble sleeping, my appetite is capricious, and once in awhile I take a day off and hide in bed with a stack of murder mysteries and the cats and let the world go on without me.

But to look at me, you would say I am in perfect health, and most of the time that's how I feel--perfectly healthy. Tired, perhaps, but healthy.

One of my grandmothers lived to be 96; the other died at 90. So I always expected that I would live to be a feisty old lady, wearing eye-catching hats and big earrings, talking to strangers on the street, and traveling to new places--even if I needed a cane to get there.

It was the men in my family who died of cancer, both grandfathers, one in his 70s and the other in his 50s, and my father, of pancreatic cancer at age 53.

Now, I know that it is very unlikely that I will live to be 90. But I have not entirely accepted this fact. Will I live to be 60? Probably not.

I've already lived longer than expected (fewer than half of all women with metatastic breasr cancer live five years from the time of the matastasis). Fifty-five? I think I'll make that.

Since my cancer metastasized, I've been on a two-year plan: I make plans for my life two years at a time. When I get to the end of those two years, I make plans for the next two. No saving for retirement here. My life is all front-loaded with the good stuff happening in the here and now.

Comments

[Lynne Dahlborg]

Your post is very powerful as you describe your life with mets, and how those affect your future. I am profoundly moved by all of this.

On a more mundane level, though, I want to say that kitten rescue is something we have in common (besides cancer!) We had a developing feral cat populatin in our yard four years ago, and slowly began catching the kittens at about 4-6 weeks, keeping them in our bathroom until we could find adoptive homes. They are the cutest little bundles of energy, and I can imagine how they give you joy! Over the past 4 years, we figure we rescued over 40 kittens, and got the rest of the feral population to the vets so "they can't have kittens they can't take care of," as we say to our young children. What a coincidence, and a giggle!

[Jeanne]

Lynne--that is a funny coincidence. Good for you for doing the rescuing all on your own. Our two oldest cats were born in our yard and abandoned by their mother, so we raised them from just a few days old.

After that I started fostering for the rescue, and have done that for years now. I've adopted one of those kittens, and then rest have gone on to other homes.

Here's more about the rescue:
http://www.assertivepatient.com/2006/10/nukes_in_north_.html

My dog, Constant, who is meant to be my therapy dog, was also a rescue. I took care of him from four weeks of age, and couldn't give him back. I'll be blogging about him soon.

He's only just past a year old now, but last winter when I felt so sick from the Xeloda, he just lay on my bed with me, cuddled up, giving me comfort. What's so amazing about that is that he is usually bouncing off walls (and people) with energy. He's half lab and half springer spaniel, and the springers are well named.

Jeanne