blogger profile

Sarahthequeen05

I am a spunky 25-year-old living in a suburb of Tampa. I was relocated here with my husband of 2 years from western North Carolina when the Air Force decided that we were needed in sunny Florida! I had almost all the best times of my life at Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC, the oldest women's c...

READ MORE

A Little Snarky, a Little Bitchy...But it's Ok because it's Christmas!

First of all, I’d like to give a shout-out to my sister, who turns 22 today.  Way to make me feel old.  Thanks.  Your card’s in the mail, but it’ll definitely be late, because I’m lazy and didn’t mail it until today.   Actually, I’m so lazy that Hubby mailed it for me from work.

Dear Santa,

Let me start by saying thanks for all the awesome loot I got for Christmas last year.  I didn’t even realize I’d been that good.  Maybe it was a clerical error on your part and I got someone else’s stuff, but thanks anyway.  It was all mucho-appreciated, even the weird stuff.

The following is a list of suggestions for Christmas this year.  Please take the items into serious consideration.

-A job.  Preferably not in a prison or in a call center where I have to remain tethered to a cubicle for 10 hours a day and am required to tell my phone when I go to the restroom.  Also preferably not as a stripper, whore, taxi driver, or air traffic controller.  Um, and I’m not so good at sports, so any sort of professional athletic career is also probably out.  And I didn’t go to medical or law school, so we can rule those professions out as well.  It doesn’t need to pay me millions, I just need to take care of my student loan, car insurance, and grocery expenses, and occasional self-pampering items such as the OPI Grand Central Carnation nail polish I got the other day.  Other than this, it’s pretty much open.

-Magical fairies to clean the apartment.  You can’t bullshit me on this one, Santa.  I read that story about the cobbler and the elves and how they did all his work for him and cleaned up his cobbler shop.  I know they’re out there.  Please send me some to help with my dust bunny situation.  It’s so out-of-control at the moment that I have to herd the bunnies up with an actual lasso so that I may walk around unimpeded, and they just laugh at me when I pull out the swiffer.

-Snow.  I really want a white Christmas.  I’ve never had one, and I think that, after a quarter of a century, I’m due.  I’ve had snow before Christmas, and I’ve had snow after Christmas, but I’ve never woken up to snow on Christmas morning.  It’s already been unseasonably colder this winter in NC than it has been in a while.  I’ll do my snow dance, but if you could pull some strings on your end, too, I’d really appreciate it.  I mean, you live at the freaking North Pole- it’s not like you don’t have enough snow of your own.  Help a sister out.

-World peace.  Clichéd, isn’t it?  It’s like wanting toys or a bicycle or something- it gets asked for so much that nobody pays it any attention any more.  Seriously, though, I want world peace.  I want everybody to suck it up, put on their big girl/boy underwear, and get over themselves.  It’s not that bloody hard.  Do it.  Now.

-Cancer to go away.  I don’t mean I want to cure cancer, although that’d be pretty swell, too, I mean I want it to be as if it never existed.  I want that portion of our DNA which has the ability to mutate normal cells into cancer cells to disappear, along with the environmental causes of cancer.  I want all of it gone as of yesterday.

So, that’s about it.  Say hey to the missus for me and pat the reindeer on the heads and give all the elves an extra 10 minutes for lunch over the next few weeks because it’s going to be crazy busy and they deserve it.  Oh, and happy early birthday, since I hadn’t planned on sending you a separate card on the 6th.

love,

Sarah

Thanksgiving was nice and quiet, just Hubby with his scary broken collarbone and me, with my random bout of nausea.  Still, it was nice having a lazy day to do nothing but eat and sit around looking for Christmas presents on the internet.  Actually, that’s not that different from any other day of the week for me, but it was nice to have Hubby home, even though he was kind of grouchy, (understandably so), from the extreme pain.

Friday was also quiet, because we didn’t leave the apartment.  I wanted to go to Publix to get tea bags and sugar, because we were completely out.  I make a half gallon of sweet tea about every other day for Hubby.  It’s like crack for him.  He has to have it.  I told him Wednesday night to go easy on the tea that I had just made because it was going to be the last batch until I made it back out to the store.

He told me that he thought it would be fine and he could wait until Monday, when I was going to make my weekly Target run, and not to bother going out on Scary Friday.  Now, Publix is only a mile up the road, but we live really close to the mall and a super Wal-Mart (both across from the Publix shopping center), so I’m glad that I didn’t go out on Friday. 

Anyway, Hubby discovered that Dr. Pepper, his fallback beverage and pretty much the only soda that he drinks, didn’t go to well with his Vicodin (made him extra-dizzy and nauseated for some reason), so he really started to crave sweet tea about Saturday night.  I decided that I wanted to go to Barnes and Noble Sunday morning to look for stocking stuffers and that I’d just swing by Publix on my way in.

Got a few things at B&N that I can’t detail because they are prezzies and people who will be getting them read my blog.  The best part of the whole trip though, was a conversation between 2 little boys, both about 7-8 years old, obviously friends, since one was white and the other black, (both adorable as all get out), and they were with the white boy’s mom.

I don’t know their names, so we’ll just call them Will and David.  I have no idea why, they just popped into my head.

Will (white kid), elbows David (quite hard), and, snickering, says: “Whoa.  Did you see THAT?” Gestures at me.

David, elbows Will, even harder, and says, “That’s NOT funny at all.”

Score one for David in my book.  The moral of this story is, children, if you make fun of someone with cancer, expect to get elbowed really hard in the kidneys.  It was all I could do not to laugh out loud.

I did go to Publix and got tea bags and sugar- had to buy only 5 pounds since they were out of 10, but got 200 tea bags instead of 100, so that’ll last about 2 months.  And as a bonus, I remembered to pick up refills for 2 of my anti-nausea medications that I’ll need for tomorrow, otherwise the rest of this week would have been nasty and no fun at all.

Hubby’s collarbone area is pretty nasty, too.  The bone’s still sticking up some, and the whole area is that nasty chartreuse-yellow color from all the bruising that’s fading away.  The sticky-up bone part is pretty funky, and we were arguing this weekend about what looked weirder: my port or his bone. 

We decided it was a tie, but closely leaning towards a win for him; it’s obvious a bone doesn’t belong where his is currently, and it does look rather unnatural, but at least it’s his own bone, whereas my port is perfectly circular and titanium and silicone and is not something my body would ever do on its own.  On the plus side, mine doesn’t hurt at all unless you mash on it really hard, or prevent the movement of my arm, so he has an advantage over me there, in a twisted sort of way.

The igmo that tackled Hubby from mid-air called Friday to ask something random and then casually asked how he was, (just as an FYI, this a-hole hasn’t even apologized).  Hubby told him that it hurt a lot, (bit of an understatement, if you ask me, since he was taking 2 of the Vicodin every 4 hours and still had incredible pain).  When he got off the phone, Hubby asked if I was mad at the guy that broke his bone.  I said, “Yes, I hope he gets leprosy and his penis falls off.  Like, he’ll just get up to pee one morning and it’ll come off in his hand.”

I blinked.  I wasn’t quite sure where that had come from.  Hubby just looked at me, possibly thinking, “Holy crap, what sort of witch have I married?”  I said, “You know, leprosy.  Like the king in Braveheart had.  It causes necrosis of tissues and your body parts just die and fall off.”  He quickly changed the subject back to what Christmas presents we’re getting for our respective families.

Incidentally, my mother was complaining about an idiot doctor she’d reported to the board of medicine a few years back for ignoring a massive post-surgery infection that she had, and I said the same thing to her.  I think it’s become my new favorite curse for wicked people- it’s so much more descriptive than “I hate him.  I hope he dies”.  Unfortunately, I haven’t found a female equivalent for it, yet.  I guess I could use “breasts” instead of “penis”, but it just doesn’t sound as funny.  When I use the word” breasts” I think of fried chicken.

Target was fun today.  I was feeling frisky, so when I got my Starbucks grande Signature hot chocolate with a shot of peppermint and peppermint whipped cream and chocolate shavings and red sprinkles, I got a mint brownie, too.  I told the fabulous Starbucks lady that it was my one last little hurrah before the chemo ended and my metabolism slowed back down and joked about buying a little candle for it.  She told me about her mother-in-law having thyroid cancer and the chemo that she’s going through right now, then she only charged me $0.95 instead of $1.95 for the brownie.  I told her I loved her.

If you get the chance to try one of these brownies, I highly recommend it.  They are so rich and fudgy they’re almost like one of those flourless chocolate tortes, then there is a green minty layer that tastes like it has cream cheese in it, and then a chocolate ganache on the top drizzled with minty green icing.  Oh, holy crap, it was so good. 

Not exactly the breakfast of champions, but totally worth however many hundreds of calories it has, trust me, especially since it’s so rich that you’ll only be able to eat it once every 6 months.  I don’t get them very often, but I love getting Starbucks pastries to eat as I shop because of the reactions that I get from other shoppers.  Well, not all other shoppers, just the women.  I am not exaggerating when I tell you that every single woman that sees me munching on my pastry, be it scone, muffin, or bread, first looks me up and down and then focuses on the food in my hand. 

They are all thinking “Honey, you are not teensy, so why are you eating that fat- and calorie-laden food?”, while being jealous of me eating it at the same time.  This holds true for women who are bigger than me and women who are smaller.  It’s really strange.  Something similar happens when I’m in line ordering my beverage, too, and I get whipped cream on it and the other woman in line inevitably orders something made with skim milk and sugar-free syrups.  I get this nasty glare and I’m not sure why.

Speaking of nasty glares, I got 3 today, (maybe more but I only noticed 3), from these fat, balding men.  You know those guys that aren’t fat anywhere else besides their bellies?  Well, they were all shopping at my Target this morning.  It was like the Paunchy Men’s Shopping Club. 

One thing I’ve noticed about being bald is that women and men have very different staring techniques.  Women will glance away as soon as you make eye contact with them to acknowledge that you know they were staring at you.  Men won’t.  They’ll just continue to stare, unabashedly.  I’ve compensated by staring back. 

Today, I stared back at all the glaring, fat, balding guys, while saying, (in my head), “What?  What are you staring at, you porker?  There’s nothing unusual about me.  You look like you’re 5 months pregnant, which I’m pretty sure makes you look a hell of a lot more abnormal than I do, so stop it.  And, by the way, you should really re-think all that cookie dough and bacon in your buggy.  It’s not going to help.” 

When I was picking up string cheese for Hubby on the dairy aisle, (because he needs all the calcium he can get right now), a nice Target guy asked if I needed any help.  I told him I didn’t and he said, “Yeah, you come in here all the time so I figured you knew where everything was.”  And I kind of liked the idea that the Target people recognize me.  I wondered if I would be as memorable if I had had hair this entire time.  I think not.

In fact, I’m not really bald any more at all.  By the end of October, I had mostly skin all over my head, the sort of baldness that actually reflects light and is shiny.  My hair follicles have finally started to take a stand against the chemo, and I have hair again.  It’s downy, fuzzy, white-blonde hair, but it’s hair, and I have about 1/3-1/2 inch all over my head.  And it’s not sparse, either- it’s the same thickness as my old hair, just finer.  Hubby calls me “Peach Fuzz”.

While this is dead exciting, it means that my leg hairs are also trying to grow, and that makes me a little bit sad.  It will be wonderful when chemo’s done, but I’m really going to hate having to shave more often than once a month.  I told my doctor that if he figured out a way to give women enough chemo so that only their leg, underarm, facial, and bikini-area hair stopped growing, he’d make a killing.  He just laughed.  I wasn’t kidding.  It’s been so nice to be baby-slick everywhere the past few months.

Now, I’ll have to go back to tweezing my eyebrows (when they grow back), and shaving, and using that scary Sally Hansen stuff to eat off the tiny blonde fuzz that I get on my cheeks and upper lip.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that as soon as my body realizes the chemo is gone, (which’ll probably be the week of Dec 15th, since, according to my schedule I should get chemo that week but won’t since I’m done), I’ll sprout a 1 inch growth of hair all over my body overnight just like a Chia pet.  I’m not looking forward to it.

My Christmas shopping is truly and completely done.  I’ve got chemo tomorrow, blood work next week, and then a PET scan the week after that, so it’s fairly smooth sailing through the holidays.  Don’t know if Hubby’ll have to have surgery on his clavicle yet- we’ll find out Wednesday for sure.  I think it will be a low-key, stress-free holiday season, and I’m very much looking forward to it.