(Disclaimer: Many of you know that I just visited my oncology team last week- Just so you know, all tests came back normal. I continue to have no evidence of returning disease. I am feeling happy, humble and very grateful for being in this place in this moment.) I have thought of western treatments like…
Category: Tamoxifen
Is it time to retire my Oncologist?
Joe sent me a thought provoking article from the New Yorker on the need for incremental medicine, the kind practiced by old fashioned generalists, contrasted with the heroic medicine practiced by specialists. Which of course had me thinking about how Cancering treatments might be different if we valued the more subtle aspects of medicine as much as…
Burning Books and The End of Bad Expectations.
I have a confession. I have burned two books in my life. I am not a fan of censorship, I did read Fahrenheit 451, and to be fair I didn’t seek out every copy and destroy them, or start to steal them from public libraries to prevent others from reading them. Nonetheless I am a book burner. The…
Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
When my MRI appointment came onto the scene in September my anxiety reached near epic proportions. It is stunning to me that I could be more, much more, anxious waiting for a routine check up than I was at nearly any time during my year of treatments in 2014. I am coming to recognize that anxiety is in part simply a communication between…
Attack of the Gallbladder Sludge Monster!
Polyps and Sludge and Cysts! OH MY! When one thinks of the stereotype of elders exchanging complaints around the dinner table, things like “the rheumatism” “gout ” and “gallbladder troubles” likely come to mind. In the hubris manner of the young and the healthy I imagined that I would never fall prey to such topics of conversation. Ye…
Holding up the sky for Chicken Little.
First off my MRI results came to the Clinic yesterday and the Nurse Practitioner, Marion, gave me the all clear. I looked at the report – and it is annoyingly brief. One would think with all the angst I have been feeling this past week that it would have more than a few sentence fragments….
Ah Statistics! Tamoxifen Update #3
As I continue to question and research Tamoxifen I see that there is no way of applying statistics to the individual, just the possibility of having a generality. Statistics are like a squall passing through, who knows where the rain will fall? Or who will be at the right angle for a rainbow? There are always those…
Tamoxifen 2.0
For months I have been researching and considering Tamoxifen, the one prescription drug I receive. Last week I decided to take a holiday from it. Wanting to figure out if the side effects I am experiencing are related to Tamoxifen, or some other issue, like turning into an old hag – this is my birthday month after…
Body Sovereignty
Tomorrow we travel to Portland to visit with both Compass Oncology for a blood draw and check up, and to Hai Shan clinic for acupuncture and a reset of my swamp tea formula. The two sides of my treatment coin at the moment. After watching the huge TTAC documentary a few weeks ago, and then…
Is Tamoxifen the Boat?
There is a humorous fable about how God intercedes in our lives, probably told in millions of churches the world over. A big storm sets the water to rising, and soon it has turned into a flood. A man looks up at the sky and secure in his faith, he asks God to save him. Just at…
Time Tracking Shenanigans
Lately I have been re-noticing that I am still losing track of things/people/tasks. Time is pretty variable these days. As I have always been shall we say “time challenged” this isn’t exactly new. However as certain aspects of my chemo-brain continue to heal, namely spacial perception, it makes the other ways my brain has been changed far more noticeable, and…
A Tale of Two Tamoxifens – a case study
*2016 update: I wrote this post in early 2015 while figuring out which brand of Tamoxifen worked best for me. I have since also adjusted my dose from 20mg, to 10mg. The first thing I do each morning is to push back the curtain and look out at the landscape. Morning meditation is spent observing the light…
Riding the Pooka 