A year ago today, I woke up very early. No breakfast and no coffee, we headed to the hospital. All the waiting was over. Decisions had been made. I was as ready as I was ever going to be. For me, the surgery itself was the easy part. I went in, got prepped, they put…
I came back from my last oncologist appointment (Monday) feeling a little down. The visit was good. We made a solid plan of action that addresses both breast cancer prevention (hormone therapy) and treatment for osteopenia (low bone density). I was fine until I asked the question “so how long would I need to be…
Your friends or family invite you over for a holiday meal. They want to feed you. They mean well. However, as someone with celiac disease, this can be very difficult to navigate. I don’t want to offend my friends, but I also do not want to get sick. So I asked the celiac Facebook group…
As my one year cancer free day is fast approaching (December 17, 2014 is the date the last of my cancer was removed from my body), I am finding myself having flashbacks to my diagnosis day. I am not remembering the storm the week before surgery, nor how low I was feeling. Instead I’m remembering…
Not sure if it is the gluten-free diet (except for when I get accidentally exposed – not sure yet what got me earlier this week). Not sure if it is just that I’m fitter now. Not sure, but it is good. Usually when I take a week off exercising, my body back-slides. I end up…
Today I pause and reflect. It is December 6. It is the 26th anniversary of the Polytechnique massacre – when 14 women were killed in an engineering school in Montreal, Canada. I was a first year student at the University of Victoria at the time (December 1989). I was studying physics. It could have happened at…
I am proud to say that I successfully managed a blog post per day for the month of November. Unlike NaNoWriMo, the requirement wasn’t for a specific number of words. There wasn’t a way to finish early and meet the requirement. Instead I had to blog every day. In the beginning, I thought I’d blog both…
It occurs to me that there is a lot of dialogue about how approximately 20-30% of early stage breast cancers progress to metastatic disease. I ran into a bit of conflict in a discussion group the other day because I asked the organization to do some more research around the myth of 30%. With that…
Today, I want to share with you two very well written and informative blog posts by Ann at Breast Cancer? But Doctor …. I hate pink! In the first post Ann eloquently talks about the challenge of eating while experiencing what she informs us is known as cancer anorexia cachexia. As someone who is going…
Yesterday we (hubby and I) helped mom clean out her kitchen. The goal was to make it clear what was gluten free and what wasn’t. Hubby did most of the hard work, as I didn’t want to be too close to the open flour and worried of cross contamination – plus, he is just really…
