Unfurling

Yesterday's news shot me out of the bell jar like a bottle rocket. I'm back on top of the ticket; I've pulled my foot out of the grave and James has suspended his eHarmony account (for now.) Before the good news arrived, I was slowly unfurling from the fetal position and regrouping (and thinking about regrouping.) But yesterday, for the first time in several days, I could look at my kids without losing it.

When the wee brown ones are in your presence, you have to fake it like it's your full time job. Acting like nothing is wrong is hard work and most of it's in vain. First, they’re not easily fooled. Second, I'm a horrible actor. Third, my big fat face is a dead give away. Some women can bawl their eyes out of their sockets, then wipe away the tears with a delicate tissue and it's like it never happened. If I even sob a little, my face turns fuschia and swells up; my eyes narrow into coin slots and stay that way, sometimes up to 24 hours. So, every now and then, I catch Caroline or Paulie giving me the hairy eyeball: "You're suspect!"

Organ Thursday:
The CT scan was a blur. I was in a dark mood in the waiting room. James read a Men's Health and tried not to talk to me per my request. I choked down two barium smoothies -- you had to take a full 45 minutes to drink each one. 90 minutes of ass. The scan itself was less than 15 minutes. They injected some dye into my vein and then passed me through this giant donut that checked my organs for the beast. The donut part may have been a cartoon hallucination. I was starving.

On the way out of the hospital, we had a humorous parking lot sighting that wouldn't make sense or be funny so it's futile to describe it. So, we were both in better spirits once we got home. Caroline had drawn me this picture (left) and scotched taped it to the wall next to my bed. "Mommy, I know you don't feel good. I know you have a cold. This will make you feel better when you wake up." (It does.)

On her drawing, there were these little tadpole-looking black squiggly lines in the grass. "What are those," I asked.

She looked at me like I'd just emerged from a pod.

"WORMS!?"

Aside: Both kids have inherited my childhood hobby of keeping earthworms as pets in plastic buckets on the back deck. One time, they caught James dumping one of the buckets off the back deck. They remain traumatized and royally pissed.

I wanted to catch up on Thursday's Lost premiere, and Caroline beat me to the punch: "Let’s snuggle and watch Lost." She doesn't get the show but she's not afraid of it. She watches for Aaron sightings, that's about it. “Oh, Mom, look at him, he’s getting SO big.”

Paulie stood up on the coffee table while we were watching the show and turned around: "Mom, I’m going to shake my booty at you." He did and it was awesome.

That night, the Dell'Olios brought Thai from Wild Ginger over for dinner.

Up, up, up out of the bell jar.

Throw-us-a-Bone Friday:
Friday morning, I woke up feeling good, just wanting to get the bone scan out of the way and move on. I listened to WERS the whole ride into the Brigham and found a new favorite band (or at least favorite song -- "Coming Home"). This hardly ever happens to me anymore. I was car dancing. They're called "The 88" and their name stands for 88 constellations in the sky, 88 keys on the piano, the infinity sign, 88 cities in Los Angeles, 88 mph to get Back to the Future, etc. Love that. I think they've been around awhile. I have to start paying attention again.

I had all of my talismen along for the ride with me: Your emails and Facebook messages, wall posts, and blog comments. I also had Nana Rie's heart. My friend Amy, when I told her about Nana's survival, told me that in order to have survived breast cancer back in th 40s, you had to have had a strong heart. So I was going though some of Nana Rie’s funky jewelry and found a rhinestone-encrusted heart pin. I've been wearing it ever since for some luck.

While I was trying to park my wagon in a teeny tiny compact car spot, I was thinking about what my sister-in-law Paula said to me the day before about not looking online for case studies in my "type" of cancer, about how outcomes are as individual as the person, it's "your" cancer and yours alone. BTW, she told me all of this while she was mainlining chemo at the Dana. Talk about tough.

I met my mom at the Au Bon Pain near the main entrance. She also promised not to talk today and had a whole bag of tricks to avoid chit chat and be there for moral support. So, we went to nuclear medicine where they injected me with a radioactive dye at 9:30, and asked us to please loiter until 12:30. It takes 3-4 hours for the dye to settle into your bones.

For someone who didn't feel like talking, I couldn't shut up. I was talking non-stop - to my mom, the older gent sitting across from us, the cleaning people, everyone in the waiting room. Brandon Fraser was on one of the morning talk shows, jumping around and squealing like a monkey. This was very distracting to everyone.

An old man sitting in wheel chair in the corner barked up out of nowhere. "Who is that? He's obNOXious!!!"

"It's Brandon Fraser. He's an actor," the woman sitting next to me said.

"He's an ASS."

Seriously, there was something wrong with BF. While it's an elderly thing to say, I truly believe he was "on something."

My nervous talking behavior continued during the bone scan, which was the equivalent of being scanned like a photo in a leviathan scanner. I was making lame comments as a picture of my entire skeleton lit up like the night sky on the screen in front of me.

ME: You know, this nuclear dye can’t be good for you. If I didn't have cancer in my bones already, it’s definitely in there now. Har, har, har.

Bone Scanning Lady: (BSL) Yeah, just drink a lot of water and pee it out so it doesn’t stay in your system for too long.

ME: What do you see? Can you see anything?

BSL: I just see beautiful bones.

ME: I know you can’t tell me anything. You don’t say have to say anything. Just knock something off your desk if you see something.

BSL: (smiles at me like I'm an insane)

ME: I'm sorry. I've had three weekends in a row of waiting for tests to come back. They've all had shitty results. Three weeks is not a lot of time in the grand scheme but when you’re waiting for answers that could predict how much longer you may have to live, it’s a lifetime. I need to prepare myself for the worst.

When I was walking out, BSL grabbed my arm and whispered. "Between you and me, I don't think you have anything to worry about. I didn't see anything light up. It usually lights up. Don't tell anyone I said this, I could lose my job. Have a great weekend, ok?"

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I wanted to hug her.

I was all set to hang onto that piece of news all weekend but then the doctor called and kicked it up a notch with the "all clear" across the board. I wasn't supposed to get the results until next Tuesday or Wednesday. Needless to say, "faith" has replaced "fuck" as the F word of the weekend.

We'll take it. Even the doctor said she was surprised by the results and had expected to see more widespread disease. Before they scheduled the scans, they'd told me to prepare for that. I still can't even write what they'd originally predicted. I don't want to jinx this gift. I still have a locally advanced disease and it's still a serious situation with all kinds of ugly treatments and surgeries ahead, but wow, perspective is really everything, isn't it?