The Assertive Cancer Patient

Buying Seeds

Let me confess, first of all, that as a gardener, my eyes are bigger than my stomach. In other words, I bought far more seeds than I have room for in my rather modest garden space.

Never mind that I created a vegetable garden in the sky in my backyard: a structure that was once Younger Son's fort is now a little retreat for me with pots of vegetables and two folding lawn chairs. I drink my coffee there on summer mornings, and having the plants up high keeps them safe (mostly) from slugs and snails.

When my friend Laurie and I visited a couple of plant nurseries on Tuesday, this is what I bought:

Hungarian Breadseed Poppy
So that I can grow my own poppy seeds for cooking. I've tried these before and didn't succeed. I'm trying again.

Edamame
These are Japanese-style soybeans. You cook the green pods in salted water and then eat them cold (slit open the pods and eat the beans inside) with beer on summer evenings.

Alpine Strawberries Mignonette
A tiny, very flavorful French strawberry. I grew these successfully a couple of years ago, but lost the plants to winter cold.

Tricolor Pole Beans: Green, Yellow, and Purple
These delicious beans are really fun and easy to grow. The seeds are a mixture that produces beans of three colors. Unfortunately, they all turn green when cooked.

Heirloom Runner Bean, Painted Lady
This is a new one for me. I think I'm going to plant them on my trellis on the front porch, because the beans have coral and white blossoms which are edible and the plants should climb eight to 10 feet. This bean dates to the 19th century, according to the seed packet.

All of the above are Renee's Garden seeds, a brand that I've had good luck with in the past. And they have such interesting seeds. Look for them at specialty nurseries.

I got some hollyhock seeds too. We had these in our garden at home when I was a kid, and I want to plant them up against my front porch so that they will be at head height when I'm sitting on the porch. These seeds are from Burpee.

I also have some Ranbow Blend carrots (Ed Hume seeds) left from last year that I'm going to plant again. As advertised, these carrots were white, pink, orange, yellow, and red, and were really delicious.

And I have some bush peas (Ed Hume) that I'll plant again. Older Son and I both love sauteed pea pods in fried rice.

I've tried growing tomato plants from seed, but have given up on that. Now I buy young plants at the nursery. I usually get lots of cherry tomatoes and a roma or two. Larger tomatoes don't ripen well in Seattle's mild climate. And I'll look for eggplants and peppers as well, and a zucchini or two.

Younger Son ate zucchini last year and loved it--which I count as a real parenting success since he is such a picky eater!

Once I'm over my cold, I'll start all of these seeds inside, and then move them outdoors as things warm up and we move toward summer. Anticipation!

See also:

Pushing Spring

What I'm Eating 4

Carrots for Breakfast

The Cancer Garden

Bamboo: Eat It, Grow It, Wear It

Paradise in a Pot

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

Support This Blog, Please

You may have noticed a "donate" button at the bottom of some posts on my blog.

A button that looks like this:

The button is there because, with two small exceptions, I have decided to keep The Assertive Cancer Patient ad-free. The exceptions are a link to Amazon whenever I mention a book, and a Netflix ad on my Cancer Movies pages.

There are any number of ways to put ads on a blog. It's simple and easy. I tried this for a week or two when I first put my blog up. I used the ad service provided by Typepad, which hosts my blog.

But--and this is a huge BUT--most of the ads that popped up on my blog were for Web sites, products, and services that I personally couldn't endorse. And I didn't want them on my blog. An awful lot of them fell into the quacks category.

Cancer patients are fairly easy targets for exploitation--because we're sick, because we're afraid, because we'd like a magic cure that came with no side effects ... I don't want the exploitation of any cancer patient to start with an ad on my blog.

So there are none.

But I still need to make some money from the blog, which takes the best hours and the best energy of my day.

The result? The donate button.

Thank you for any cash that you might be able to spare. I appreciate it more than you will ever know.

A special thanks to the cancer patients who have sent me donations, and then apologized for not being able to send more!

I know who my audience is, so I expected that if people were able to send a donation at all, it would be in the $10 to $20 range. Those $20 contributions are keeping me at the keyboard, blogging away.

If you want to read more about me, go to the About page.

A note about using PayPal: You can make a donation by clicking on the donate button and going through PayPal without setting up a PayPal account if you don't want one. There is an option to simply pay with a credit card.

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

I Need to Whine!

This doesn't qualify as a rant, I only rant about things that make me crazy, like the high cost of cancer drugs and the insanity of trying to sort out errors in my medical bills.

But I do need to whine, so here goes.

I've had a cold since Saturday, and I feel like crap. It's nothing serious, and it seems like half of Seattle is sick right now, so I certainly am not alone, but my throat hurts, my chest is full of gunk, and I'm running out of Kleenex.

I'm coughing, which hurts, and I have that exquisitely painful condition: Kleenex nostril--where the skin on my nose is red and tender from too much contact with tissues.

I didn't get up this morning till 10:30, which means I slept something like 13 or 14 hours. Obviously I needed it, because I was out cold. I've had to cancel things the past few days, including my volunteer stint at First Place, the school for homeless kids, and a coffee date with an old friend.

I hate having to do that.

To top it off, I'm behind on everything, so if you've been trying to contact me or I haven't done something I told you I would, that's the reason.

Oh, and I just turned down $500 from someone who wanted to put ads on my blog. That hurt, I was sorely tempted, but it didn't fit with my view of what I'm doing with this blog.

I'd really like to crawl back into bed, and I probably will do that in a couple of hours. Just baby myself for another day. Because I have an event tomorrow afternoon that I really don't want to miss: a get-together for freelance writers and editors sponsored by the Society of Professional Jouralists (SPJ) at REI downtown. I'm going with the writers in my small group writing workshop, and really looking forward to it.

The funny thing I've noticed about myself is that I don't whine (much) about my cancer like this--but a simple cold, now that's grounds for a whole lot of whining and bitching.

OK, I'm done.

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

What I'm Eating: Lunch

As I've said before, I'm struggling to eat a healthy diet.

The Tykerb, my new miracle chemo drug, seems to kill my appetite. It also upsets my GI tract. So I don't feel much like eating, and the foods that do appeal to me tend to me light on nutrition: crackers, bagels, pudding, rice. Too many vegetables at one sitting leaves me with gas and cramps.

Also, by 6 p.m. or so, I don't feel like cooking, so I've been shifting my main meal to noon or early afternoon. I eat out with a friend or one of my sons once or twice a week, because I eat a better meal that way.

But I also seem to have odd food cravings--these I indulge.

The other day when I was at the grocery, I saw bunches of fresh asparagus. It looked wonderful--expensive, but wonderful. So I bought some.

Today I made myself a very tasty rice dish, using the asparagus, mushrooms, and tofu.

First, I precooked the rice, which was a box of seasoned brown and wild rice, the Farmhouse brand, which has no additives.

I cut the asparagus into 1 1/2 inch pieces and precooked it for just a minute in the microwave. I sliced the mushrooms and cut the tofu into small cubes. I put all of these into a heated wok with just a little oil and cooked them quickly on high heat. When they were almost done, I added a splash of soy sauce.

Then I stirred in the rice, and that was it.

I ate in on the front porch in the sunshine where I could admire my garden. Crocuses and small daffodils are blooming, tulips are above ground, and the blueberry bushes have new leaf buds.

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

Color

Color makes me happy. It's as simple as that.

So when I was out running errands the other day, I bought several bunches of tulips at Whole Foods, one of our neighborhood groceries.

I put the pink and purple ones together in one vase, and set it on the living room window seat.

The other tulips, which are cream, are in a deep-blue vase against the pumpkin-colored walls of my dining room.

I can't believe I waited so long to paint the main rooms of my house a strong color. When I bought the house, the walls throughout were a nice safe off-white. Boring. Safe, but boring.

But I was afraid of making a mistake with color, so I thought about it for a long time. First, I painted a couple of small rooms--the inside back porch where the cat has his food and litter box and the boys' upstairs bathroom were the first. I painted them a beautiful clear Robin's egg blue.

Then the guest room on the first floor. My friend Pat helped me with that, and we painted it a rich brick red. It's wonderful. That was two years ago.

Then finally, I got up enought nerve to tackle the living room and dining room, and, as I said, I can't believe I waited this long. We painted these (Pat and I) last fall, and all winter my house felt like a warm cave.

The tulips are gorgeous against these walls, and everytime I look at them, I feel happy.

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

Pushing Spring

One way I get through the final few dreary weeks of winter is by “pushing spring.”

I do this by starting to work in the yard as soon as my fingers can take the temperature outside. There’s always lots of cleaning up to do, even if it’s too early to put in plants.

I uncover bulbs—crocuses, tulips, daffodils, a few lilies, crocosmia, and irises—then I weed and add fresh mulch.

I put used coffee grounds around the new shoots to keep slugs and snails away. We have a heavy snail infestation in this part of Seattle.

My onions and garlic have wintered over, and I added a few more onion starts to the bed from a big bag that I bought last fall and kept outside.

Today’s job is to choose my seeds for the year. I like to grow vegetables and fruit (strawberries, blueberries, Japanese nashi, and this year I have a new fig tree). Starting seeds inside in February makes me feel like spring is just around the corner.

Last year I had great success with multi-colored carrots, tomatoes of various types, potatoes, green beans, peas, and zucchini. Also the onions and garlic.

Less successful were beets and pumpkins. Also melons—didn’t get a single fruit.

I have quite a few seeds left from past years, so I’ll start with those.

I need to buy green beans, climbing peas, and seed potatoes.

I have a few potatoes left in the ground from last fall that should start growing soon, but I need more. We never seem to have enough potatoes. Potato salad made with small homegrown potatoes and homegrown green onions is beyond delicious. Eat it warm.

On the flower side, I usually grow sweet peas on the front porch for the fragrance, and this year I want to try hollyhocks. They grow really tall, so if I put them in the ground in front of the porch, I figure they will grow to just the right height to enjoy when I’m sitting on the porch next summer.

I also want a couple more honeysuckles (I have two now) for the hummingbirds, and a couple more fuschia if the ones I left in the ground over the winter don’t come back. Hummingbirds like these too.

I have quite a few different lavender plants in my front beds, but I could always use more. There’s a lavender festival over in Sequim in mid-summer. Sequim is a ferry-ride away on the Olympic Peninsula. I think I’ll round up a couple of friends to make a day trip over there to buy more plants.

The last time I went, two years ago, I paid about $2 a plant for some really beautiful lavenders—one with white flowers, and two with pink—and we ate lavender ice cream and lavender cookies. Both were surprisingly tasty.

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

A Melanoma Diagnosis

I woke up this morning to find an e-mail from a young woman (35) who was just diagnosed yesterday with melanoma. She had found my blog, and was writing to ask for advice.

She's the mother of four young children, and was feeling very afraid and freaked out. "I'm driving myself crazy and it's day one," she wrote. "I'm looking for some advice about how to handle the stress and worry."

Well, I don't usually like to give advice, but I couldn't ignore this one. Here's my answer.

I'm laughing, but very gently, so don't be offended. This is how I felt when I was first diagnosed--with breast cancer and then later with melanoma. Of course you're afraid. Of course you are checking every single mole! I still do that, even though my doctor also checks them every few months--but I found the first one, so I figure that I am most likely to find any more.

I have lots of moles too, and freckles, so there's a lot to keep me busy.

So, this is what I think--

This stage of cancer treatment is the worst, trust me on that. When you first find out, and you're afraid, and you are worrying about your kids, and you haven't had treatment yet.

I think the best way to deal with it is to acknowledge it. Admit that you are scared stiff. Talk about it, if that's what you want to do, or ignore it publicly, but admit to yourself that you are scared.

If it helps you to get information, I would do that, but there is lots of scary info on the Web, and a fair amount that's not accurate, so be careful.

Then, I think, you have to be gentle with yourself until you've had the excision, and don't expect too much of yourself--because this level of background stress and fear can make you really tired and unable to cope with daily life. But you won't realize that until you have a meltdown in public (done that too), so be gentle with yourself.

If the stress and anxiety don't level off once you've had the cancer removed, I would consider seeing a therapist of some kind who can help you with these issues. I've had a therapist hypnotize me and make me a tape so I could do self-hypnosis on a daily basis when I was really stressed, and I take small doses of anxiety and depression meds--they help keep me on an even keel. And I see a therapist once a week.

You can find someone who specializes in working with cancer patients--they often can be really helpful. And don't feel embarrassed about this either--lots of times people are hard on themselves when they need this kind of help, I know I was in the beginning.

I hope this helps. Please let me know how things go, and if you feel like leaving comments on my blog, I have some great folks who read the blog--many of them have cancer blogs of their own--and you'll get some great support there too.

So, readers, please chime in if you have suggestions about living with fear.

Oh, and here's something I forgot, the link to a story I wrote several years ago:

Running With Fear

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

Controversial Avastin in the News

I was on Avastin for a couple of years to treat my metastatic breast cancer, first in combination with Taxol and Herceptin, then with Herceptin alone, and it worked for me.

But Avastin is out of favor now, and my doctors decided to drop it from my regimen when I started on Tykerb a couple of months ago.

I'm fine with that, if for no other reason than the drug is outrageously expensive, and I have a bone to pick with Genentech about that. Genentech also makes Herceptin, another outrageously expensive cancer drug.

In any case, the FDA approved Avastin for breast cancer, despite some strong opposition from Breast Cancer Action and others.

Here's the link that will take you to all the news stories, courtesy of the Cheeky Librarian:

Avastin

And my posts on what Herceptin and Avastin cost:

The (High) Cost of Cancer Treatment: I

The (High) Cost of Cancer Treatment: 2

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

Drinkin' With My Kid

Older Son, who is 23 and a student at the University of Washington--known in these parts as the U (You) W (Dub)--came by this afternoon to see me.

He lives in a house with three other young guys, and comes home about once a week just to check in with me--raid the fridge, pick up his mail (which all comes here), have me cut his hair (I'm his only barber), and give advice to his younger brother, who is a college freshman across town at Seattle U, if they both happen to be home at the same time.

It's a gorgeous day--yet again, we've had a string of five or six perfect days--and I was working in the yard when Older Son got home.

He sorted through his mail (I think he's overdrawn at the bank--not my problem), and then we decided to head to the Sunlight Cafe for a late lunch.

And it turned into one of those golden parenting moments: A beautiful day, out with my kid, enjoying a beer ... I think this is the first time that I'd had a drink with Older Son in public. I serve him beer and wine at home when we have parties, but I'm not much of a drinker.

We dawdled over lunch and drank our beer and talked about life. For the record, I had a Fat Tire Amber Ale.

And it was, as I said, a perfect parenting moment.

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.

Cancer Patient Disaster Preparedness

Ever since Hurricane Katrina, I’ve been telling myself that I need to assemble a disaster preparedness kit.

Usually, when I think about assembling a kit, I end up lying down until the feeling goes away, because my next thought is how much work it would be to put this together.

Whenever I read a list of tips, like this one that I found online, I feel overwhelmed …

Take Tip No. 2, for example, “Know your treatments past and present.” My medical records swell to three or four volumes now, and are kept at four different cancer centers. Just getting copies of all of these would take me a week.

But, on the other hand, if a major earthquake hit Seattle, as a cancer patient, I would be among the more vulnerable of the victims.

So, time to stop whining. Time to get together a basic disaster kit.

Read more:

The Assertive Cancer Patient Basic Disaster Kit

The Cheeky Librarian Prepares for a Tornado

The American Cancer Society Links

@ Jeanne Sather 2008.