Category: Five years and counting

Zoledronic Acid aka Zometa is a drug given for osteoporosis and also for bone metastasis. Since the two years of Prolia I took didn’t stick, my oncologist recommended zometa – and given that my father had bad osteoporosis (from celiac disease), I wasn’t about to risk it – so I reluctantly agreed.

Friday I had my first treatment. The theory is that I’d get a dose every 6-months for two years and then after that I would no longer need it. I wasn’t looking forward to it – both because it is given my infusion and second because it can have crappy side effects.

As much as I was worried about the infusion and my mental reaction to it, it went off without a hitch. It took about a half hour. I can confirm that just like having a port, when you receive the meds via IV you get a strange taste/smell sensation that comes from inside your body. When the nurse first pushed saline into the IV I was reminded of the familiar taste/smell. The Zometa wasn’t too dissimilar to the saline, perhaps a little more plasticy. I pulled out some mints so I didn’t need to taste it!

Yesterday morning I was feeling OK, and thought that maybe I got away without any negative side effects. Unfortunately, that didn’t last, by mid day I was exhausted and then in the evening I felt feverish. I pulled out a thermometer and discovered I felt feverish because I had a fever! At least i can can confirm that I know by body well enough to recognize when I have a fever.

I pulled out the listed side effects – I knew “flu like symptoms” was a risk, but I wasn’t sure if that included fever. Yes, apparently fever is also a potential side effect. Yesterday evening I was downright miserable.

This morning I still had a fever but not as high as yesterday. Some tylenol seems to be keeping it at bay. I’m feeling a fair bit better now, which is good because we have a lot of work to do to get ready for departure on Friday (or more like Saturday).

Last night, after a very busy few days, we collapsed exhausted. We succeeded in filling the first two containers and getting our house cleaned up and prepped for photos and showings. We even had our first showing a couple hours after the photos, and a second showing today. The house isn’t even listed in MLS yet – so this is a good sign. With any luck we’ll have an offer before we leave.

When I’m driving around running various errands, I am finding I’m feeling something I call nostalgia of place. It is like having emotional flashbacks when I am in various places – and they aren’t really significant places – places like the hotel we stayed at the first time I came to California or the highway I take to go to the South Bay cancer center. They are not flashbacks in the remembering sense rather they are more a memory of emotions – remembering what I felt at a time in the past while driving down a specific stretch of road.

It is hard to believe that soon we will be working on lasts … at least lasts until the world gets a little more sane and we decide to come back and visit and have a proper farewell with all my friends. It sucks to be leaving and not being able to give people hugs. A zoom goodbye just isn’t the same as giving someone a great big hug.

Tomorrow we will be one week to departure. The last couple of weeks have been intense. Now that the house is ready for showings, we are focusing more on getting the van ready for living in. We have a very limited amount of time left and the van definitely needs a few more things before we leave. We’ll be living in it for an undetermined amount of time – and that too is an interesting challenge. I’ll talk more about that in a future post.

For now, we are celebrating the fact that we got the house read for showing and cleared out two containers worth of stuff. We think we can get our remaining stuff into a single container, but we have two in the driveway just in case we need the second one.

Things haven’t really felt real since this pandemic hit us back in March. At the time we decided to shelter in place. It was the plan that made the most sense.

Fast forward three months and we are now planning our move. Our house is full of boxes. We have two small shipping containers in our driveway, slowing filling up as stuff leaves the house. We are planning to have it ready for showings by Monday – something our real estate agend didn’t think we could do. Maybe we can’t, we will see.

There is now a sign on our front yard. Our place is officially for sale. It won’t be in MLS until they take the pictures, which implies the place is ready for staging.

We have a plan to depart on or about August 1st. Once the car and shipping containers leave, we will be ready to drive away in our van.

Logistics are challenging in this ever changing world. When we get to Maine we will need to quarantine until we get our Covid test results. We can test there or maybe in New York – either way, once we have a negative test result (or 14 days passes) we can collect our stuff and cross over into Canada, where we will quarantine again for 14-days.

It doesn’t feel real yet. I’m working my way through the freezer here – trying not to buy any food stuff that we don’t need.

It is interesting to learn about what food stuffs we can take across the border. With Covid, we have a lot more dried goods at home then we used to. Fortunately, most of this can easily be taken with us. There we two specific things that we need to check for – potatoes and dairy products. It seems that those are the two things with restrictions. Everything else the volume restrictions are way more than we would carry anyways, so we don’t need to worry about them.

This weekend our focus is on packing up a bunch of stuff in order to get the house ready for the videos for the MLS listing and also so that it can be open for showing.

Even with a house full of boxes it doesn’t feel real. I wonder if it will feel real when we are living in our van driving across the continent!

There is an expression about taking things one step at a time. This is great advice when you have a daunting task or project. The thing is, when you have a tight timeline and a lot to do, it isn’t so much about one step at a time as it is about optimizing which steps work well together in parallel and which need to run one after another. It is all about optimization.

I feel like right now I’m taking about eighteen different steps all in different directions. I’m struggling to stay on top of things and balls are dropping. I’m learning to prioritize. Interestingly writing this is part of the prioritization because I don’t want to lose all the thoughts that are happening as I go through this crazy time.

My mother-in-law asked the other day about our stress levels associated with the move. We looked at each other and reflected on why we were not stressed, and why we were able to handle the various uncertainties involved in this plan – and that was, that staying is just as uncertain as going. The difference is that staying will mean the uncertainty around here lasts longer – where going the uncertainty is largely in the this time of transition, but will become better managed once we get to the other side of this move. Once we are happily living someplace in the Halifax area, we will be more content – and that is what this move is all about.

Today we had two boxes delivered from UHaul. This are boxes that we will pack up and which will allow us to remove a lot of stuff from the house here. Yesterday we signed with a real estate agent who will sell our home. It will likely show up in MLS on Friday and they will come on Monday to take photos, so it needs to be stage-ready at that point — which is ambitious, but things change daily around here.

Right now Santa Clara county is in a good place. With a lot of California taking a pause (or step back) to help contain the spread of Covid, Santa Clara county is actually opening things up. The county is not on the watch list, which means the spread here is pretty contained; however, there are counties nearby where that is not the case, so I don’t know how long things will be OK here – that is the uncertainty part. Our goal is to have the house sold before things take a turn – because we feel that at some point they will – which is in part why we are making the move.

And so, today we got some shipping containers to start packing up various boxes. These will be shipped to Maine, where we will have them unpacked into a UHaul truck that we drive across the border. There are so many moving parts, my list of to do items is a mile and a half long!

So, it is not one step at a time but more like 18 well choreographed steps, with the occasional stumble along the way.

Two weeks ago, as we drove up to Mount Umunhum for a hike we were chatting as usual. We were reflecting on the uptick in Covid cases in the US and how things are getting worse not better. We also reflected on how we are here but we are unable to spend time with friends.

And then Atlantic Canada bubbled. Restrictions got lifted as there were zero new cases for 3 weeks. They have contact tracing and mandatory quarantining in place. If you don’t live there or have family there you cannot visit. They are keeping Covid out while also living almost normal lives.

I’m not sure if I’ve blogged about our adventures with Treehouse Village. We discovered cohousing – which I had a misunderstanding about but now realize that I will have my own self-contained condo while also having the benefit of living with neighbours that want to be friends and enjoy each others company. Getting back to our Adventure’s, we decided that when we moved back to Canada we wanted to live in Treehouse Village. It will be another year before things are built, but we are really enjoying being part of the process of building the community and creating the communities social norms and policies. It is exciting, in part, because the people involved are amazing. We have not met many of them face-to-face but they all feel like close friends already. It feels nice knowing that we will be moving into a community – there is a lot of emotional labour that goes into building community, so it is nice when that effort is shared.

Anyways, the big decide that we made was that we are doing to head back to Canada in August. We have only a few more weeks to pack up everything here and manage all of the logistics. It is a bit daunting as I’m still teaching 3 courses, and doing a lot of work for Treehouse. We need to pack up the house, find a real estate agent to sell our place here, rent or buy something in Nova Scotia, figure out how to get our electric car to Maine, drive ourselves (in our van) to Maine, pick up all our stuff and put it in a Uhaul truck and drive across the border in New Brunswick, where we will need to quarantine for 14 days. Oh ya, and then just days after we arrive in Nova Scotia I’m due for my next lupron shot, so I need to coordinate seeing an oncologist and getting that prescription so I can get the medication (it is an injection into muscle so needs to be given by a nurse). The logistics are crazy.

As I learn more, I’m going to start sharing more. I’ll try and keep this blog up to date on how things are going. I am busy but I also don’t want to lose a record of this time. We are making a lot of decisions and I think others can learn from them. Moving not only back to Canada but also moving to the other side of the continent during a global pandemic when then country you are living in is a hot mess is a pretty crazy thing to be doing. It is hard to believe, but I’m actually looking forward to 14-days of quarantine where we are forced to not go anywhere and we don’t be able to do much other than work (I will still be teaching, Scott will likely still be working remotely), and relaxing. We will need it by then.

Oh ya, and we made it to the top that day! 4.2 miles along beautiful trails. The square box building is the top.

Feature image: Mount Umunhum taken from about 1 mile up the trail.