CANCER IS BACK AND THIS TIME IT HURTS RIGHT OFF THE BAT!

APRIL IS STILL POETRY MONTH AND LIBRARY MONTH. MANY WONDERFUL THINGS TO CELEBRATE.
   But in the middle of the month I received some bad news about my cancer which has returned to the lining (epithelium) of my stomach.  This time the chemo won't be as bad, they say.  But the doctor also said that I didn't have to take steroids this time. But she wasn't right about that. One of the chemo drugs is different and there should be fewer effects. But most people I spoke with didn't have pain with chemo, and I did.  As with most health issues, everyone is different, and responds differently to medicine.
   The pain began two weeks before and the first visit to Urgent Care sent me home with laxatives. Two weeks later they hadn't worked.  Meanwhile, and this is what makes me most angry, a blood test had been done when I first went and some doctor (not the UC doctor) asked for a CA-125 count.  It showed 92!!  Well, the month before, my six month check up, the count was 14!!  Yet this outcome didn't ring any bells, set off any alarms, nothing.  Had I not returned because of the severe pain, I would be walking around with the tumors on the lining of my stomach continuing to grow and spread.
 

Not like a baobab  tree that was across the Ruaha River from me in February 2015 when I visited Tanzania and Zanzibar, probably for the last time.  I am heartbroken that my health won't be good enough to fulfill that bucket list I had:  Amsterdam and the art museums, Yucatan and Oaxaca in Mexico, Ireland and Wales, Vietnam and Thailand.  Or a cruise in a very small ship around Europe. Don't forget all the places in Latin America I haven't seen -- Peru, Ecuador, Chile.

So I thought I would set my sights a bit closer to home and concentrate on that lifelong dream I have had of creating a beautiful, handmade, unique dollhouse.  Please don't laugh.  It has symbolic meaning in my life as I was gifted a beautiful handmade dollhouse for my sixth birthday.  Made by friends of my parents, it had a lift off roof, and a ranch style feeling, a fireplace, doors and windows that opened plus (I am pretty sure) lights that actually worked.  I turned six in 1953 when I was living in Croton-On-Hudson, New York.  The government was continuing its surveillance of my father and consequently my entire family. We suddenly had to move.  We purchased an old truck with a wood station wagon body that was owned by Allen Funt of Candid Camera. You have to be at least my age to know who he was.

More important than my dollhouse were the many books my father lost. He asked a friend to hold them for him in his attic in Croton but at some point the friend got scared and threw them away (possibly burned them all).  I guess my obsession with books and dollhouses goes back to those dreadful days when I was terrified but didn't know why, was told never to open the door to anyone, and lost the most precious gift of my short life.  I have never seen a dollhouse like it since and do not remember the names of the makers.  So sad.  This is the closest I've ever seen - by Marx - made of tin with a lift off roof.  Amazing!  The one I was given was wooden, with a shingled roof, and lights that worked. Much more sophisticated than this.

But now that I live in Los Angeles, close to Mexico (THIS IS MEXICO!), I think I should design a more logical house for this climate and natural setting.  So of course I thought of an hacienda - doesn't have to be a huge one, just one story perhaps, with a central courtyard, and the arches for the porches.  Found a blog with an excellent looking one and even wrote the artist.  She kindly sent me back the plans with the measurements!! So beautiful!  But it still isn't exactly what I want.  

I love that she designed it herself and figured out all kinds of beautiful touches to make it look real.  There is a center courtyard with a fountain but it is very very small.  The furnishings are exquisite and belong to a very upper crust family. Do I want my hacienda to be that bourgeois?  Not sure, yet who would own an hacienda if not a bourgeois?    I once stayed in an hacienda in Huejotitan, Jalisco, Mexico which was actually an orphanage.  It was huge, or seemed that way to my 16 year-old eyes.  Some of the staff had their own suites, bedrooms with a bath.  Larger rooms for multiple beds were plentiful to house the groups I had traveled with- about 15 of us - as well as the orphans themselves.  

The base of the above dollhouse is 39 by 25 -- that's quite large.  Access is from the back.  I imagined my doll house as a rectangle with a smaller one inside for the patio, with lift off roofs, so you look down on the rooms.  Indeed, I even hoped for a two-story affair.  And perhaps another way to open it by separating the whole into two parts that are also hinged in two.  But that's a lot to ask.  Our amazing carpenter/handyperson Gilberto Osorio (highly recommended - he can do anything and does it well, and if he can't he finds someone else who can) can probably make whatever I ask but I really need some good plants.

This is how I imagined the rich interior - full of beautiful pottery and rugs and art from Mexico.  I had started to collect furniture as well years ago so I have some.  This dollhouse will fulfill two of my particular wishes - bucket list I suppose one could say -- and those include a love of miniature animals and people.  I collected tiny ceramic animals and people for the first 14 years of my life, when I decided I was too old for them and told my mother to give them away.  A strange thing to do since adults collect these as well.  There is a tiny store at Olvera Street which houses many of the miniatures that I love.  I hope to lavish some love on them as well.  The store is owned by a couple who are struggling, as are all the stores there since the city decided to stop subsidizing them (so as to push them out in order to gentrify I suspect).

I wish I could believe in prayer and that I could pray for health.  Unfortunately this round of cancer is very painful -- to the point that I cannot really go anywhere unless I can sit with a heating pad on my stomach, and nod out when I am tired (which is most of the time).  

I'll end with something more positive - the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, a beautiful human being!  First African American to win the Pulitzer and poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, among other great honors!

A SUNSET OF THE CITY

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.

It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.

It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.

It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.

I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it?? Somebody wanted to joke. 

A LITTLE ABOUT A WHOLE LOT OF NOTHING

 

Kitties when we first got them.








   It's October 11 and I haven't written for two months.  I think that the recovery from six months of chemotherapy and radiation has been much worse than I ever imagined.    Meanwhile, we rescued two kittens from a No Kill Shelter about six weeks ago and they have distracted me somewhat from my own ailments. They are darling but full of illnesses themselves.  Viruses have given them terrible coughs and sneezing, and stomach issues. But in the end the final straw was when we saw their fur starting to fall out in places around their heads and on their paws.  We have taken them to three Vets and found that diagnosing their ailments isn't that scientific. We have forced tons of Amoxicillin down their throats and experienced their withdrawal from us.  Finally when we stopped trying to administer the meds they came back to life and happiness.  But then this skin ailment took over. So we took them to a third Vet who diagnosed ringworm.  And somehow I realized that I had a spot on my arm as well.  I rushed off to Kaiser Urgent Care to be given over the counter meds for it. But no one said, you must wash everything in hot water and hang out in the sun. You must wash everything with a bleach solution and preferably not sweep or vacuum so you can kill all the airborne spores that aren't easily killed.  No one said that it is easily spread, and highly contagious.  So now I just stay home and only go out if I absolutely have to do so.  I have applied the medicine religiously and the spots are going away (they showed up on the bridge of my nose).  But my lack of immunity to anything means it may pop up again.

   And meanwhile we are boarding the kitties at the Vet where they are getting their meds properly administered and are together in a cage. But we feel completely guilty about it. There is nothing we can do but try to get them healed, clean our house thoroughly and many times, and rid my body of any infection.  I haven't wanted to write about this even though I know that ringworm (NOT A WORM AT ALL) is as common as Athlete's Foot.  In fact, you can use the same medicine for it.  You cannot use creams on the kitties because they lick it off. But the meds, I believe, are toxic to them.  I will be amazed if these darling cats live very long given all the torture they have had to go through.

   In some ways I wish the No Kill Shelter had warned us more -- they did say they might carry some disease and to keep them separate for a week.  We didn't heed this because we have a tiny house and nowhere to really isolate the kitties.  One remedy we may try is to keep them in a separate building on our property until they test clear of the spores.  That may be best for me as well although I still worry about how their psyches are faring.  It is also very expensive to house them at the Vet.  I'm sure they are delighted to have them knowing how much money they will take in.

   Meanwhile, I still have symptoms that don't go away.  I have neuropathy of the feet which seems to be getting worse, not better. I have feet that swell up by the end of the day, so I have to sleep with my feet elevated on a towel to try to bring down the size.  I was told I need to wear a mask any time I go out in public because my immune system (two months after the last chemo) is still compromised.  I have a persistent cough and going up stairs knocks me out (my stairs - about 21 up from the street).  I am dizzy and the tendency to hit my head is fairly prominent and persistent.

   I took these photos so I wouldn't feel so badly about having them at the Vet.  They seem to be a good and caring bunch there and know how neurotic we are about this.  They are together in a cage which isn't large but is bigger than the one they lived in at the No Kill Shelter.

 

   They are free to roam in the exam room. When we visit them, we can take them out of their cage (they are together) and let them roam outside there as well.  There are no other animals in their area which is probably good.  No scary big dogs who are kept in the next room. The Vet seem to be able to keep the animals well segregated.  They only let us visit at designated times in order to control everything but they keep records of all that they do - partly because they charge for everything they do.  Giving pills, changing pee pads, throwing out poop box, etc. etc. are all written on a chart. The meds are administered in the morning early before the clinic opens.
   One day we will have to visit and have them show us how to administer pills.  It wasn't easy giving them liquid so I can imagine pills will be much worse.   Neither of us is patient unfortunately.  And I am having an operation on my wrist on Thursday and will have my wrist in a cast for two weeks for it to heal, even though it's a minor operation to remove a ganglion cyst.  I have to be put out because it is in a dangerous place over a major artery or nerve (I forget which though it seems to be both).  Perhaps that's why this blog post is titled "a little about a whole lot of nothing" because if it weren't for cancer, this wouldn't even be worth mentioning.