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SurferGirl's blog: "Loss"

created on 02/12/2008  |  http://fubar.com/loss/b187816

On Top of Everything

LIFE, WITH CANCER Feeling on top of everything, briefly Lauren Terrazzano Life, With Cancer March 20, 2007 Like many things, it seemed like a good idea at the time. It was a 50-degree day, the sun was shining and I woke up and felt like going for a hike, something I loved to do long before cancer. Upstate Bear Mountain was no big deal for a girl who had once spent nearly a week hiking in the Canadian Rockies, sleeping in alpine huts. Or who had once climbed the Grand Tetons with a group of rabid female journalists. But I had two lungs during those treks. Now I have one. So we set off that Sunday morning a week ago: my husband, my trusted friend and I, up the Palisades Parkway to the trailhead. There were few hikers making the ascent; most people gathered there were heading indoors for the carousel at the base of the mountain. I need to get to the top of this mountain, I told myself and my two compadres. I needed to feel alive. There's nothing like climbing a mountain to do that. Even if it's only a 4-mile climb that wends its way through the famed Appalachian Trail. In the old days it would take me 90 minutes to get to the peak, which rewards hikers with an observation tower and magnificent views of the Bear Mountain Bridge and the Hudson River. Bear Mountain, incidentally, has few bears. It is named because the mountain is said to resemble a sleeping one. "There must be a column in this somewhere," my friend Monica suggested as we clambered along the icy trail, holding onto trees and hiking sticks so we wouldn't butt-slide down the steep mountain path. As we climbed I remembered getting up there once, picnic lunch in hand, and seeing the tops of the Twin Towers off in the distance. That was just a few days before Sept. 11, 2001. In 2005, 10 months after my first surgery, to remove the lung, I somehow managed to get 40 wonderful reporter friends (not a small feat, since we aren't the most athletic bunch) and their families to climb the mountain as a fundraiser for underinsured lung cancer patients. We celebrated at the summit with catered sandwiches and chocolate cookies. The climb on this March day was a little different. It was icy on most of the trail, and nippy in the areas shaded by the tall evergreens. Whenever I got tired, my husband would grab my arm and pull me up the path. Monica offered plentiful words of encouragement while carrying my pack, all the while threatening to kill me for putting myself in such a precarious situation. In a sweep of melodrama, I sat on a dry log and told them to go on without me. Perhaps the illness simply has taken its toll. But more than two hours later, we did, in fact, make it to the top. The icy, cold top. Victory. There was no one else up there. A few days later, my white blood cells plummeted, an occasional side effect of cancer treatment. Perhaps the exertion of the hike didn't help. I was contemplating not writing a column this week. But as I write this, I am bored, sitting in a hospital bed listening to the rhythmic sound of an IV pump as it transports fluids and antibiotics through my veins. Silly me. That's the thing about cancer. There are a lot of peaks and valleys. One minute you're on the top of the mountain, the next minute you're at the base of the trail again. Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.

Dark Thoughts

http://www.newsday.com/ny-hscol1226,0,6442381.column Dark thoughts intrude on a season of light Lauren Terrazzano | Life, With Cancer December 26, 2006 Article tools E-mail Share Digg Del.icio.us Facebook Fark Google Newsvine Reddit Yahoo Print Reprints Post comment Text size: This time of year, the world is awash in New Year's resolutions. People hoping to lose weight, to get a better job, or to be a better mother, father, son or daughter. I have a few resolutions as well. The first is to live. The second, more importantly, is to live well, despite knowing the threat of death is always there. It is the most difficult of resolutions for anyone facing a serious illness. For those of us with cancer, the fear of death lingers coyly. It is always lurking as we plot our futures through doctor appointments, CT scans, biopsies and blood work. It creeps up at the oddest moments, like when it was time to renew my passport and I realized I could expire before the document does. I know this may seem like a dark topic for the holidays, but the New Year is always a good time to figure out what you plan to do better. With the help of loyal readers from Uniondale to the United Kingdom, I have tried to hum along with my life, writing about issues from humor to the high cost of cancer. But death is a topic I've largely avoided. It would be so much easier not to write about it. In fact, it'd be a lot easier not to think about it. Note that the name of this column is Life, with Cancer. The emphasis is on "life." But there it is sometimes. The fear of death keeps me up at night, or it wakes me at 4 a.m. and I listen for a sound -- any sound outside -- like a truck going by, to remind myself I am still here. As a reporter, I've written hundreds of stories about people's deaths. I've made a career of asking uncomfortable questions with the hope of making sense of it all. Yet since that otherwise ordinary, sunny August day in 2004 -- the day of my diagnosis -- my ability to ask the tough questions about my own life has somehow disappeared. I find it hard to ask any of my doctors how much longer they think I have. I can't bear to know, because to put a time frame on it will somehow taint the time I have left. Still, I am frequently haunted by this question I cannot bring myself to ask out loud. Most people are afraid of death. Yet, we're all dying, a wise editor once told me. We're just doing it on different time schedules. In my darkest moments, I worry about the future without me. First I worry about the grief of those I will leave behind. I wonder what people will say about me at my funeral. I wonder if I will be there in some way to hear it. Grief fades with time. It's the feeling of loss that seems to linger -- the little, daily reminders that a person is no longer around. For example, I think of all the catalogs that arrive at our apartment. Lands' End, Crate & Barrel, Victoria's Secret, and how they are all addressed to me. I think of how it will hurt my husband to see them after I'm gone when he makes his daily visit to the mailbox. I think about canceling the catalogs now, in an attempt to loss-proof my home, the way new parents child-proof theirs. If only it were that easy. So how do we deal? There are no easy answers. Every day is a mental exercise, trying not to dwell on the inevitable. Staying busy helps. I got a Crock-Pot for a wedding shower gift, and I have begun to use it. I always thought it was for old ladies. Now my 30- and 40-something friends and I share recipes via e-mail. We call ourselves the Secret Society of Crockpot Crackpots. I also managed to send out my Christmas cards, as I do every year. This time they featured a photo of my husband, my dog and me in Central Park. We are smiling. The daily rhythms of everyday life, Christmas cards and Crock-Pots, are the things that keep it normal. Well, as normal as it can be. In facing the prospect of dying, the one benefit is that you learn how to live. Not perfectly, but better than you did before. You don't take time for granted. You enjoy a Sunday morning bagel that much more. Time with your friends and family becomes even more special. And you appreciate the rare 50-degree day in December that allows you to finish your Christmas shopping. So as you read this, I hope I'll be sitting on a beach in Puerto Rico, sipping a drink out of a coconut shell. Yes, I'll be trying to live life better than I did before. Then I plan to be back here in 2007, fulfilling my resolutions. Happy New Year.

Bald Chicks Rule

http://www.newsday.com/ny-hscol1219,0,6507919.column 'Bald Chicks Rule' and the other laughs Lauren Terrazzano | Life, With Cancer December 19, 2006 My friend Amy routinely uses humor to diminish the angst of going to see her cancer doctor. During an exam one day when he asked her to remove her shirt, she replied, deadpan: "Aren't you going to buy me a drink first?" He turned red; she cracked up. And so did I when we swapped tales months later at a diner over our stranger-than-fiction moments in oncology. This is not to say cancer isn't a miserable disease with enormously dark moments. It is. There are some days I make Sylvia Plath look well-adjusted and chipper. And there are some days I want to put my hand through a paned-glass window. But then there are days when things aren't so bad, when I laugh at how absurd it is that I probably have enough hospital wrist bands to stretch from Maine to California. Humor is empowering. Levity can pop up in the most unexpected places. It's a non-emotional way to confront an emotional situation. In fact, gallows humor has helped cops survive crime scenes; soldiers survive foxholes, and us cancer patients survive the stresses of treatment. This is why there is at least one Web site, Cafepress.com, that has emerged in recent years to sell humorous gifts for cancer patients. No typical "Thinking of You" cards or "Desiderata" poems -- which can also be helpful at times -- from this Foster City, Calif. company that hosts vendors. Instead, you'll find T-shirts, mugs, teddy bears and hats with irreverent -- sometimes profane -- sayings like, "I love the Smell of Chemo in the Morning," or "One more MRI and I will stick to the Fridge." The MRI T-shirt was the design creation of Atlanta-based humorist Jennifer Shephard, 37, who lost both grandparents to cancer. She began selling her items on the Web site about two years ago and estimates she has sold about 10,000 so far. She said she donates all profits to cancer research. "With something so scary, the only way to get through it is to feel like you are thumbing your nose at it," said Shephard. "It's almost like you are rebelling against it." There are items for all types of cancer. "Save the ta ta's" for breast cancer, or "Stop colon cancer. Moon a doctor." My personal favorites: a T-shirt that reads: "Bald Chicks Rule" and one with the simple yellow and black triangular symbols that indicate "radioactive material." I keep meaning to wear that one to the airport. "For years, people played it very safe for people who are sick," said Marc Cowlin, a spokesman for Cafepress.com. "A newer trend points at the problem to make the person laugh a little bit. After all, they say humor is the best medicine." Luckily, those around me agree. Humor also has a bite, and that bite is what let my friends know I was still my old self. And still am, mostly. After my lung cancer diagnosis 29 months ago, I asked my friends in the newsroom to come up with the best title for my memoirs. Journalists, with their often perverse sense of humor, offered some goodies: Tuesdays with Laurie, the Lungless and the Restless. Oddly enough, I laughed so hard I cried. A few months ago my friend Sylvie sent me a postcard with the saying: "You say I'm a Bitch like it's a bad thing." It is taped to my refrigerator. She's also the designated waiting room caricaturist, penning New Yorker-like cartoon versions of the flood of people in the hospital, including my doctors, my parents and any friends who happen to be hanging around during one of my stays. Leah, my oldest friend and partner in geekdom since the third grade, provided me during one chemo regimen with a detailed synopsis of our childhood tormenters -- you know, the ones who have since grown up to be serial killers. I read that list howling, and the hours passed like moments. My friend Carole opts for sending humor cards over rainbows and teddy bears. And Karla, the queen of gag gifts, presented me with a pirate's eye patch and a matching pirate's hook for my hand after recent eye surgery. It made the nurses laugh. Very nice, I thought, as a smile crept to my own lips. Then again, it could have also been the morphine drip.

Wisdom

I found out recently that a dear fried whom I had lost touch with had died last year. We had once been very close...we were bridesmaids in each others' weddings... we were fast friends in college...and supporters of one another through our early years of post graduate adulthood...but then our lives drifte apart in the way no one ever plans for... and we always think there will be time to reconnect and find a way back into one anothers' lives. Sadly this is not to be in our case... She was a writer and I am now in the process of reading through some of the articles she left behind...here is one I thought worth sharing with those of you who care to read... http://www.newsday.com/ny-hscol1205,0,6114698.column LIFE WITH CANCER Secrets from the alternate universe Lauren Terrazzano | Life, With Cancer December 5, 2006 I've never understood the people who insist that getting cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them. I could have done without this so-called epiphany in my life. My family and friends could have as well. Still, the one enlightening thing about it - and this is a stretch - is that getting such a disease offers a certain perspective that often eludes the rest of the world. We travelers on this road have learned a secret: the value of time. Down to the day. The minute. The second. We are forced to confront our own mortality every day. We see the bus coming straight at us, while other people never knew what hit them. So we cram as much life as we can into whatever time there is left, because each doctor's appointment or scan is a dress rehearsal for the bad news we know could ultimately come, as one reader wrote to me recently. Still, many who have never had a life-threatening experience tend to plod along toward infinity with what I call luxury problems: Worrying about the thread count on their expensive sheets, why they didn't get that raise, or how to get their kid into the right school. How I long for the days of such worries. How I long to go back to the time when my biggest concern was where my story played in the newspaper, not whether a suspicious dark spot would show up on my CT scan. This is not to diminish other people's dramas. If you want to exist among the living, you have to acknowledge the rest of the world doesn't know what it's like to wait for the results of a biopsy or to undergo chemotherapy. Unfortunately, many of us do. And while there are days I want to hide under my down comforter, I offer the following advice to the masses, not just those living in the parallel universe that is cancer. Live. Here are some suggestions. 1. Get married. What are you waiting for? 2. Get a divorce. Why be with someone who doesn't make you happy? 3. Remember that everybody's family is a bit crazy, especially during the holidays. There is no true-life Brady Bunch. 4. Have a baby. Or adopt one. Or choose neither option and be happy with your decision to have a child-free life. You're not getting any younger. 5. Order dessert as your first course and your last course in a fancy restaurant. 6. Go to Iceland to soak in thermal mineral baths. 7. Go to Cuba to see one of the last bastions of Communism before Castro's reign ends. Or go to Coney Island and ride the Cyclone, if that makes you happy. 8. Get the tattoo or nose ring you've wanted since college. Your mother will get over it. 9. Lose your fear of flying. Really. It's limiting your view of the world. 10. Advise that chronic complainer with the "woe is me" complex that he or she could benefit from a good anti-depressant. Realize you are that person sometimes. 11. Tell your family and friends you love them. 12. Don't give power to those who have shown a pattern of hurting you. 13. Take down the license plate number of the jerk on the highway driving crazily and call the police. 14. Seek subtle revenge on those who create the petty annoyances in life. Phone a telemarketer back on the number on your caller ID and proceed to chat about your latest root canal. 15. Float in crystal-clear water somewhere where you can see your toes on the bottom. Rinse. And repeat. You get the idea.
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