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annakie · 2 years

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Bright eyes to bat and hide behind

It’s been several months, so here’s a life and pet update.

I’ve been more or less off tumblr for the last few months, needed a break, let the queue almost run out. I’m checking in every few days now.

But the last things I personal-posted were mostly about my cats.

Leela, who has kidney failure, has been thriving for six months now. Honestly, she’s been more energetic, eating more, expressing herself even more now than she had been for the last year or two before the hospitalization. Every morning she enthusiastically screams at me for food. I’ve kept feeding her and keeping water next to her bed here on the office desk. She’ll tell me when she’s hungry and she gets whatever she wants whenever she wants. She’s back to her “normal” weight, which is still like, five pounds, but it’s fine for her. She’s sometimes quite playful, which is so great to see for a sixteen and a half year old cat. I don’t mind when she screams for food, her having hunger is always good news. I don’t mind it when she spends 30 minutes in the morning running around and screaming at the top of her lungs, it means she’s alive and has extra energy and that’s fine with me.

I’ve got some PTO coming in December, so I’m thinking I’m going to take her to the vet for a checkup then, just so she can be looked over. But honestly, she’s doing great.

Patchy has Lymphoma, diagnosed at the end of June. I’m happy to report that Patchy, likewise, has been doing well! The very first day she had to take medicine I researched to make sure it’d be OK to give it to her mixed in with food, and it was, and then I called and confirmed with the vet the next day, and he also agreed. So her medicine gets mixed in with a small pouch of food that is basically just shredded chicken in broth, and she licks the bowl clean every day. Two hours later, she gets “real” dinner.

I took her in for her first checkup a few weeks after she went on the medicine and the vet was very pleased with how much better her digestive tract was. It was evident in the ultrasound he took, and she didn’t throw up at all that month. So we went another 6 weeks, and again, no throwing up and an even better ultrasound.

In the middle of September I woke up in the middle of a Saturday night to Patchy throwing up. I... did not take it well. But she ate fine the rest of the weekend. I was supposed to take her in that Friday anyway, so I just moved up her appointment to the first vet appointment I could at 8am Tuesday, almost ready for a terrible report. Instead, the doctor was like “We almost can’t see the lymphoma at all anymore. She probably had a very normal upset stomach. She’s doing great. Keep doing what you’re doing, here’s more medicine, come back in three months or if she throws up like, multiple days in a row.”

So it’s been over four months since the original diagnosis. Her next appointment is at the end of December. She did throw up one more time a few days ago, but not since, and she’s still eating like a little horse, maybe even starting to gain more weight than she should.

It’s been a great reprieve.

I don’t take a single day with either of them for granted.

The worst part is looking at both of them and always being on that edge. Are they eating okay today? Are they behaving normally? Drinking enough? Looking for abnormal pukes. That knowing that it’s only a matter of time until something goes wrong. That part sucks.

And I’ve been saving extra the last few months knowing that new bills are incoming (and every ultrasound+medicine visit for Patchy is already kinda hefty!) Hoping there’s gonna be enough, if bad things hit for both of them at the same time.

Mostly grateful for this extra time, though, with both of them feeling well and happy. Trying to make sure they both get extra love (while making sure Fry and Pemily, both of whom are in great health, get their fill as well.) Taking extra pictures, and implanting memories in my brain. I don’t want to look back at these days when the worst happens sometime in the future and regret my time with either of them.

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So besides pets, what else is up?

Still social distancing mostly. Have been out to eat a couple of times with my family, and once or twice with friends, but still preferring to eat in or takeout. Also went to a movie (Venom 2) with a friend, but bought filler seats on either side of us and the theater wasn’t packed, either. Really, mostly socializing by going to friend’s house for D&D games. My mom and aunt have come over here a few times, too.

I ran a Halloween-ish horror-themed oneshot for my RL friends, including my usual DM, two weekends ago at their place. It was on a ship, it was a little gross and suspenseful, and ended in PVP as planned, so I hardly had to do anything in the final fight. Everyone had a great time. Planning on doing another RL friend oneshot plus Christmas Feast in December.

Plus still got all the online gaming and hangouts going. Still loving running my Sunday night game for my RL ex-work friends from 2 jobs ago. They’re level 11, kicking ass, and enjoying themselves. We sometimes play their “B-Team” characters which are a lower-level party in the same world who go on sidequests or just have small random adventures when not everyone can attend a session but we want to still play. They’re about to get into the real meat of the campaign story though, and I’m looking forward to amping everything up.

And right now I’m DMing my Wednesday night game. Running Candlekeep Mysteries as a campaign, adding in this supplement that I love, Witch+Craft, which is a crafting system + location + magic items + mini-campaign that is all very chill and done in a Studio Ghibli-esque style. I’m really enjoying running a low-stakes campaign which doesn’t take much prep work. I bought Candlekeep Mysteries on Roll20 and after supplementing some prettier maps someone made and posted on Reddit, I mostly only have to read ahead on the next adventure, and do some loose storyboarding to draw the campaign together between sessions when we craft and work on smaller, personal character stories. It’s nice. The players are aware there will never be a world-ending type threat, they’re just enjoying the ride.

Speaking of virtual entertainment, I’m also loving that venues in other places are now so much better set up for streaming. In the last two weeks I’ve gone to three virtual shows that probably would have never streamed pre-pandemic, plus several other monthly-or-there-abouts shows that have become staples for the last year+.

Getting my booster shot next weekend probably.

I never made it past Virmire on my ME:LE playthrough because I wanted more sweet, sweet mods. I know they’re cooking up some great things for N7 day so I think once all that work is released I may start back over and do the whole trilogy playthrough, even if the ending mods and the full EGM aren’t out yet.

Work has been... hm. I don’t want to say too much but my department has never been totally stable and I feel like since day 1 I’ve been working on an uphill climb. Then there’s been more instability in my boss situation. Technically, starting tomorrow, my immediate supervisor position is empty and the position’s supervisor’s position is empty. In a fairly large company, I’m technically reporting two levels up for the foreseeable future. It’s... not great news. But I’m hanging in there for now. :) We are getting more help in at my level, at least.

Annnd... now I’m gonna go cuddle in bed with Patchy while reading a book.

Oh, yeah, Star Trek friends? If you hate the ending of Enterprise as much as I do, please read The Good That Men Do. It’s the beta canon retcon of the Enterprise ending done in a realistic and canon-friendly way. I’m only like 75% through, but it is absolutely the canon ending in my brain forever and ever amen. One of the better written Star Trek books, as well. Highly recommended.

#personal post tag thingy #my pets #also a little bit of Star Trek Enterprise talk there at the end #and D&D talk #and video game talk

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ynsimagines · 3 years

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Supergirl: B!D Lupus Request

It was an understatement to say you hadn’t been feeling well lately. You thought you had just come down with a nasty bout of the flu, but it had been two months now and many of your symptoms weren’t letting up.

You were exhausted constantly not even a full nights sleep and a three hour nap every day could satisfy you. This didn’t go unnoticed by your sisters. Kara noticed it first since she lived with you. She noticed how slowly you walked, or how difficult it was to wake you up in the morning. Just last night you woke up with a fever, and headache. She confided in Alex who also became worried she had enough medical knowledge to know something was going on with you

“Hey Kiddo, are you sure you’re ok to work today? Maybe you should’ve stayed home.” Alex asked when you walked into the DEO.

“I’m fine there’s a lot of stuff I need to help Winn get done today,” you answered.

Alex decided not to pursue the issue anymore for now, and went about her work.

It was almost lunch time when Kara arrived at the DEO after having stopped a local bank robbery. When she looked at you she immediately saw that you were in pain and she got worried.

“Sweetheart, why are you here you should be resting at home?” She asked kneeling down. “You could barely get out of bed this morning.”

“I took pain meds, I needed to be here,” you shrugged.

“But the pain meds have worn off and your clearly in a lot of pain. Let me take you home and look after you, I’ll draw you a nice warm bath and we can order your favorite food for dinner and watch movies,” She said and you didn’t argue as she lifted you in her arms.

Once you got back to the apartment Kara had texted Alex to say that she had taken you home. Alex had replied that it was more than okay, and she would come check on you in the morning.

Kara got you more pain meds considering you were too weak to open the bottle yourself, and went to draw your bath. She took you to the bathroom and sat you down on the sink until your bath was ready.

After your bath you found that you’re joints felt better enough for you to get yourself out of the bath and into some warm pajamas Kara left out for you, and you then walked out into the living room to see your older sister sitting on the couch watching t.v.

“Hey little one, how are you feeling?” Asked Kara as she paused what she was watching.

“Better, the bath really helped” you said sitting down and cuddling up to her, she put her arm around you and kissed the top of your head, “I’m glad to hear it sweetheart. food will be here soon.”

That next morning Alex came over to the apartment as promised. During the night last night things had gone down hill again you woke up feeling like you were on fire. Kara came and took your temperature to find that you had another fever, and you were both awake for the next few hours to try and get it down.

“I think its time you see a doctor, kiddo this has gone on long enough. You’re young, you shouldn’t be feeling this way. Somedays you cant even get out of bed, but then other days you feel completely normal.”

That next week you were into see the doctor. “I’m going to do some blood work to try and narrow down what this could be and then schedule you in for a bone marrow biopsy to rule out a few other diseases.”

“So we got the results back from your blood test, as well as your bone marrow biopsy,” said the doctor when you saw him that next week. “The good news is you do not have leukemia or lymphoma which are the two cancers we suspected you could have. However you’re inflammatory markers were positive for an auto immune disease called lupus.”

“Its a long term condition with no cure. It can be managed with medication. So far the Lupus doesn’t seem to be attacking any organs in your body, but we need to make sure we keep a close eye on it with regular blood and urine tests, and hopefully we can get you into a state of remission.”

You sat there in shock as Alex took over with talking to the doctor.

“Hey sweetheart, lets get you home ok?” Asked Kara at the end of your appointment.

You nodded and she helped you stand up while Alex grabbed the prescriptions for your medication.

You now find yourself sitting on the couch in yours and Kara’s apartment sitting between her and Alex. You were even more overwhelmed after hearing Alex in the car tell you all the medications you’ll have to take including a daily steroid injection until you’re not flaring anymore. And you also may have to do chemotherapy if your disease gets bad enough.

“Everything is going to be okay,” said Kara rubbing your back. “Were going to be by your side every step of the way.”

“I’ll do all the injections and blood tests so you dont have to constantly see a different doctor, kiddo” said Alex.

“I love you guys so much,” you said trying to be brave for your big sisters and not cry.

“We love you too sweetheart,” they said as they both kissed your head.

#supergirl #baby danvers #lupus fic #OC #kara danvers #alex danvers #cw #DC comics

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kelseyshljourney · 3 years

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My HL (Hodgkin’s Lymphoma) Journey

“You have cancer”. I heard these words on a sunny July afternoon in 2020. July 23rd to be exact. I had a chest biopsy that was done that Tuesday, the 21st and anxiously waited for the results. I was not prepared to hear those words ever in my entire life nor is there anything that can prepare you for it. I was 6 months pregnant with my daughter, Madison, at the time so you can imagine the emotions I was feeling were heightened because of the pregnancy. Let me start at the beginning. Welcome to my cancer story.

My cancer journey started during my pregnancy with my aforementioned daughter. I found out I was pregnant with our first child in February 2020. I’ll make it clear that I had a wonderful pregnancy (cancer stuff put aside) and my daughter is happy, healthy, and living her best life. We were wonderfully blessed to be on this journey of pregnancy and enjoying every part of it. Although, I would not recommend being pregnant during a pandemic. Now being in 2021, there’s more that we know about COVID-19 but the beginning was rough. During the first trimester of pregnancy, my midwife brought up information about genetic testing that is available to pregnant moms for their babies that can be done through a simple blood test. It’s a carrier screening test that’s optional but does check to see if I am a carrier for 3 genetic abnormalities (Down Syndrome, Trisomy 18, and Trisomy 13). I almost didn’t do this blood test because whether or not I was a carrier for the 3 different abnormalities, it wouldn’t change the outcome of the pregnancy. If I ended up being a carrier, my husband, Rob, would also have to be carrier in order for it to be most likely passed down to our baby. I decided to do it because it was covered by my insurance and it was a quick visit to my clinic to get my blood drawn. No big deal.

I got the test done in April and then didn’t hear anything right away. I didn’t think much of it but I realized that I never got my results back on the test so I called my clinic to get my future appointments set up and then spoke directly with my midwife. She asked me if I heard anything from the lab about my results and I told her that I hadn’t. She ended up calling them and then called me right back. She said that my results came back as “inconclusive” as the lab could not determine if I was a carrier for any genetic abnormality because a lot of my DNA strands are incomplete with parts missing. My midwife said that out of her 30+ years of doing this job, she has never heard of this result before. Great. I was concerned about what this meant for the baby and concerned since my midwife didn’t know how to handle this. My care was transferred over to a Maternal & Fetal Medicine (M&FM) doctor who I saw for the rest of my pregnancy as I was now considered to be high risk. During this same week (the week of May 18th), I had a visit over the phone with a genetic counselor who told me that the result of the genetic test could be the cause of something as simple as being anemic (not getting enough iron) or something more serious like a tumor (whether benign or malignant). I was told that the least likely of it to be would be a tumor (I can laugh about this now but the irony). I also had a breast ultrasound at the hospital to make sure there were no lumps that could be causing this (there weren’t – I was clear).

At this point, I was feeling stressed but overall still feeling good and excited about my pregnancy despite this hiccup (or what I thought was just a hiccup). I had a few visits with the M&FM doctor and had more ultrasounds than a “normal” pregnancy so that they can check to make sure that Baby E was growing as she should and didn’t show any outward signs of a genetic disability. I had a lot of blood work done but it all came back clear and showing no signs of anything going wrong in my body. For a while, I felt like a test subject and with every test that was ordered and prick in my arm I was getting annoyed that I wasn’t getting to enjoy a “normal” pregnancy with all the visits that I had. I say “normal” because every pregnancy is different for every woman. When my doctor told me that the last thing she wanted to order for me was chest CT and an MRI to confirm there was not a tumor in my body, she promised she would let me enjoy my pregnancy and not order any more tests. I almost almost declined the MRI and CT because I felt like I didn’t want to go through that and be exposed to possible radiation and on top of that, I felt fine. God was really watching out for me and leading me in the direction to get the diagnostic tests done.

On July 8th, I had the MRI and CT done. I was with Rob when I got the call from my doctor that afternoon to go over the results. The MRI was unclear because of the baby moving but from what they could see, there was nothing that came up. However, the CT scan showed a mass in my chest that was the size of a distorted hockey puck; measuring at 7 ½ cm by 7cm by 2 cm and was located between my heart and my lung. I was watching Rob tear up and all I could say to him as soon as I hung up with my doctor was. “I’m going to be okay” over and over again. I think I was in complete shock over hearing that there is a tumor in my chest that could be cancer. We had my family over that night and I broke down several times throughout the night. I remember saying that I want to watch my child grow up (since we didn’t know the sex of the baby at the time) and I was scared that I wouldn’t have that chance. I went to bed that night thinking that I was going to die during the night because of the tumor. To be very clear, I wasn’t having suicidal thoughts or anything but when I was told that I have a tumor in my chest, the first thought that went through my mind was that I wouldn’t live to see the next day. This sounds dramatic as I’m writing this but it's the truth. In reality, I probably have had this tumor for a year, two years, or even longer. No one truly knows.

Between finding out about the tumor and getting the chest biopsy done was about 2 weeks. I can tell you that it was the slowest 2 weeks of my life. During this time, Rob and I were busy packing and getting ready to move into our house. So on top of being in the middle of a pandemic, being pregnant, having a tumor in my chest (without knowing if it was cancer), we were moving too. These two weeks were filled with prayers and spending time with friends and family. I had many breakdowns but Rob helped by feeding me all my favorite foods (I was pregnant after all). We moved into our house on July 16th. It was a wonderful day and we are thankful for the friends and family that helped us move into our new space. It was an exhausting time but so worth it. As mentioned at the beginning of this, I had my chest biopsy on Tuesday, July 21st. They couldn’t put me under because I was pregnant but my midwife prescribed me something that would be safe to take while pregnant but will help calm me during the procedure. It was a surreal feeling laying on the procedure table seeing a needle sticking out my chest and moving with every breath I took. Without that medication, I would have probably freaked out since I knew that the needle was close to my heart and lung.

Me in post-op.

2 days later is when I got the call from my doctor telling me the life changing news: I have cancer. God works as wonderfully as he does because that day my mom and grandma happened to come over for lunch, a rare occurrence during the work week so they were there when I got the call. I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (HL), which happens to be a very treatable cancer. My doctor told me that she has already been in contact with the oncology team at the hospital to have someone get a hold of me to get an appointment set-up right away. I called all of our family who came over to process the news with me. There were many tears shed between all of us and I couldn’t eat or drink anything because I was so stressed and worried about what this means for my future and Madison’s future. That night, I got a call from Dr. Anderson who became my oncologist during this journey. We met with him the following day at the hospital to go over my CT and MRI scan images and to go over treatment options. He discussed that the general treatment plan for HL was chemotherapy and possible radiation. He also discussed the staging (HL is staged from stage I to stage IV) but because I was pregnant, they were limited in what tests they could order to determine a true stage until after I give birth. For example, they would normally perform a PET scan to confirm where the cancer is in my body but weren’t able to because it’s not safe for the baby. I was originally stage I but borderline stage II because of the size of my cancer and they knew that because of the chest CT. One thing he suggested was to get a bone marrow biopsy done to confirm that the cancer hasn’t spread to my bone marrow (which is a common place for HL to be).

I can tell you now that doing the bone marrow biopsy rivals the pain of childbirth. I was 6 months pregnant when I had the bone marrow biopsy done and it is a very painful procedure. I had the biopsy done on August 5th and what they do is take two samples from my pelvic bone, a liquid sample and a solid sample. The thing is, they could only numb the area where the needle was inserted into my body but there was no way to numb my actual pelvic bone so that is where I felt the pain and it was one of the worst things I’ve ever experienced. I’ll be honest, I cried during it but I luckily had a wonderful nurse who held my hand and talked me through the pain the entire time. Fortunately, the results came back confirming that there was no cancer to be found in my bone marrow. I was still considered to be stage I at this point in my cancer journey but that changed once I gave birth. I’ll get into that a little later.

This was the day after. I was very sore. Peep at the zubaz.

Now that the bone marrow biopsy was done, we met again with Dr. Anderson to go over options. I had the choice of starting chemotherapy while still pregnant (it’s generally safe since I was in my third trimester) or wait until I give birth to start. It was a very heavy decision to make. On one hand if I were to start chemotherapy while still pregnant, there are possible negative side effects for the baby: low birth weight, preterm labor (which ended up happening anyway), mental issues, and fertility issues. On the other hand, if I wait to receive chemotherapy until after the birth, am I putting my health at risk and possibly getting worse with the cancer? Rob and I went back and forth, talked to our families about it, and prayed – a lot.

After a lot of thinking, I decided to wait until after the birth to start chemotherapy. I was feeling good overall and not feeling the “normal” symptoms of HL. I was considered asymptomatic (not showing any symptoms) but here are the common symptoms for HL:

· Persistent fatigue

· Night sweats

· Fever

· Unexplained weight loss

· Severe itching

· Painless swelling of lymph nodes in neck, armpits, or groin

I came to the conclusion that whatever decision I made was the right decision. I knew that I wanted to ride out the rest of my pregnancy without causing any possible disruption to my daughter and her growth. In lieu of receiving treatment during pregnancy, I had to go in for weekly blood work to make sure that everything was still coming back normal (for a pregnancy). My oncologist did order a blood test that checked inflammation in my body. This is called an erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) and the number was already elevated because of pregnancy but also if it was higher than what my oncologist wanted, it would help determine that there might be something bad happening in my body. The number slowly increased as the weeks went on and as I got more and more pregnant. Fortunately, the number was still low enough to satisfy my oncology team. I also had an echocardiogram on July 27th and lung function test on August 3rd to get a baseline on where my heart and lungs were. Of course being pregnant means that my lung function test came back with skewed results than what would be normal. They get these baselines since the drugs that I will be receiving during chemotherapy can affect the heart and lungs negatively so they want to keep a close eye on it. They both came back fine, my heart is strong and my lungs were functioning as well as they could with the rest of my organs pressed into them (yay pregnancy).

I had my last ultrasound for my daughter when I was 33 weeks pregnant and the last time that I would see the M&FM doctor as I would be seen every week until I gave birth with my midwife. Little did I know, I would be walking into the hospital on Sunday evening, September 13th because my water broke (I’ll never forget Rob’s face when they confirmed that my water broke – it was priceless!) A little worried but ready for anything, I was ready to give birth despite her being 6 weeks early. Since I was only 1cm dilated, the plan was to induce me the next morning and start the process of giving birth. Apparently my daughter Madison had a different plan because I spent the night dealing with veeerrry painful contractions before I got the epidural. Seriously, a game changer. When the doctors came in to check how I was doing with the epidural, they were surprised to find that I was 9cm dilated and told me that I was about to start pushing. Since I was without sleep and very tired and given the epidural, I was ready to do the damn thing. After an hour of pushing, Madison was born on September 14th at 6:51am! She spent 13 days in the NICU but was never needing any respiratory support at only being at 34 weeks but was healthy and happy.

Once Madison was home from the hospital, it was time for me to get started with my official cancer journey. On September 29th, I had a PET scan done and this helped to confirm everything we knew but also showed something unexpected; there was another lymph node that lit up in my chest too. This put me officially in stage II HL. The treatment plan remained the same though; I were to receive a chemotherapy combination of drugs abbreviated ABVD (every letter represents a different chemo drug). This part is hard to write because even discussing these drugs makes me nauseous and queasy (something that I don’t think will go away anytime soon). The “A” in the “chemo cocktail” side effect is hair loss. Something that I have prepared myself for, or as much as I could, but nothing can prepare you for when it actually starts happening. I knew that the hair loss was temporary and I would rather be bald for a short time than have cancer for the rest of my life. We got together with some friends at the end of September interspersed so they can meet Madison and also to spend some time together before Rob and I made the decision to lock down our house from visitors. We also made the decision to limit our circle of people that we will see in the coming months. We did this because we knew that my health was going to decline because of chemo and also with the threat of COVID, my immune system couldn’t take the risk of getting sick. It was a very difficult decision since we thrive on social situations and we love hanging out with our friends and family but it was vital that we don’t see many people. This really affected my mental health as I rely on our friends to get me through hard times and this was hands down one of the hardest times that I will probably go through.

Over the course of the next 6 months, I will experience the ups and downs (a lot more downs than ups) of receiving chemotherapy and the effect that this has on my body. I would never wish chemotherapy and the pain associated with it on anybody. I know that this was extremely tough on my family and friends to see me in such a state. Chemotherapy and the days after it are a nightmare that you can’t wake up from. It was my reality waking up every day and knowing that I still have cancer and have the possibility of getting really sick from it or something worse (don’t worry, I never got into a dark head space but I also needed to make sure I was realistic in all the possibilities). My only other experience with cancer is not a positive one. My sister in law, Beth, passed away from stage IV malignant melanoma on March 26th, 2017. From the time she was diagnosed to the time she passed away, it was about 6 months so you can imagine what was going through my mind when I was diagnosed with this horrible disease.

On Monday October 5th, I underwent outpatient surgery to get an implantable port that was put in my chest. This port is used for chemotherapy and is an alternative to having the nurses inserting a needle in my vein each chemo session because over time, the chemotherapy drugs can negatively affect strong veins. The port uses a special needle during chemotherapy to inject the drugs and connected to the port is a tube (I’m sure there’s a medical term but I’m not medically trained) that ran up to a main vein near my neck that was connected directly to my heart so that the drugs were dispersed quickly through my body. It was never painful during the time that I had it and I looked forward to the day when I would be able to get my port out because that means that I was cancer free and no longer receiving chemotherapy.

Also in post-op. Notice the 2 different spots where they cut open. The bottom cut is where the port rested.

On Thursday, October 8th, I had my first chemotherapy session. Luckily the hospital allowed one visitor to come with patients so Rob was fortunately able to come with me. My mom was staying with us for a few weeks to help with the transition of chemotherapy and making sure that someone was able to take care of Madison in case that I was not able to (thinking of this breaks my heart because I never wanted to be a position where I couldn’t take care of my own child). Rob and I showed up to the hospital early in the morning at about 8am and didn’t leave until a little after 3pm. It’s safe to say that it was a very long, draining, exhausting day. Not all chemotherapy sessions were this long but because it was my first one, there’s more that happens than normal. Walking into the oncology suite for the first time to get chemotherapy was nerve-wracking because I didn’t know what to expect. I also felt a lot of eyes on me from the other people also waiting to get chemotherapy and I knew they were looking at me because of my age. Most of them were a lot older. I did come across someone one time who was just a few years older than me (they usually ask date of birth when checking in so that’s how I knew) and I could tell it was his first time because he looked as nervous as I did during my first visit.

At the hospital, they have both private rooms and a public space too. We were lucky enough to get a private room and it made things a little easier and helped to ease my anxiety knowing that if anything negative were to happen, I wouldn’t be in a public area where other people could witness it. The first nurse that I had was Jen and she was incredible. I’ll say that every nurse that I had were awesome. Anyways, they stared out each visit by taking blood work through my port. They want to make sure that I met the threshold with my blood work to be able to receive chemo because if I am below that threshold for what they are comfortable with, I would be deemed too sick to receive chemo and it would have to be delayed. Luckily I never got to that point but I came close a couple of times. They mainly check my hemoglobin and my white blood cell count but there’s a few other numbers they check as well. I then had a visit with my oncologist who walked me through what each drug’s side effects are. It also was an opportunity to ask questions. The main side effects entailed nausea, lack of appetite, headaches, fatigue, numbness in hands and feet, and night sweats. To help curb the nausea, there were “pre-meds” that were given to me before I received the chemo drugs that mainly were anti-nausea drugs.

Once my oncologist left, it was just me, Rob, and Jen. Jen started to give me one of the pre-med drugs called Emend. It’s an anti-nausea drug that was given to me through my port. Jen just started the drip from the IV bag when I started to feel my chest tighten and my face got flushed. I asked Jen if it was normal to feel this way and she stopped what she was doing immediately and told me that it’s not normal. She stopped the drip right away, pressed a button in the room, and then all of a sudden, it went from the 3 of us to about 7-8 people in the tiny room. There were nurses, helpers, and a pharmacist that came in the room. Someone was taking my vitals (heart rate, oxygen level, and temperature), while the nurses there checking my legs for swelling. As soon as she stopped the drip, the tightening in my chest went away and I was able to breathe normally. My vitals came back fine but my heart rate was through the roof because having that many people in the room spiked my anxiety and then there were people that were sticking their heads out of their rooms to see what was going on. It was slightly embarrassing because I felt fine and I don’t like being fussed over. The pharmacist explained that they will discontinue giving me the Emend but he also explained that this is not a common thing that occurs for most people so I most likely had an allergic reaction to the drug. Once everyone left my room, Jen gave me a huge dose of Benadryl to counteract the Emend so I ended up falling asleep for most of the session and I was in and out of consciousness so I don’t really remember much from my first session. I woke up periodically when Jen came in the room with the chemo drugs. I think Rob left the room for a little bit to get some food from the café and to stretch his legs.

The drug that always came first was the Adriamycin (A) which had to be administered by the nurse sitting next to me and slowly injecting it in a timely manner. The rest of the drugs, Bleomycin (B), Vinblastine (V), and Doxorubicin (D), were given via IV bags that were slowly administered over a period of time. When 3pm came around, I finished up my last drug and was able to leave. I went home and slept for a long time.

I received chemo every other week. I was considered to be toxic for the first 72 hours after, which means my bodily fluids should not be handled by anyone but me. Rob and I deemed our downstairs bathroom as the “chemo bathroom” so that’s what I used every time. After going to the bathroom, I have to put the toilet seat down and flush twice. If I vomited, I would need to be the one to clean it up but if someone were to help, they would need to wear a mask and gloves. Fortunately I never vomited during my cancer journey (mind over matter). For the rest of my chemo sessions, they were mostly uneventful. There was a point where the hospital changed their visitor policy and I was not able to bring Rob to the appointments so I had to go alone. This really took an effect on my mental health and negatively affected my health knowing that I would have to endure the sessions alone. I felt like my health declined during that time period so for a few months, I was going alone and sitting in the public area. I usually would bring our Nintendo Switch, read, or I would sit and watch Tik Toks. I would have a song in my head on how I was feeling that day so I would usually send the song to my family to let them know where my head space was at that day.

For those that are wondering, a chemo cycle is about a month long (28 days). In each cycle, there are 2 sessions. The plan was to do 2 cycles and then have a repeat PET scan done (which was the end of November) and then most likely 4 more cycles of chemo after that and then another PET scan (which was in March). As I mentioned earlier, one of the side effects from one of the chemo drugs is hair loss. My oncologist prepared me that I most likely will lose my hair. Easier said than done. I didn’t see any hair loss during my first cycle but I knew that it was only a matter of time. When I started my second cycle of chemo, that’s when it happened. It was the week of Halloween and I believe it was a Tuesday when I took a shower during the day. As mentioned before, my mom was living with us to take care of Madison and I am thankful that she was there. This is a vulnerable topic to discuss for me because even though I know the hair loss is temporary, our hair makes us part of who we are as people and you can’t convince me otherwise. When I started washing my hair, I pulled out a huge portion. I kept pulling out more and more hair and I broke down crying in the shower. I eventually made it out and showed my mom what happened. This was one of the toughest days of my journey. I ended up sleeping for about 6 hours after that because I was emotionally and mentally drained. That night, Rob bought me my favorite food from a hibachi place close by our house and that helped my spirits a little bit.

The rest of the week I avoided washing my hair when I took my showers because I wasn’t ready to go through that trauma again because despite pulling out a few handfuls, I still had plenty of hair on my head. I said at the beginning of the journey that I wasn’t planning on shaving my head and that I would just keep what hair I could but I changed my decision on that. On Halloween was when I became bald. I was prepared this time when I went to take a shower as I brought in a few shower beers and had loud music playing. I walked out of the bathroom and showed Rob, who was watching Madison, the hair that I pulled out and with tears in my eyes, I asked him if he could shave my head. I can tell you that afterwards, I didn’t feel sad, I felt liberated more than anything because this was my decision and not something that the cancer could take away from me. I was in pretty good spirits and spent the night playing board games with my brother and sister in law. We dressed Madison up as a Chipotle burrito even though she didn’t like that (she wasn’t in it long). I now am in possession of a few wigs and some hair wraps and hats. My family has never seen me without a hat or a wig on because being bald is the only physical trait that links me to cancer. I want them to always remember me with hair because this is already tough on them that I don’t want them to have that memory of me.

One thing that I didn’t mention earlier but with the Bleomycin (B), this was a drug that caused my loss of appetite, fatigue, and overall nausea after each chemo session. This drug is known to cause negative effects on the lungs so I was carefully monitored by getting lung function tests done. The last one that I did was at the end of my first cycle where they saw a slight drop in my lung function so they stopped giving me this drug so I was only getting AVD for the rest of my cycles. My oncologist explained that it’s better to have some of this drug in my regimen than not getting it at all and it’s about 50% of the time that it’s dropped at some point during the chemo journey. I overall felt better and got my appetite and some of my energy back. I started working out again and felt like I could get through the day without feeling like I needed a nap. I probably would have napped more if I didn’t have Madison at home but I wanted to give as much attention to her as possible. I’ve said this many times to my family, friends, and coworkers, but Madison will always be my dose of serotonin when I’m having a bad day.

After going through 2 successful chemo sessions, it was time to get another PET scan done. This happened on November 30th. I got the results of the scan 2 days later with Dr. Anderson. He explained that the chemo drugs are doing their job and he saw a huge improvement in the cancer that was found in my body. The mass in my chest also decreased in size. He showed me the scans and I was blown away with the difference. Seeing the cancer light up in my body gave me goosebumps and brought tears to my eyes but also seeing the improvement gave me so much hope. The game plan after this visit was to go through 4 more cycles (about 4 months) of chemo and then do another PET scan.

On December 30th, I was starting my 4th cycle and I wasn’t scheduled for a visit with my oncology team that day. I had my routine bloodwork done and then I was sitting in a private room waiting for my pre-meds when my nurse for the day came in. She told me that it was taking longer to get the blood work back because my white blood cell count was so low that they had to individually count my white blood cells. Individually. Count. Meaning, I was almost at the threshold of being too sick to get chemo and inevitably delaying treatment. The nurse warned to be extra careful and to avoid leaving the house since I could not risk getting sick now. I only left the house to go to chemo at this point so I wasn’t seeing many people anyways. I remember calling my mom and telling her the news and breaking down crying because I was scared. It’s hard for me to admit that and I felt scared during this process more than I let on to my family and friends because I hate feeling vulnerable. I was able to still get treatment that day but I also didn’t feel very good during that visit. This happened one other time, which happened to be my last chemo session that I had.

One scary event that happened was when I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I was in the middle of my workday, Madison was being watched by my sister in law at my house, and I was in the kitchen walking back to my computer when I started having a hard time breathing. I sat down and tried to take a few calming breaths. I calmly told Briana that I wasn’t able to take a proper breath and I then told her that I’m going to call my oncology team to see what they would recommend. I spoke with a nurse who told me to come in right away. She said she spoke with my oncology team who recommended getting some tests done to see what is going on. I went to the hospital and had an EKG done and also a chest CT. My oncologist said the EKG came back fine and so did the CT. They thought possibly that I could have a blood clot but that wasn’t the case. They recommended taking it easy and to take some ibuprofen when I got home, which I did and I started to feel better and was able to take a deep breath again. This happened on February 2nd. I didn’t have that feeling ever again.

On March 10th, 2021 is when I completed my 6th and final chemo cycle. Despite having a low white blood cell count, I was in pretty high spirits hoping that this was going to be my last chemo session ever. I had the last PET scan on March 22nd and went over the results with Dr. Anderson on March 24th. I was a bundle of nerves and holding Rob’s hand when my oncologist walked into the room and what he started saying was ominous. He started out by saying that the scans look good but aren’t perfect (okay?) but they didn’t want to leave anything to chance (alright, what does that mean?) He proceeded to show us the recent scans and then did a side by side comparison and was showing us the improvement. He then started going over the follow-up protocol for when I would get future scans, visits, etc. I had to stop him and ask outright, “is there cancer left in my body??” and he laughed and said that he probably should have started out the visit by saying that I am cancer free. CANCER. FREE. Even typing this, I’m tearing up. I started crying tears of joy, relief, etc. He said that I am officially in remission and in 5 years I will be considered completely cured of cancer. I’ll be getting CT scans done once every year and visits and blood work done every 6 months.

Dr. Anderson explained that the mass in my chest decreased in size to the point that he’s comfortable with not recommending radiation. He said that I have the option of speaking with the radiation oncologists but that he doesn’t feel the need for me to get radiation done. He knew that I was very against getting radiation if I could avoid it but of course I would listen to medical advice if it was strongly recommended. This was a huge sigh of relief since radiation would take a toll on my body. We left the hospital, I cried some more, and we went immediately to our families the life changing news. We spent the rest of the day at my parents house where Madison was and celebrated by popping a bottle of champagne and ordering sushi. I took the rest of the week off from work to relax and enjoy being cancer free. I got my port out on April 1st. It was such a wonderful and freeing feeling. I was looking forward to this day since I got it put in.

Again, post-op. I think my face says it all.

I can’t describe the feeling that when I check my next visit, it’s not until June. From May 2020 to March 2021, I’ve had a total of 47 visits that were cancer related (not even counting OBGYN visits). To provide a comparison before 2020, I would maybe have 4 visits during the year. We slowly have been spending more time with friends that we haven’t seen since before starting chemo and it’s been an amazing feeling. I’m looking forward to my hair growing back (and my eyebrows which slowly disappeared). If anyone asks me what my future plans are, I tell them that I plan to travel this year and focus on being a cancer free 27 year old. I’m also hoping that by sharing my story, it helps to spread awareness to the fact that it’s vital to get yearly check-ups by your doctor because you never know what might be happening without your knowledge. Also, if something doesn’t feel right, speak up.

I want to send a huge thank you to our friends, family, coworkers, our church, friends of friends, and any others that have prayed for us, brought meals and gifts over, or thought of us. I also want to thank Dr. Anderson and his team at Regions and for all the nurses that took care of me during my chemo sessions. I’m overwhelmed with the amount of love and support that I have felt during this entire journey and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’m emotional writing this. Thank you.

Follow me on instagram! kel_sey5

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i-will-be-forever-yours · 4 years

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You are my strength

A/N: So I know it’s been a little bit, but I finished it and I want to let you guys know that I changed the cancer to lymphoma from leukemia. It worked a little better since lymphoma is more common in men. Still occurs in women, just less likely. I hope you guys enjoy, and my medical knowledge is not the best...hopefully if I get into the medical program (fingers crossed) that I will be more precise. Thank you for reading! hope you enjoy, and feedback is always welcome! Also, I didn’t edit, so please excuse the errors.

Warnings: Talk of cancer, depression, and (barely) suicide attempt (please don’t read if this is upsetting) Mostly fluff, with a sprinkling of angst

Summary: Y/n and Shawn have struggled the past two years. Hardship and pain was the only thing seen. They were in a never-ending tunnel, that only led to more darkness. Is there any light in their future?

Word Count: kinda short.. 1.2K

posted 2-16-20

-not my gif-

“And where do you think you are going?” he said whilst grabbing her by the waist and pulling her back on top of him, before quickly flipping them over so he was on top of her pinning her down. They had been watching a movie on the couch together, and she thought that he was asleep and she could sneak away for a second.

“Shawn! I have to pee, babe come on! Let me go” y/n giggled as Shawn playfully held her down. “I actually really need to pee, so if you would please let me go” she tried again in the most serious voice she could muster while Shawn made funny faces. She goes to lightly slap away his hands when he suddenly jumps back smiling.

“Okay, okay! No need for physical violence” he chuckles and allows her to walk past him. “Please, go right on your way ma’am.”

Rolling her eyes, she makes her way to their shared master bedroom but stops when she hears a whimper. Quickly backtracking she quietly opens the door to the nursery just a door over.

It never fails to make her smile when she sees her two-month-old babies asleep in their cribs. It was unexpected, her pregnancy. She was told she could never have kids after what she went through, so when the inevitable feeling of nausea arose out of nowhere she was worried. Not only that but Shawn was worried. He was worried that she was getting sick again. She had just gotten over her last bout of sickness, and it took a toll on her body. Just over a year and a half ago she had been diagnosed with cancer. It was aggressive cancer, but they were going to fight this war with leukemia.

He watched her suffer through the treatments, and the depression. She wanted to give up, she wanted him to move on, but he stuck by her side. He loved her more than life itself. He wished he could go through it for her or at least with her, but since he couldn’t he was there for her every step of the way. When she got sick with the pregnancy however, he was worried beyond measures. What if she were sick again? He didn’t know if she could take that again because her body was so weak already.

However, they were greatly surprised when they got the news that she was pregnant. Not only that but pregnant with twins. This took a major toll on her body though. Y/n was in and out of the hospital. She struggled to carry them, due to her already weak state, but she wouldn’t change it for the world. Y/n was proud to say that she was a mother of two beautiful babies. When she was diagnosed, all those days ago, she lost hope in building a family with Shawn. She thought that she would never be able to give him the family that she knew he longed for.

- A year and a half Earlier -

“It’s okay, just breathe baby. We are going to take you in to see the doctor today. Okay? You’ve had this fever for over a week and you’re losing weight.” Shawn tried to reassure y/n but the tears continued to flow down her face. She was lying in his arms because she didn’t have the strength to get up. That’s what worried him the most. She had always been this independent person, who refused to show weakness, but here she was crying in his arms, too weak to stand.

After going in they were given life-altering news. Y/n had leukemia and needed to start treatment immediately. They barely had time to process, before they were met by the specialist. The Oncologist sat them down and told them that they were lucky enough to have caught it in the ‘infant’ stages. He explained the treatments and what they would be looking at.

They fought this together for the better part of a year. It took all the strength she had, both physically and mentally. There were times when she got back from a hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and truly thought about giving up. She wanted to be out of pain, and she wanted Shawn to move on. The guilt was almost overpowering. The thought of making him suffer, and constantly worry for her brought her to tears. That is where he found her, in the bath that he had filled for her. There was a razor to the side and her medication.

He rushed to her, getting in behind her and holding her shaking form against his broad chest. He consoled her until the water was too cold to sit in. He gently helped her out and paid no heed to his soaked clothes, but instead wrapped her in the fluffiest towel and led her to the bed. He quickly changed a laid with her, rubbing soothing circles on her back, while her head laid comfortable in the crook of his neck.

They got better, and soon enough they were walking out of the hospital doors, hand in hand, with a clip that said ‘I kicked leukemia’s ass’. That’s not to say it was a short walk in the park, because it felt like the longes fucking marathon of her entire life, but surrounded by people she loved gave her the strength to keep fighting. She fought it with all she had and came out on top.

- Present Time -

Now as Y/n looks down at her sleeping babies, she smiles. She doesn’t even see her husband walk in behind her until he slips his sting arms around her small frame. Kissing her lightly on the cheek he asks, “What are you doing in here babe? I thought he needed to pee.”

Lightly chuckling she replies, “I did, but I heard one of them whispering so I came to check on them.”

He hums in response while brushing his nose against the name of her neck, inhaling her unique scent. She smells like fresh lavender and baby lotion.

“Come back to bed with me babe, they are asleep now,” he whispers.

He gently turns her body around and leads her back into their room. Y/n walks into the attached bathroom, and when she comes back she is met with the cutest sight. She sees Shawn hugging her pillow, while his soft curls fall gently over his forehead. She makes her way closer before sliding in next to him. His arms immediately reach out to her and gently slide around her waist. She smiles while her back is pressed against Shawn’s broad chest. It’s quiet for a moment, before Shawn whispers, “Thank you for making me the happiest man alive, you made me a dad and a husband. You taught me how to live and how to be strong. I love you so much Y/n.”

Turning her head slightly, Y/n places a kiss on the corner of Shawn’s lips. They know that they will always be strong and lift each other when one feels weak. She replies in a soft, sleepy voice, “You are my strength.”

_______________________________________________________________________

Thank you for reading, and please let me know if you like it or have ideas that you want me to write. Love you guys

#shawn mendes #fluff #slight angst #reader insert #Female reader #kinda bad writing #repost please

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nehedar · 4 years

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A synchromystic birth story

In 1986 I was a 5 year old living in North Miami Beach, and going to kindergarten. I dreamt that my mom was late picking me up from school and I was left alone on the playground. Noticing some movement in the tall grass at the edge of the playground, I saw a lion weaving in and out and decided to explore that area. (brave, right?)

I wandered in the grass, and soon began to hear two women screaming for help. I followed the voices until I got to a clearing. In the middle of the clearing was a fountain, like a large cement birdbath, the screaming was coming from the fountain. As I approached I saw with horror that inside the fountain was my teacher’s head and my mom’s head, each cut in half and sewn back together. They both looked at me and screamed at me to separate them. I felt such pity and horror but I knew that if I were to separate them, they’d both die.

I woke up crying and upset, naturally and went into my parents room, at which time my dad told me that I could learn how to control my dreams. He gave me the instructions to “find my hands.” He gave me a rudimentary lesson in lucid dreaming that I would develop throughout my life, first lucidly dreaming around 7 and developing from there. It’s a work in progress.

In the meantime, I pondered the meaning of the dream, always mystified by the lion and fountain which seem like such strong, symbolic images for a five year old’s mind to construct a story out of. I loosely translated it as being torn between my mother and the outside world, represented by Mrs Cohen, my schoolteacher.

In October 2001 I was 20. I was living in a dorm room at Stern College in NYC and my mom had also moved back from Zion, Illinois to her native NYC as well. Only my youngest sister was living with her at the time.

My mom and sister weren’t getting along. My sister who was 12 at the time called me frequently and told me the problems they were having that mostly stemmed from my mom’s inability to find a job and sleeping all the time. My sister had little confidence in my mom’s abilities to care for her.

I had found them a therapist and was doing all I could, assuming it was normal relationship, emotional, and economic problems, until one night while my sister was complaining, I heard my mom in the background clearly slurring with an odd tone in her voice.

I told my sister to put her on the phone and when I heard her voice, I immediately got a very strong feeling that my mom had a brain tumor and was going to die. I know that sounds made up, but it’s true. I remember that moment clear as day. I was in my dorm room at the time, smoking a cigarette out the window. I sat down and took a breath, realizing that the next step was getting her to the hospital.

The next day I had been excited because Maya Angelou was speaking at my school, but I skipped the event and headed to Brooklyn, to my mom’s apartment while my sister was at school.

When I got there, the door was open, and there were papers on the floor. I walked in and sat on the futon and fended off the cat’s attacks while I stayed, nervously wondering where my mom was.

She stumbled in the door soon after with one shoe on her foot. We called a car service and went to the emergency room. She had no insurance at the time but would be set up with Medicaid.

She was very dazed in the hospital. The clearest memory I have is of her reading French signs and slipping into French.

By the time she was seen, they didn’t want to keep her. Maybe they thought she was on drugs, or just mentally ill, but my friend was able to convince them to keep her. They left her in what I can only call a “cell” with no furniture, where they left her sleeping on the floor.

I was left with the assumption that my mom was having some kind of serious mental breakdown for a day or two but one day at work I got a message to call a doctor at the hospital.

Someone had ordered a CT scan which found a large tumor in her brain that needed immediate surgery. The extraction biopsy would tell us the nature of the cancer.

It was Chanukah when I came to visit my mom in the hospital post-op. When I first saw her, I gasped a little bit because the dramatic scar on her shaved head looked so familiar, the way the stitching had appeared years ago in the dream.

They broke the news to me that she had an aggressive stage 4 glioblastoma multiforme, that would surely kill her soon. It could be as early as a couple months away.

My mom didn’t want to die, she wanted to be a guinea pig for natural medicinal approaches to curing cancer. So my grandmother (who was also dying with non hodgkins lymphoma) gave me $10,000 to spend on these experimental efforts.

I was doing what my mom wanted, but I still regret not just getting her high at that time. That was her favorite thing to do. Of course nothing we did worked. The best time to start something like that is before the surgery, and we would have needed vast sums of money to have the ability to take her somewhere that could care for her.

One day while my mom was in the hospital, I had a dream where the chime of an email arriving sounded from the basement of the house where I was living.

I went down to the basement and found there was a rainbow gathering in there. I figured that my life was so stressful, I had created something to give me a sense of peace and calm in my dream.

But when I woke up from the dream I figured, might as well check my email.

In my inbox there was an invitation to a rainbow gathering in Emilia, Italy, which happens to be my name. I felt a little shaken up by such an intense invitation (It made sense that I’d be on a rainbow gathering email list, but don’t remember getting any other invitations other than that one).

I went to the rainbow gathering, which made my mother really proud. I had taken her to her first rainbow gathering the previous summer and she had the best time of her life. She actually considered that her brain tumor had been caused by the shocking difference between the depression she’d lived with in her home life, back in Zion, Illinois, and the bliss she felt at the rainbow gathering.

She hung on through the summer but not much longer. On June 20th, I was approached about signing a DNR by the hospital. June 20th was my 21st birthday and it just so happened that was the exact age I had to be in order to legally sign it. Me and the social worker shared an otherworldly chuckle about that.

She died on September 8th 2002, more importantly on the second day of Rosh Hashana.

I muddled through life for a while after that, pretending to want to go to school, but really just enjoying the dorms’ midtown location so I could work on my music in the city. I had been an orthodox Jew since the age of 18 but chose to exclude any personal concern about the Jewish kol isha law from my practice after I began writing songs. The first song I recorded and the first video I made was called Mama and feature old home movies of my mother and her mother (who died 3 months prior to my mom’s death.)

A year or two after, I brought lice from a rainbow gathering to the dorms at Stern. I shaved my head to protect my roommates and classmates after trying unsuccessfully to manage it on my own. A rumor started that I did it to protest agunot. I didn’t discourage the rumor. That year when it was time for high holiday services, I was pressured to wear a wig, borrowed from a married neighbor, so I wouldn’t bother the congregation. I felt a clear message that my mom, whose yarzeit it was didn’t want me to put up with this crap. I haven’t really been open to shul since.

I got married in 2012 and was pregnant the next year, at which time I began to experience a lot of grief about my mother not being present for my pregnancy.

My mother had 6 kids, the last 2 at home, and always said she loved being pregnant and giving birth. I on the other hand, hated being pregnant, being poked and prodded and just wished I could talk to my mom about it.

I wrote a song about it called “Come in to the Light” which was a call for my mother’s presence to surface and watch and guide me through the pregnancy.

I enlisted a video artist to make a video to accompany the song and I talked to her about my dream imagery. She asked me for a photo of my mother, and she surprised me by flashing my mother’s bright smile at the end of it.

In the last trimester of my pregnancy I was looking for work and a friend put out a call for a temporary worker to help sign synagogue members up for high holiday tickets. The synagogue happened to be my mom’s favorite synagogue B’nai Jeshurun in the Upper West Side. On the same block as the synagogue were 2 carvings on either side of an apartment building with actual fountains where the water came out of a lion’s mouth into fountain below.

I stared at this, utterly disbelieving what I was seeing. I wondered if I had ever visited NYC with my mom when I was very young, been to the synagogue with her and seen the lion and fountain which might have explained their presence in my dream. My dad told me that I had never been to New York with my mom. I felt as if the present was affecting the past. I took this picture on my last day of work.

I left that job on my due date, but didn’t give birth until 10 days after that, which happened to be the anniversary (yartzeit) of my mother’s death. I had a hard time in labor, mostly due to the meanness, bullying and dehumanization of the mechanized, medicalized birth industry, and the particular hospital and practice that I gave birth at.

I didn’t want to use pain medicine, as my mom hadn’t used it. But the hospital wasn’t accustomed to non medicated women, let’s say. At one point, tired of the combative standoffs I was having with hospital staff, I asked for it.

When the anesthesiologist began her speech about what she was going to do, I felt no option but to politely as possible ask her to stop talking immediately. She left the room and didn’t come back. I was able to get through the transition phase of labor because at one point my husband whispered in my ear “Your mom would be so proud of you.” That triggered the image from the end of my video that the artist had snuck in, of my mom’s radiant face to pop into my mind and remain there fixed, as a focal point.

UPDATE: In 2020, (my son is almost 6 years old) I learned my doula has the same birthday as my mom (8/28). That same doula, super “randomly” had worked in the same position as me at the synagogue the year before.

https://youtu.be/WN_ITpDmJKE?t=263

#synchromysticism #birth #story #bir #syncronicity

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justinsdaysinthedark · 5 years

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Post # 6 - It is what it is

I'd be lying if I said I haven't spent the past half an hour with tears flowing from my eyes staring at a blank screen wondering how I'm going to get everything I've got floating in my head out. I suppose listening to Coldplay live in Argentina probably wasn't the best choice of music to set the mood. I'll work on that one in the future...

Where do I start? It's been a question I'm often asking myself at the start of these blog posts and it's certainly not the easiest one. What do you guys know? There's been so much happen since my last post on Thursday night.

Friday July 26th: I saw my doctors around lunchtime who came in quite concerned. Whilst they were confident my lymphoma was one called DLBCL (Diffuse Large B- Cell Lymphoma), some tests had come back with suspect results that it could be a more aggressive and harsh type of lymphoma called Burkitt's lymphoma and if confirmed, chemo was starting that night with no time to waste. There was also one marked in the middle (a cross of the two) called Burkitt's Like Lymphoma which is treated similarly to DLBCL. Whatever it was, I couldn't change it. I just wanted answers and if treatment needed to start, let's get it underway!

Adam, my incredible haematology doctor sent off another test of my gall bladder to finally get the confirmation I was after. It was urgent. He had to know. It was reassuring of Adam to state "Justin, we need to know what this is. Preliminary results are due back later this afternoon and that will hopefully rule out Burkitt's. if it is Burkitt's, we'll start chemo tonight and I'll be with you every step of the way - even if I have to stay back a few hours."

I know doctors earn a fair coin on a lazy day, but how many give you that much confidence that you and your health is important to them? I'm going to have it a guess and say not many but alas, I am so incredibly lucky with the team of doctors I have.

4:00pm and Adam strolls in the door heading straight for my room. My heart drops, similarly to what it had when Michael dropped the news I had lymphoma. "Good news. Preliminary results are back and we're confident it's not Burkitt's. You can't rule out anything in life, so there still is a small chance it could be. We're happy to wait for the final results on Monday, figure out a treatment plan from there and start Chemotherapy next week. Spend Saturday and Sunday on day leave and I'll see you next week."

This was news to my ears. In a time of what has been negative or no news, I could spend the weekend with family relatively freely and forget everything was happening for a few hours each day. My Uncle Bob and Aunty Denise were down from Tasmania to see me, as was my Aunty AJ and cousins from Bairnsdale so it all felt like it fit into place.

Friday night saw me considerably more relaxed with this news...that was until Collingwood started and it was the demolition it was. Slightly humorous side note, the nurse came in around 9pm for my nightly observations. Naturally, my heart rate was up a bit more than normal watching the football (118BPM - normally between 70-85BPM). This caused the nurse to call in the team of doctors who wanted to put me on an ECG machine for the night and monitor my heart. I assured them it was because Collingwood were on and if they gave me an hour, I'd be okay. It took some convincing, but it finally worked. Back they came an hour later and it had gone down - crisis averted.

Saturday afternoon and evening was wonderful. I went down to dads for dinner and was fortunate enough to spend some much needed time with family over a beautiful dinner and good laugh.

Sunday was much the same. I went home, mum did a fair chunk of washing for me as I spent it being me. Seeing Courtney, napping in my own bed and even headed over to Fountain Gate and got some much needed new clothes and other miscellaneous items - something that seems so simple but is such a luxury when you've spent the past 15 days in hospital.

Monday July 29th: They say the more you think positively, the more positive news you shall receive....or it goes something like that right? I woke up this morning the most upbeat and best I'd felt in weeks. I felt fine. I felt no pain, almost like I'd woken up from a shitty hotel! In all honesty, I felt like I'm abusing the system however I keep being quickly reminded how much I need to be here. Did I wake up so positive because I lived my old life for 16 hours over the weekend? Is it because I was hoping to hear a reasonably positive outcome with this lymphoma test? Probably a mix of both if I'm honest. But whatever it was, I was hopeful.

Adam came around at roughly 10:00am. Didn't really have much for me in terms of news but more of an outline of the day. If they hear the results of the test they were waiting on, they'd write me up a treatment plan ASAP and get chemo started this afternoon. At worst, I'd be starting it tomorrow (Tuesday). They just needed that definitive answer of what type of lymphoma I have - an answer I'd love more than anybody.

Either way, we agreed i'd need a PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) line in which basically is a long-term cannula. It runs from the inside of my arm right up and around and stops basically just outside my heart. This is for easy access for the chemotherapy and even an easy exit for blood tests - something that's proven incredibly difficult to take from me over the past few days. Additionally, these lines can last up to six months verses the three days you get from a cannula. There were too many positives to say no to!

This wasn't scheduled for any time in particular, so 1:00pm came around and I was about to be taken to get the PICC line in.

Just as I was about to leave, Adam came in with a few words I'm all too familiar with. "Well, the pathology tests we were waiting on have come back inconclusive..."

Woah. Wait. What? How do tests of my gall bladder that was removed six days ago come back inconclusive? How does one of the main sources not have enough 'data' to tell them what sort of lymphoma I have? I was just stunned.

Adam continued "As a result, we can see some signs of Burkitt's lymphoma and that's what we're going to treat you for. You're young. You should be able to handle it and it's better to over treat you than under treat and be stuck where we are at the moment. It's an intense 16-day chemo treatment that will totally wipe out your red and white blood cells as well as your platelets. We foresee you being in here for another 3-5 weeks, depending on how well your body goes getting these levels back up to normal post this first treatment..."

I honestly say this but that's all I remember from this conversation. I was hoping I'd be heading home this week but looks like that definitely won't be happening. Today marks day 40 of the past 55 days in hospital (day 15 of this stint) and if I go off the longest suggested time expected, I have another 35 days to go. That honestly crushed me.

I got taken down to get my PICC line in - quite an easy process. Very similar to putting in a larger cannula, just a whole lot longer and uses local anaesthetic as well as being guided by an ultrasound and X-ray. I'm lucky enough to have two ports, which will hopefully speed up some of my medication and how much they can pump in. Does it feel weird? The only weird part was feeling it slide down past and near my heart - but that's okay now!

By the time I return, dad made his was in to try and help process the news. We get Adam in to once again explain the process. In layman's terms, I'll be starting an intense and high-dose 16-day chemotherapy program kicking off tomorrow (Tuesday) morning. Most of the time across the next 16 days, I'll be hooked up via IV drip getting whatever medication is required. I think I saw I have rest days on days 7 & 8 which I suppose will give me two days to look forward to. At the end of the day, it's something I'm not certain on and will be a day by day process and constant learning about what's going into my body to help fight with me.

I do have one request for you all. With my body not producing red or white blood cells or platelets over the next few weeks, I do request if you are planning to visit however are sick to stay away those extra few days. With my immune system going to be at the lowest it's been, I don't particularly want to pick up something I don't need. Additionally, as much as I'd love flowers, they're also banned due to the infection risk of the spores mixing with the chemotherapy and causing some dangerous damage from the inside.

At the end of the day, if you're not sure please message me and check as I'm not entirely sure myself about everything. I'm constantly learning as I'm going.

How am I feeling? I'm nervous. I'm nervous at the unknown. How will this affect me? How bad am I going to feel? Will I lose my hair? What will my energy levels be like? In advance, I do apologise if over the next few weeks I'm not myself. Truth be told, that's because I probably won't be.

In a way, i'm finally excited to start my treatment first thing tomorrow morning (after yet ANOTHER lumbar puncture). I was so envious of both people next to me getting their first rounds of chemo today. I know mine will be intense but I just can't wait.

I've learnt so much about cancer and chemotherapy over the past four days and I know there's so much more to learn. Today I learnt I'll be incredibly highly cytotoxic, which basically means all needles and anything used on me need to go in a separate bin just for me. Additionally, I'll have to get used to the good old double flush after the toilet to ensure all waste is disposed of. Mouth ulcers are a big issue with most chemo patients as well. I'll have to start brushing my teeth after every meal and taking a special mouthwash 3x daily to assist with keeping these under control. There's plenty of other little things, but they're two I least expected.

Everything really hit me last night....not like it did tonight though. I just had twenty minutes to reflect and it just became a sudden realisation. What I'm going through is real. It's not a 'joke' anymore. It's not something they're looking at as a potential cause. It is the cause. I have a legitimate medical issue and it's finally time to fight lymphoma. All well and good to be talking the talk like I have been - it's now time to walk the walk. This sits well with me. If I give somebody my word, I do whatever I can to get it achieved. Unfortunately for the lymphoma throughout my body I've given it my word and it's time to fight it. Round one begins tomorrow morning.

I leave tonight feeling a whole lot better than I did when I started tonight's post. I didn't learn from my words earlier as Coldplay live from Argentina is still playing however I'm in a much more comfortable mind space.

My best friend of a lazy 20 years, Dylan visited tonight with his partner, Jacqui. One phrase popped up more than most and they made me aware it was a common phrase coming out of my mouth.

"It is what it is."

I can't control what's happened to me as "it is what it is." What I can control from here though is how I fight lymphoma. Thanks for the visit tonight guys, I appreciated the two hours spent here in what's been an incredibly tough afternoon.

Much love.

Juzz xx

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antigonies · 6 years

Text

Summer highlights

I haven't found the right words for a while, but I especially don’t know how to do justice to this summer. Everything seems to have happened. But if I don't actually force myself to write something down now, I never will.

It all started still in Paris, with C and J inexplicably ignoring me whenever I mentioned planning a trip. And then the uncertainty of whether or not I would be hired to work in England again, something I had been looking forward to all year round, but I somehow decided that I would not get hung up on it, and believe that whatever happened was meant to happen.

The second day after flying home, C picks me up for lunch. Her hair is so short you can somewhat see her scalp, but she looks as lively and happy as usual. Meeting B at the restaurant, 10 minutes later, C tells us that she has been diagnosed with lymphoma. She did not tell us before because we live abroad and wanted us to see that she was ok. I manage to not cry then. But B reveals that the reason she was home early this year is that she woke up one day not remembering anything, covered in bruises; according to her roommates, she came home crying and screaming hysterically. She thinks she may have been drugged but none of us dare to talk about what we all are thinking. Heartbreak upon heartbreak. Holding my friends' hands, hugging them, crying on the lunch table. 'We are too young to live through this, aren't we?', except no one actually says it, knowledge that tragedy has been happening to us already and will continue to happen. I want to never be away from them again. (I remember having written something about C back in January, something about how "I would not want to live in a world were she doesn't exist". Did I know, somehow? Does love do this to you, worrying always so much that you breathe your fears into life? I have long suspected that dreams, sometimes, are small windows into the future.)

Everything blurry after, hours of just sitting in J's car listening to him talk about the first boy he's ever really liked; going to a pride event (in honor of Garcia Lorca, my heart) with him and C; driving lessons, endlessly, my anxiety getting the best of me. Stopping a class just to call C to check if she needs help with her birthday party.

I'm clingier than most nights. C, tired of hugging me, points at this friend of hers, L, and says, half-jokingly: "He can cuddle with you". Fast forward an hour later and I'm grabbing him and kissing him in the dark of C’s front porch, clumsy and a little desperate. This may have nothing to you with you. I don’t even need to see you again, to be honest.

C and I dress up and surprise J at his graduation. He spots us in the crowd and just shouts "¡Cabronas!", which we take to mean, "I love you with all my heart". Taking cute pictures of C and her ex, because the love is still there, albeit a bit changed; everything transformed into something else.

Is this guy seriously texting me? Are we making conversation now? At first, I'm just being polite, but very quickly I'm laughing wholeheartedly at his jokes and sending him pictures of my favourite artwork at this exhibition from which C, B and I almost got kicked out because we were laughing too hard. Cheap food and two huge pints of cheap drinks later, all three of us are spilling secrets we never thought we'd share. Mocktails after because C is not supposed to drink, talking about everything we have survived in turning from girls into women, all the traumas we've fought and will keep fighting. You never know when one of the best nights of your life can happen. This is one of them.

The best nights of my life just keep piling onto each other, like the time C and I go to see 'Love Simon' and have only fries for dinner (just like when we were thirteen), then singing our hearts out to Cristina Aguilera, thinking "this is the happiest I've been in months, maybe years, and also, I love you so, so much".

Purposely forgetting France, but also everyone I love there. Finding out that it is impossible to be present everywhere and for everyone. That perhaps you'll always be missing somewhere.

Telling my parents about J's new boyfriend and half-accidentally coming out as bi to them in the same breath. Getting just a surprised comment and then the insinuation that I'm just doing it to be like my friends. Being too scared, or too tired, or too indifferent to tell them my story, so there we are, after a brief moment of silence, at the sushi restaurant, middle table, arguing way too loud over something 'completely unrelated' that has obviously everything to do with It. Still feeling lighter after, somehow, not having to constantly look over my shoulder.

Talking to L about whether of not he should come out to his parents, too, him telling me about this boy he likes in his hometown, me telling him about how this girl keeps ghosting me. This is what my parents were scared of, I guess. This freedom. And this is just the midsummer. The only poems I care about are about the sun.

Sending C flowers after her last chemotherapy session, thinking the worst has passed already. She keeps getting weaker, though, her smile still on, but needing days of sleep. We've all become used to planning our weeks around her good days, that is, always after Wednesdays. When she starts coughing too much, though, she is admitted at the hospital, the same week we were all supposed to go partying again. The little room inside the patient area where her bed is smells of antimicrobial gel even, with the mask on.

When she tells me not to come visit the next day, my heart feels so heavy in my chest that I must find a way to distract myself from all this. Texting a former friend I am just getting back into contact with after two years since our falling out. "Hey, are you going to the fair? I really need to go out". Oh, L is coming too. Only half-flirting, we share whatever drink he was having and I ask him about his crush; the reply makes me laugh because it may have been more than I bargained for. Of course, an hour later, we're making out at the Cuban bar after I just put lipstick on his ex. We didn't know how to dance when the night started, but we're getting better now, or more oblivious. He asks me to take him to the city center somewhere, just the two of us. I show him the best view of the city, we get breakfast together, I tell him about how the character I relate to the most is Sabina from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, because she always wants to flee, always looking for something somewhere else. He doesn't understand why I ask the things I'm asking, why I talk about loving my friends so much but seem to hate romance. I really don't know, man, I have a doctor's appointment. Straight from the party, I fix my smeared mascara and sit patiently in the waiting room for her to tell me about my blood. Unable to sleep, then, I think I'm experiencing my first hangover. The second night, the other guy in the group points out he's the only one there who hasn't had anything with L, so of course we all chant for them to kiss. Everyone is and is not tired. I don’t go home when he does because I want to keep dancing. No one knows where this is coming from. Not even me. I just want to forget myself a bit, I think.

I seriously don't know which day it is, at this point, or what happened before or after. J's birthday, with very inappropriate presents that we wanted to give him so badly. I keep re-writing C's poem but my handwriting is never pretty enough, never the perfect gift. I have, somehow, not argued with my parents in almost a month. I say I feel like a different person, and C acquiesces. My friends in France wonder where I am, what I have been doing.

I go online while half-asleep one night and seem to read that Marta (@tosfumarewords) is leaving tumblr, something with which I cannot deal at that point and I hope I just misread, trying to go back to sleep. Wondering how I can be so sad over losing someone I have never met in real life, but frankly I am too depressed about it to log on again and find out if it's really happening, and why.

Everyone is going back to studying, so I am alone more. I don't want to be alone. I also don't want to think about it. J takes me up to the mountain to go stargazing. I don't think I could be more in love with the night sky, or with the moment we cuddle in the backseat of his car, telling him about how I don't want to die anymore, although maybe I would not have chosen to be born, not yet anyway. The clouds have come by now but it doesn't matter. We softly hum to the radio on our way down.

At my grandparent's village, the familiar routine of getting to know old friends again and being too afraid to ask about the war-full past marks the beginning of the end of the summer.

I've started to reread the bad literature of my teenage years over which C and I first bonded over. She is too busy to go out now, back into the hustle. I talk to B about relationships, how they seem to be in a language that is foreign and distant to me. She asks me to let her and her friend sleep at my house in Paris in November, and of course, everyone is welcome to come. The same day, L tells me he is getting tickets to come visit the city. I guess everything happens at once.

This, the first time I write anything new in months, and now it's five pages long, three hours later. I apparently don't know how to do anything in moderation. Getting ready for new farewells, again, and already, things that seemed to be over come back. Reunions on the horizon. Nothing ever leaves completely. Everything transformed into something else. Even summer, time, even me.

#just a very rough stream of consciousness for those of you who wondered where i'vebeen #tbd #don't reblog #about me #personal #alcohol tw #food tw #cancer tw #abuse tw

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dylanobrienisbatman · 6 years

Note

Oooh blarke prompt! Sick fic or an exes to lovers but bellamy was the one to break up with clarke cause somehow it's almost always the other way around? 😘😘

AHHH!!! okay! I am SO sorry this took so long, but i finally finished! You can read it on AO3 here, or under the cut!

Caution Tape Around My Heart

Bellamy had always hated hospitals, his whole life he had hated them. At first it had just been in that way everyone did, the too sterile smell, the sick people everywhere, how there was always that one doctor who was sort of a dick but you couldn’t be a dick back because he was literally performing a procedure on you right then and there. But then, when he was 16, his mom died in a hospital, from a drug overdose, and that was the proverbial straw that broke the camels back. He was always on the brink of a panic attack when he was in hospitals, and the slightest thing would set him into a spiral that would take hours to come back from. And then, when he was 25, he found out he had cancer. He fell, playing soccer with friends, and the bruise just grew and grew and grew, over the next week, until it was almost his whole thigh, and he went to get it checked out, and they told him he had stage 3 non-Hodgkin Lymphoma. He was 31 years old now, and had been in remission for almost 3 full years, but his monthly checkups with his doctor still required an anti-anxiety pill beforehand and some serious attempts at meditation (recommended by his therapist that he had during treatment). It was his 2 year and 10 month checkup, post remission, and he was sitting in the waiting room at 945am, before his 1015 appointment, and his leg was bouncing up and down at full speed, and he kept continually having to wipe the sweat off his palms on his jeans. Any small thing was going to set him over the edge today, he had come down with a nasty cold last week and had convinced himself his cancer was back, had even called his doctor in hysterics (he had been assured that people just got colds, it was normal, but he asked to move his appointment up anyway), and so he was especially on edge.

Which meant Clarke Griffin walking into the waiting room REALLY was not what he needed today.

Oncology shared a waiting room with physical therapy, and she went to the check in desk on that side of the room, giving him a chance to quickly hop from his seat and find a spot in a corner, and also to be mildly relieved. She wasn’t here for cancer treatment, as far as he could tell, which… for all their difficult history, he wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy. He studied her from the back while she waited in line. Her hair was shorter, but it had been almost 6 years since he had seen her, but other than that she looked mostly the same. A little older, but still the same.

Clarke was his first love, and the girl he had loved most. She had been in a class he was a TA for when he was a senior in college and she was a freshmen, and had made it her mission to challenge him on every single thing he said, and he had basically loved her instantly, in that way that made him angry at himself because she was so clearly irritating. They had figured it out, when she was 20 and he was 23, after almost 2 years of being inseparable friends, and he was almost positive he was going to marry her. But things didn’t always work out as planned, and he had broken up with her pretty soon after he found out he had cancer, for a lot of different reasons, and that had been that. She had moved away pretty soon after, from what he had heard, and he hadn’t seen her since they broke up, until this moment, in the hospital, while he was already panicking about his checkup.

Perfect.

He tried his best to shuffle down into his seat, and grabbed a random magazine off the shelf, pulling it in front of his face, but shocking literally no one, not even himself, it didn’t work, and when Clarke turned around, they made eye contact instantly. Her eyes grew to the size of small dinner plates, and she looked frantically around, he was assuming for some kind of escape route that wouldn’t look suspicious. They stared at each other for a second, and then he watched as she steeled herself a little, and walked over to him. He had been expecting acknowledged ignoring, so this was a shock. She walked slow, like she was trying not to startle some small forest creature, and plopped down in the empty seat on his left.

“Hi Bellamy.”

“uh… Hey. Hey Clarke.” He wasn’t sure you were supposed to say to an ex that you hadn’t spoken too or seen in 6 years. He didn’t even know what she was up too. “What are you.. uh.. what are you doing here?” He wasn’t sure if he meant in town or in the hospital… he figured whichever she answered would be good enough.

“Raven had physical therapy today… I just got back in town a few weeks ago and she asked me to pick her up today.” Raven had known Clarke was in town for a couple of WEEKS and hadn’t told him? Which meant his other friends probably knew too. Dicks.

“That was nice of you.” He said. He was sincere, but she scoffed. He wasn’t sure he actually blamed her, but he tried to recover. “No, really. I’m not… I’m not trying to be a dick.” She looked at him through the corner of her eye. They hadn’t actually made eye contact since she sat down, an awkward position for an awkward encounter. She smiled, wary but apologetic.

“What are YOU doing here?” She asked, glancing over him. He didn’t seem like he had an injury that required therapy, and he had never told her about his cancer.

“Uhh, i’ve got a… i’ve got a checkup with my oncologist.” Her eyes widened, finally turning to face him.

“You ha-“

“I’m in remission. I’ve been in remission for… a while. Just a monthly checkup. A few blood tests, a couple questions. No big deal.” He wasn’t sure if he actually succeeded at feigning the blasé attitude, but to be fair, he didn’t really care if she believed him or not. She wasn’t entitled to his story, not anymore. He felt a weird sense of rage grow in his belly.

“Oh.. Well.. congratulations.” Platitudes, meant for strangers and acquaintances. He wasn’t sure what category she was even in.

“Yeah… Thanks..”

They sat in silence for another minute, which felt like hours. He wasn’t sure what to say, and clearly neither was she. She opened her mouth to speak a couple of times before snapping it shut, and retreating back into her seat. She finally opened it again, and was about to actually say something when the nurse opened the door and called his name.

“Wou-“

“Bellamy Blake?” He stood up, but turned to face her. Eye contact was terrifying. He looked at her nose instead. He waited a second, and then turned, because she had clearly decided not to finish her sentence, and walked about 3 steps before she finally spoke up.

“Would you like to grab a coffee or something? I’d love to talk. To catch up.” He paused, and the nurse looked expectantly. He smiled at her, and turned.

“Yeah… uh… Raven has my number. Just… text me. or call me. or whatever.”

She nodded, a small smile on her mouth that looked almost forced, and he turned away from her and followed the nurse inside.

He was numb through most of the appointment, barely hearing what the doctor said. The real news came later, thankfully, when they called him in 2-3 days with the results of his call, so he wasn’t concerned, and he hopped on the subway home at around 11, barely even paying attention. Thankfully he didn’t have to drive. He really didn’t expect her to text, but at around noon, his phone rang, and an unknown number was CALLING him. He contemplated letting it go to voicemail, but his more impulsive side got the better of him and he answered it.

“Hello?”

“Hello… is this Bellamy?” Her voice was sort of shaky and unsure.

“Yeah, hey Clarke.”

“Are you busy right now? I’m at Ravens and she said you live close. I could meet you for coffee wherever.”

He contemplated making up a busy day, but he had taken off work for the appointment and he was just planning on lounging around his house and finishing up the new book he had picked up on the rise and fall of the ottoman empire, and that nagging feeling in his gut wouldn’t go away. He had to know, had to have a moment of closure even if it ended in a fight. He didn’t have high expectations.

“Nope, not busy at all. Theres a little local place on Atlantic and Smith.” She agreed, and they scheduled about 30 minutes out. He thought about changing into something else, but she had seen him this morning, and she would know. He didn’t want to give her the impression that he was trying to make himself look good for her. He ignored the way his heart was about to bust through his ribs and run across the room. He pulled on his shoes, tucked his book under his arm, fumbled trying to lock his door, and made his way there. He figured if he was early he could pick a good table, order himself a drink, and look reasonably comfortable before she showed up.

Apparently she had the same idea, because she walked in while he was ordering.

They stood awkwardly near the counter while their drinks were made, and settled into two comfy chairs in the back corner. She broke the silence after a moment.

“I just wanted too… I don’t know. This seems stupid now.” She looked at him for something. He wasn’t sure if she wanted him to contradict her or confirm her thoughts, but he didn’t even really know what he thought anyway.

“I mean… maybe it is. But were here now, so we should probably at least talk a little. No point in all this discomfort otherwise.” She chuckled, and some part of him, some 6 years hidden, 25 year old part of him, preened at making her laugh. The feeling hit him baseball to the face, and he didn’t know how to respond to it.

“Very true.” She agreed, which was a relief. “What have you been up too?” It was such a broad question to cover 6 years.

“I’m a history professor, at Columbia. I have been for about 2 years. I’m working towards my Ph.D. in their history department too, taking a few night classes and stuff. Living here, obviously.” It felt so pedestrian, talking about his job with the person who used to know him best in the whole world. “You?”

“I.. uh.. I just moved back. To the city. I have a job as a curator at the Brooklyn Museum. Finished up college, obviously, with my art degree… you know that you were there,” she was talking so fast, her nerves apparent. She hadn’t picked up her cup in a while because her hands were shaking. “…And did a masters, and I was working as a curator for a small gallery in San Francisco for about a year before I applied for this job. I am staying with Raven for a few days before I can move into my new place.” Another weird conversational standstill. She looked at him with this look that just sort of told him that she wanted him to ask something next. He just wasn’t sure what to ask.

“That’s great, sounds like the perfect job for you.” He realised this was somehow weird to say, because while she might not have changed that much, 6 years is a long time. She could be a totally different person. He didn’t know her at all anymore. He tried not to think about that. “I don’t know what to say, Clarke.” It was true. Their breakup had been gnarly, full of anger and cruel words, and resentment dies hard. And he held quite a bit of it towards her for the thing she had done.

“Bellamy I-“ She started but he cut in.

“Your mom called me “welfare trash” Clarke. To my face. And you just… stood there. We had been dating for almost TWO YEARS, and you let her call me that.” She shrunk into her seat. He realised that his words were still coming, a stream of things unsaid, things unresolved. “You let her tell me I wasn’t good enough for you, that my “status” in life would never be enough for you, and that you would leave me for someone with more money once you realised that I couldn’t give you the life you wanted.” She was welling up, but that just made him angrier. She didn’t get to cry about his pain. “And then you let her sit there, and tell you about how much better for you this man and that man and this girl and that girl, ‘some young lawyer maybe dear’ ‘perhaps doctor whats his nuts’. You let her humiliate me. And I just took it, and you apologised to me afterwords, but you never corrected her. You never stood up for me. And for the next month, you just let her keep it up. And at that point i already knew about my cancer, and you just… let her keep at it.” Her eyes widened. He hadn’t told her about the cancer. “And i know you didn’t know, but you didn’t need to know. I was your boyfriend and you just…” He trailed off, shutting his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to calm himself down. He got his breathing straight.

“So I broke up with you. You clearly didn’t want to defend me to your mom, and maybe you agreed with her, maybe you didn’t, but you never told her. Maybe you did later, but you should have done it in front of me, or at least in the days following. And I had cancer, and I couldn’t pile that on to someone who couldn’t even stand up to her mom for me.” Her face was a maze of emotions, from distress, shock, and sorrow, to something heavy, like grief. He finally sat back in his seat and just… breathed.

“I’m sorry.” That was what he wanted to hear, but not at all what he expected. He almost dropped his coffee. “I was 22, and I know thats not an excuse, but she… well… its my mom. And that was when i still had this weird hero worship complex towards her. I didn’t know how to stand up to her back then. I didn’t know what to do.” He was sure he looked stunned, and maybe a little angry. “I’m not trying to make excuses. I’m not. I deserved everything you said back then… and everything you said now. You were everything to me, and i let her… i let her treat you like garbage. I just want you to… I don’t know. A couple of years later, when I finally got my head out of my ass a little, I confronted her about it. I told her you were… my best friend,” Her voice was shaky, like she was going to cry. He resisted the urge to reach across the table and take her hand. “You were my first REAL love. I had boyfriends, and girlfriends before you. And i loved them, sure. I loved Lexa, I loved Finn, kind of,” it was his turn to chuckle, “but you were different. And i just… I’m just sorry. I know i was wrong, and I’m just sorry. I wanted you to know that.” He wasn’t sure what to say.

“What did your mom say?” Was what came out, entirely unprompted by his conscious brain. He wanted to kick himself. She smiled, to her credit.

“She was shocked to say the least, but i think i got through to her. And a couple years after that I found out about her involvement with my fathers death, so we don’t speak anymore anyways.” That was the kind of bomb of information he wasn’t prepared for, and his subconscious took the opportunity, yet again over riding his conscious choice to maintain the appearance of not caring, to take control of his mouth.

“She WHAT?” Clarke shook her head, and suddenly the conversation flowed. She told him about her mom and what she had done, and that flowed into stories about their lives. The conversation was simple, nothing too exposing, except the story about her mom, and his story about his cancer. She asked about his sister, about his job, he asked about Wells and HER job, and they just sort of traded stories. It still felt weird, like talking to a stranger who somehow new too much about him to ever be a real stranger. The only stayed for about an 45 minutes, nothing too long or intense, but at the end he felt like a weight was lifted. They didn’t hug, or touch at all, when they parted ways, but he saved her still ‘unknown’ number in his phone during his walk home and he figured that was a start.

Over the next few months, she slowly reintegrated into his life. She was invited out for drinks every weekend, now that her friends knew that he knew she was back, and asked him to lunch so often that it was a scheduled thing now, to see her at work or on the weekends. But it was Raven’s birthday were it all came to a head.

Her “party” was just a get together at her loft, with all her friends and her girlfriend Luna, and when he got there it was just the two of them and Clarke. He dropped the 12 pack of beers and the pack of cupcakes he brought on the counter, and found them all three out on the balcony, drinking a bottle of red wine. He tried to ignore the way it stained Clarkes lips pink. He had caught himself thinking about her a lot the last couple of times they had spent time together. Their time together had gotten more familiar, easy like it used to be, and the way he used to feel, at the beginning of their friendship, so long ago was creeping its way back in. He had broken up with her out of rage, and betrayal, and in an attempt to protect himself from her, but it had been so long. Every time they spent time together, she would find a way to apologise again, to assure him that she knew, she knew she had been wrong, so long ago, she knew that what she had done had hurt him, and he felt the wall he had built being brought down, piece by piece. He tried his best to force it back up, to retain the barrier between himself and his feelings, but it was harder than he expected it to be.

The night wore on, and the beers got him fuzzy, and wine always made her touchy, and before he really realised it, her arm was around his waist, and they were sharing the recliner. He thought about pulling himself away from her, but the smell of her hair and the feel of her, warm and solid around him, was like every dream he ever had those first couple of years after she left, and the part of him that made good choices with logic was hiding behind that wall that kept shrinking down, and letting the part of him that led with his heart take the lead. So he stayed, pressed against her, letting himself feel it, letting himself maybe think that he could see past it. that he could forgive her. Her hand found his knee, his thigh, his arm, his shoulder, over and over again, and his brain just kept getting fuzzier as the night dragged on. When it was finally time to go leave, she hugged him goodbye, tucking her nose into the junction of his shoulder and his neck, and when she leaned back, she pressed up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, closer to the corner of his lips but not quite, and the place where her lips landed was on fire. She untangled herself from him and wandered out to go home, leaving him shell shocked.

She didn’t call him the next day, didn’t reach out at all, and he felt like he was going out of his mind. He picked up his phone at least 7 times to call her, and then put it back down. He wasn’t sure what to do with himself, just kept pacing around his apartment. He couldn’t find anything to distract him, and before he really realised what he was doing he was putting on shoes and grabbing his keys and catching the train to her apartment, his brain rattling around as he rode. He knew it was stupid. She had only been back for 6 months, but the anger of a 25 year old him, scared of dying, scared of loosing her, scared of not being good enough seemed... far away now. Far away from the 31 year old version of himself that was standing here now, missing this girl he had told himself it was stupid to miss. Longing for this girl he had made himself push away. She was just like he remembered. She was his perfect match. She was strong, and bright, and beautiful as he'd ever seen her, and full of so much joy. She was everything he ever wanted, just like she had been at 23, and 24, and 25. Just like she had been all those years in between, when he made himself ignore how he compared every person he dated to her. She was made for him. She was a part of his heart. She was his "One".He got to the door, and realised he had no idea what to do. He paced outside for almost 10 minutes, and was just about to ring her bell when his phone buzzed.

He pulled it from his pocked, and her name flashed across the screen. He answered it.

“Hey..”

“Hey where are you?” He paused, but before he could answer she kept talking. “I’m at your place, and you’re not answering your bell.” He couldn’t hold it together, and started laughing, right there on the street. “what are yo-“ He interrupted her through his laughter.

��Im at your place.”

“What?!”

“I was just… I don’t know. So i came to your place to.. I don’t know.”

“Just stay there,” she said, hanging up the phone. He stood awkwardly outside her house for the next 20 minutes until she rounded the corner and saw him. She stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of him, and then took of at a run, barrelling into him, holding him tight. He took a second to respond, and then wrapped his arms around her waist. She unhooked herself from him, and took him by the hand and led him into her apartment. He stopped just inside the doorway, and she turned to face him. “Look, Bellamy, I know it was all… a mess. And its only been a little while… but. It feels the same. Like it did at the beginning.”

“Yeah… it does…” He felt like he was betraying some small part of himself by feeling it all. By feeling it again. But they had alway been sort of undeniable. And the problems between them were so long ago, and so… gone. Her mom wasn’t in her life anymore, and she had finally stood up for him, even if it was a little too late, and she had come back, and apologised so much that he had to finally ask her to stop. He had forgiven her.

“i was so angry with you, for treating me that way.” She nodded, and him, taking both of his hands. “I dont want to feel that way anymore.” She squeezed his fingers, and kept her face trained and neutral.

“I understand… Forgiveness is hard for us. It always was. And this… this was big Bellamy. I know i hurt you. And I’ll spend as long as it takes to make it right again. I need you Bellamy. I always did.” Her sincerity was palpable.

“You were my person, Clarke. I never found another person in my life who was as good for me, as right for me, as much my other half… you.” A small smile finally creeped into her cheeks. “If we take this slow…”

“Glacial pace… I promise.” She took a step forward, just slight but enough to put her in his space.

“Okay.” He said, soft. She took another step, and pushed up onto her toes, slow. Waiting for him to meet her in the middle. He leaned down, and she pressed up just enough, and pressed a soft dry kiss against his mouth. She stepped back, faster than he maybe wanted, but he knew they made the right choice. Six years and all that history, they needed time, time to get it right.

And this time they would.

Together.

#bellarke #bellarke fanfiction #bellarke fanfic #bellarke fan fiction #bellarke fan fic #bellarke ff #the 100 #the 100 fanfiction #the 100 fanfic #the 100 fan fiction #the 100 fan fic #my writing #fic request #prompt #asks #answered

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scum-belina · 7 years

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Not to be really depressing but, sometimes I look back on what’s all happened to me since November of last year, and it’s honestly baffling all the horrific shit I’ve been through. My dad had been in crippling pain all summer and autumn last year, but tried to get through it bc he just thought it was sciatica. He started taking some of my granny’s absurdly strong pain pills because he didn't want to seek medical attention for his issue bc we have no health insurance, but I saw that he was only getting worse and wanted him to just get on indigent care bc mom had before and we were able to afford that medical help no problem, but he refused to. A month before his cancer diagnosis his behavior towards me changed dramatically, he started screaming at me over everything, cursing at me in horrible ways, and my mom just kept quiet about it because my dad said I deserved it for being a bitch at him.

Then once dad got the cancer diagnosis, my mom fucking lost it. She was saying how we couldn't survive without my dad over and over and I had to be the comforter, but no one comforted me. I had to push all my feelings deep down because no one was well enough to listen to them or be there for me. We only knew about the spinal tumor then, we didn't even know it was malignant, or that he had a brain tumor and other small tumors on his spine. To this day my mom blames my dad’s brain tumor for his verbally abusive behavior towards me, but I just don't know. It still fucks me up because everything he said to me still is like open wounds on me. I’m still traumatized over it and all the things that happened after it.

Then just moments after my dog passed away after a miserable night of trying to keep her as comfortable as possible all night while suffering from multiple seizures and just trying to let her know I was there with her and she wasn't alone (she was blind), my dad became completely paralyzed and could not get off of the couch. He had also lost all control of his bladder and had apparently pissed in his sleep all over Christmas presents in the living room my mom had already wrapped beautifully. Mom assumed my dad had just took too many pain pills and it made him act that way.

But it only got worse from there. 5 days he stayed on that couch. Did not get off of it once. You can imagine the horror. His left leg had become completely numb due to the lymphoma on his spine damaging the nerves controlling it, and my mom discovered he had developed a huge bed sore on the back of that leg bc he had it against the couch for days bc he couldn't move it. My mom freaked, and I got upset and told them both he needed emergency medical attention NOW, but they wouldn't listen and instead said to give them 7-10 days to get indigent care and then MAYBE he’d go to the doctors. He would not have survived being on that couch immobile another 7-10 days.

But on the 5th night, my mom and I were watching tv in the back room, and heard a noise in the living room like something had crashed over, so we went out to check and dad was on the couch knocking things off of the table next to him, and when my mom asked him what he was doing he talked complete nonsense, not a thing he said made sense. “I’m trying to buy lightbulbs with tim and this black man and youll know about them strawberries once you see them DONT ACT LIKE YOU DONT KNOW” it’d be hilarious if it weren't for the fact the brain tumor was messing with his mind, but we didn't know about the tumor at the time, and I had seen my dad have a couple of drinks that night, so my mom and I assumed he got drunk, which was EXTREMELY out of character for him, but since he was in such a pitiful state we though maybe it was enough to make him get drunk.

My dad continued on with his bizarre behavior, and I couldn't take it anymore, I called my granny (bc she lives right next door) and she showed up and saw him, and I stayed the night at her place bc I couldnt stand to be home anymore. I called my dad’s sister bc she lives in the same neighborhood too, and she went and checked up on him and thought he was drunk too. We all agreed that in the morning he HAD to go to the ER, and he did...after 5 firemen showed up to carry him out of the house into a car. He had become completely incontinent at that point and was an absolute mess no matter how much mom mom tried to keep him clean, so this was a completely disasterous situtation in every single way. My dad told us he had not been drunk that night and we all panicked bc we didn't know what else it could be. This all happened the day before Christmas Eve.

My dad’s ex-stepdad was the one who took him to the ER, and the hospital decided to try and remove the tumor through surgery the morning of Christmas Eve. That morning, my mom and I were home, but mom was going to be picke up and go to the hospital later and stay there all day, but they wanted to do the surgery earlier than expected, so the doctors called us bc they needed mom’s permission to do the surgery, so I bring the phone to my mom and she refuses to talk with them. I don't know what the fuck her deal was but I was having none of it and got really ugly with her until she answered the phone and gave them permission. She was all “THERE. YOU HAPPY NOW?“ So again I was hurting immensely yet was still getting kicked down and I was acting tough but honestly I was so alone and scared.

Then my mom went to the hospital, and I went to my grandparents to try and help prepare for their Christmas eve party, all while trying to keep everyone updated on my dad, and a little after noon, my mom called my hysterical, telling me that the surgery was unsuccessful because the tumor wasn't solid enough to remove, and that after further scans they found other spinal tumors, and a tumor in his brain. again, I was calm and told mom not to lose it too much because there could be treatment for it, but honestly I was just in shock and in survival mode. Mom came back to my grandparents and we had the most miserable Christmas we’ve ever had.

Dad continued on with his delirium until his brain surgery to remove the tumor the best they could back in January, then they did tests on the tumor and another month later we found out it was CNS lymphoma, an aggressive cancer, that likes to come back even after treatment. Back in May of this year after just 4 rounds of chemo, dad was pronounced cancer free, but his oncologist had him take over 7 more treatments, just to try and deter the cancer from coming back. Dad got his last treatment a month ago, and he’s still unable to walk, but with physical therapy he is making some progress.

We’ve gone this whole year without income, bc my dad was the only one able to work, and disability has rejected dad twice this year despite him obviously being disabled. This month dad’s case for disability will go to court and i’m praying he gets approved this time, because just relying on my relatives is terrifying. The relatives ive had to rely on this year are the most toxic and verbally abusive people it’s been hell all year dealing with them. I’ve wanted desperately to get my license and be able to drive to get my own job, but my granny manipulated my dad to give his only working vehicle to her, and so I'm completely stuck rn. Trapped at my verbally abusive grandparent’s house bc my mom and I have had to live here all year instead of our own home bc we cant pay our utility bills rn.

I’ve dealt with so much trauma,so much discouragement, so much abuse from people closest to me this year, all while having untreated severe depression, anxiety, and severe suicidal ideation that I've had for over a decade now. This is only a fraction of what ive been through this year. There’s so much other horrible fucked up shit that’s happened to me I honestly cant deal with the reality of it all most days, but tonight is a night where everything is coming back to me, it’s just constant flashbacks of it all and I just cant believe it. I cant believe any of this has happened to me, but it has. It has and i’m terrified even worse is to come for me.

#warning tis is LONG and very depressing I'm sorry #most of u probably already know all this but I needed to vent this all out tonight #it's a mess but so is my mind #also he got his cancer diagnosis from a doctor who had been told abt the pain my dad was in and he did an mri for him #bc he was detrmined to find out what was wrong w my dad #but he didn't fully get just how severe a stae my dad was in so has wasn't in a hurry abt getting my dad emergency medical attention

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dj-lymphoma-blog · 6 years

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The End! And a new beginning...

Damian Jewett, 28 October 2017

I'm sitting at the Dryades Public Market, drinking a coffee with chicory and checking some things off my weekend to do list, awaiting a little shindig I organized tonight at the Little Gem Saloon. It may be the last chance I have to soak in the wonders of the French Quarter. New Orleans is resistant to change, but I've witnessed many changes since moving here.

They redid the roads on my stretch of St. Charles Avenue in the Garden District. They opened a new streetcar line along Rampart St. They completely restored 1824 Sophie Wright Place, which only one year ago looked like this:

New Orleans will be getting a new mayor this year when Mitch Landrieu's term expires. In the culinary world, celebrity chef John Besh was apparently forced out of the industry for sexual misconduct allegations in his various restaurants. This on the heels of a recent split between Besh and one of his star apprentices, Alon Shaya. Rock and roll pioneer Fats Domino passed away a few days ago. Now New Orleans is about to lose someone else - me. I'll be returning to Canada next week. Like Mr. Besh, I've also had a rough year, with highs and lows. I was very fortunate to get to see one of my best friends get married in Brazil. I had exciting opportunities to travel to Athens and Amsterdam for work. I got to spend some time with Halifax friends back in February. Now I get to live closer to my girlfriend, which I'm very excited about. Unfortunately, many of these trips, were tarnished by my condition. Work has been a major struggle, ever since my company's global summit back in May. Scrambling to keep up with my regular duties and meeting extracurricular demands of my position, all while completing my treatments, has left me a little worn out and a little behind. As for my physical state, things are pretty much back to normal. My originally planned final chemotherapy session was completed on July 5th. It took until August to mostly recover from that, and most of the month of August to feel close to 100%. My doctor was recommending an additional round of a special chemo drug called Zevalin, or alternatively to continue with "maintenance" chemo sessions every few months for a couple years. I refused both of these recommendations and decided to take my chances and try other approaches to staying healthy. Really it came down to quality of life. I felt that I would not be able to keep up with work and life if I were going to continue with further treatments. Zevalin also has some side effects that would have diminished my expected success rate. I crunched some basic stats and estimates with my doctor and it seemed that additional treatments would have improved my chances of full recovery by 5-10%. This may seem like a lot, but it wasn't enough for me, given the circumstances. I got my port removed shortly after my final round of chemo. I had an MRI on my head in August, as something was previously detected in my skull, in the bone matter. That turned out to be no major concern. So, for the time being, it seems I have a clean slate of health. I'll be looking to set up some checkup appointments with doctors back in Canada as soon as I get settled. And my hair has mostly come back. I'm a bit balder than before chemo, but I think that was going to happen regardless. One thing I've been consciously trying to improve is my diet. I spoke with a dietician briefly several times. She didn't give me a lot of specifics, but in general recommended trying to eat better, avoiding certain foods and following a more "Mediterranean" diet. My diet wasn't terrible to begin with, but I've made efforts to eat more fresh vegetables, salads, avocados, extra virgin olive oil, beets, kale, cabbage, dark vegetables, fresh fruit juices and smoothies, etc. Spring water and tap water are typically better than purified or carbonated water, as they tend to be more alkali. I'm also working toward cutting back on beer, which is my biggest weakness. Alcohol, carbonation and purines contained in beer all contribute to acidic body pH. I have a great book that my brother-in-law bought me called Tripping Over the Truth: How the Metobolic Theory of Cancer is Overturning One of Medecin's Most Entrenched Paradigms, which contains some excellent dietary advice. I'll be reading through it and incorporating those ideas into my plan as well. It's an ongoing process... I'm hoping that a return to Canada will put me in a new, healthier environment, which I'm hoping will help me avoid relapse. As I may have mentioned, I believe the environment in New Orleans likely contributed to my condition. It's unfortunate, considering how much I love the place. But between the poor drinking water, old buildings, mold, asbestos, pesticides, large power lines on Felicity Street, etc., I think getting away from it all is a good move, from a physical well-being perspective.

And so this brings things toward a close. I’m hoping this will be my final blog about my experiences battling Lymphoma. I've enjoyed blogging and plan to document some interesting future experiences in a similar way. So stay tuned! But for now, it's time to close off this chapter of my life and start a new era of healthier lifestyle and reconnecting with my homeland. I want to thank everyone who kept me in their prayers. I want to thank my family and my girlfriend for coming to visit me throughout the year. Thanks to my friends wherever you may be for your kind words. Thanks to my good friends and coworkers in New Orleans who helped me throughout the year. Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions or concerns. I look forward to the next time we meet!

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porcupine-girl · 7 years

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Would you mind talking about how y9u were diagnosed and how it happened?

For those just tuning in, this is re: my experiences with cancer. I was 24 and I’d just started my master’s degree in Virginia, and my boyfriend (now husband) was working on his PhD in North Carolina. We were exactly a 3-hour drive apart, 200 miles door to door, which was a big improvement from the first two years of our relationship when I was in Boston. But anyhow.

Late in the semester, I got a cold. And it just wouldn’t go away. The coughing got really, really bad - I went to visit my boyfriend’s family in Denver for the first part of winter break, and his mom gave me some codeine she had sitting around and it barely helped at all. I was coughing hard enough that my ribs hurt all the time, I was like leaking pee every time, it was bad.

I went to a doctor in my hometown, Kansas City - I forget when exactly, but it might have been before Denver? Given the rest of the timeline? But she diagnosed me with bronchitis and gave me an antibiotic. We talked a bunch b/c she’d basically just started practicing a few months before and it turned out we’d gone to high school together, she was a senior when I was a freshman, haha small world!

Two weeks later, though, I hadn’t improved at all. We all assumed I had pneumonia, so I went back to the dr on about Dec 27. (I’m so glad it was after Christmas!) She took an x-ray to check for pneumonia. I figured she’d call me the next day and tell me yep you have pneumonia here’s more medicine for it.

Instead, before we even got home (my aunt and boyfriend had driven me), she called to tell me to come get the results of my x-ray. No, not tomorrow, now. Weird, but okay. When we got there, the nurse asked if I wanted anyone to come back with me to get the results. I was like… no, I’m good. She was like, are you sure?

Hint: If the nurse seems really insistent that you should have someone with you to get the results of something, she’s probably right.

Anyhow, I went back by myself, and the doctor showed me x-rays, which had a bunch of blobs all over.

And she said, “When we see nodes like this, what we usually think of first is. Cancer.”

And like, the whole room and all of reality with it kind of tilted on its axis.

(On the strange things that go through your head when faced with death: My first impulse was to scream at her Are you stupid? 24-year-olds don’t get cancer! Luckily I did not.)

I had them call my aunt and boyfriend in with me for the rest of the conversation.

Long story short, my chest was completely full of tumors. You have a network of lymph nodes in your chest called the mediastinum, and mine had basically turned into one enormous tumor. I also had one smaller tumor at the bottom of each lung.

I think the doctor was a little freaked out to be three months out of med school and delivering this news to someone she went to high school with, but she was great.

I met with the surgeon the next day to talk about a biopsy. My mom, aunt, and boyfriend were there with me. My boyfriend and I came out of the meeting with the impression that basically there was .1% chance it was some virus, 95% chance it was Hodgkins Lymphoma, which we have more or less found the cure for (this is why “cure for cancer” as a blanket term is a joke) and has a 90% survival rate, and a 5% chance it was nigh-incurable lung cancer that had spread to my lymph nodes instead of lymphoma that had spread to my lungs. But somehow, my mom and aunt were in such deep denial that they left the same meeting totally convinced it was the virus.

So I had the biopsy on Dec 30. When I woke up from the surgery, the surgeon said that it would be a few days before they had the official results, but Hodgkin’s has very distinctive cells and the lab techs were pretty sure they’d already seen them. My response was “Thank God.” I did not have lung cancer, and I’d made my peace with the not-so-bad cancer (especially since as soon as I started researching Hodgkins, I’d quickly realized that I had been showing some of the symptoms for a year, so I’d come to terms with it being that early on in this process).

Apparently, when he went out and told my family this, according to my husband his own response was the same as mine but everyone else like freaked the fuck out crying because they’d all convinced themselves it wasn’t cancer at all.

Once I was diagnosed, the real family drama began, as they all tried to convince me to stay in KC for treatment. I wound up getting my first two rounds of chemo there, missing the first couple weeks of school (my professors were very understanding), then heading back and finishing the semester while undergoing the rest. My family, like… fought way harder than the Bittles to make me stay.

So that part was very much based on my experiences; while the two situations weren’t much alike in details, I thought those details mostly balanced each other out in terms of whether it was really justified for either me or Bitty to leave.

I was a few years older than him and had been with my boyfriend 2.5 years, plus I had health insurance in VA while my family was in the midst of declaring bankruptcy due to a lack of health insurance (which was the fault of my mom’s husband, but his involvement in my situation is a WHOLE OTHER STORY OMG) so IDK how I was supposed to pay for treatment if I stayed there. But on the other hand, a broken leg is nothing like chemo - Bitty’s prognosis was “it’ll be hard to walk for a few months” while mine was “the next six months are gonna be living hell, but then you’ll probably be okay, but there’s still a 5-10% chance you’ll die.” And he’d actually be living with Jack, while my husband had to be my primary caretaker from three hours away (it was fine). And his family is miles and miles saner than mine, so overall I thought their freak out over it would be pretty low-key, but definitely there.

#cancer #pg irl #Anonymous

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collectmomentsnotthingz-blog · 5 years

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12 Things I Learned From Getting Sick

“We think you may have Leukemia.”

Not something you expect to hear as a presumably healthy 26-year-old.

Three years ago I was admitted to the hospital with unexplainable bruising all over my body. I had shortness of breath walking up a simple flight of stairs. I was as pale as a corpse. Within five minutes of arriving, I was on my stomach with a drill in my hip bone. I spent the next five days in the hospital awaiting a diagnosis.

It felt like being a patient on the TV show “House.” The doctors even had a whiteboard where they crossed off everything it couldn’t be. Consensus? Aplastic Anemia. A rare autoimmune disease that attacks the body’s stem cells, with the symptoms being very similar to that of leukemia and lymphoma.

I was in denial and didn’t want any help; or worse, sympathy. I thought I could do it all on my own. I was seriously wrong. I needed more help than I could have ever imagined, and people wanted to help. I had to learn to let them in. I made the decision to reframe my circumstances and began to look at my diagnosis as a way to help others. I was one of the few people who could bring awareness to Aplastic Anemia and other autoimmune diseases. I could encourage people to go get a check up — especially those that hadn’t in years. I could ask people to join the Be the Match foundation. I could be the personal reminder you needed to tell of those close to you that you love them. Because if my diagnosis taught me anything, it was that you never know how much time you or those you love have left.

This ultimately lead to the creation of my campaign, Collect Moments Not Things. I had seen this slogan on a poster in college and it stuck with me. At the time, it was exactly what I was trying to cultivate. That life is not about what we have, but who we share it with.

Today, I’m one of the lucky ones that gets to use the words “remission” and “healthy” in the same sentence. There are many who don’t. I’m incredibly grateful for this gift I’ve been given at the age of 30; the gift of perspective. It’s now my responsibility to share what I’ve learned so others can benefit.

Below is a list of ‘perspectives’ I gained from my battle with Aplastic Anemia. I wrote them at the end of 2015 and it may be the best thing I’ve ever written. They were born from year of tremendous obstacles & growth. I originally shared them on my Facebook page in hopes of inspiring others to question their current mindset and take action on their health and/or life. It will forever be worth sharing. Enjoy.

Health is not about having a six-pack, eating paleo or living without disease. Health is living optimally given your circumstances, genetics, environment and financial state.

It’s OK to put your pride aside and admit you need help. People WANT to help. Let them. It’s how they cope, and how you connect. Be cognizant not to fall into the trap of playing/coddling a victim.

There is no shame in seeing a therapist. I hired two when I got to California. One was a business/life coach the other a psychologist. They were the neutral party I needed at the time. They both helped me step back and observe my situation from afar. I love my family and friends, but they’re all personally biased.

Crying is a human emotion. It doesn’t mean you’re weak or soft. Society and the media had me convinced that crying decreased my self-worth as a male. I cried every day for almost six months. I realized feelings are what make us human, and feelings are how we connect with others. For years, I suppressed my emotions to appear ‘strong’. What BS. So if crying is cool, consider me Miles Davis!

Love and take care of yourself first. Then, and only then, will you have enough to give others. For years, I gave and gave and gave, totally forgetting about myself. I was burnt out. I can see now that people were only getting 30% of my best.

To me, spirituality is about taking responsibility for yourself and ownership of every choice you make.

Vulnerability to me is telling the truth, even when you know it will hurt.

Life is one big insecurity; yet we spend most of our day trying to map everything out to convince ourselves we have control. I’ve come to realize the only thing we have control over is ourselves. “There’s my business, there’s your business, and there’s God’s/Universe/Divine/Nature’s business.” — Byron Katie. I laugh now when people ask what my 5- year plan is. I no longer invest in goal-setting or material things. Your house, your car, your job, your family; they could all be gone today. Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. Instead, I have visions, ideas, and I collect moments. This does not mean I just pray and avoid taking action. No, it means I take care of today and focus on being present. The rest always takes care of itself.

“Nothing is good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” — Shakespeare. We love to label things as good or bad. What if we chose to look at everything as positive, or as a learning opportunity? Yes, you’ll still encounter pain, sadness, hurt, and anger. Those emotions are human. But now, instead of dwelling on them and labeling them as bad, I reflect on them and move on.

Technology is amazing, and it’s here to stay. Embrace it. To be able to video chat, share my story, and connect with people who ten years ago I would have never met is mind boggling to me.

Life is not a competition. What I have going on isn’t any worse, or better (see #9), than what you have going on. It is my burden to bear. You’ll drive yourself mad comparing your circumstances to someone else’s. You’ll also go mad trying to save the world of its problems. Take care of yourself and lead by example.

Meditation is an inquiry into your thoughts. I used to think it was about sitting with your legs crossed, counting breaths, and trying NOT to think. Maybe this works for some, but it’s torture for me. Writing, reading, and sharing has become my meditation. Maybe meditation is really about being in a state of ‘flow’….

Thank you for reading, sharing, and caring.

And as always Collect Moments, Not Thingz! — Brendon

#aplastic anemia #sick #learn #life #autoimmune disease #Collect moments

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karelounge · 4 years

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HOW IT ALL BEGAN

July 30th 2019- Hi y’all… My husband has had cancer since December of 2018… It has been a journey in the little time that has passed… He was in remission in April and it came back in May. They had him doing high dosage chemo, and just this week they checked how its doing, and the chemo is not working. We will see what the doctors have to say on Wednesday… On what they want to try next.Since the beginning I have been mourning my husband… since then, It’s been off and on. But it has always been a part of me to prepare for the worst… I would really hate to have to burry him in a few months.. I will really go into shock if it comes to that. He was raised very different than me. My parents were more old school, very involved and a bit over protective, while his parents let him do whatever whenever. I have really tried to get him to adapt a healthier lifestyle… But after trying so hard I have grown to just accept that it’s out of my control. I need to be well mentally and physically to be able to take care of him. I wished my friends would check on me… Instead of how everyone at work just asks how he’s doing… I have been doing fairly well these past couple of days… But it’s definitely been difficult to get where i am today. I am trying to stay strong and self reliant. I wish I wasnt human and didn’t feel the need for wanting someone to check on me or be the shoulder i desperately need. I cannot rely on my husband for this… He is going through too much for me to burden him with my emotions. I want him to focus on the fight… I could keep going forever about this… Thanks for reading.

August 5th 2019-

After seeing the Oncologist Wednedsay July 31st, the fight keeps on. We got a new treatment plan that involves chemo pills, IV chemo, and IV chemo injections into the spine. Unfortunately, my husband does experience discomfort from the LPs (lumbar puncture), which will definitely will be a change for him to go through this treatment.

I have high hopes for MD Anderson doing what they said they’ll do and take good care of my husband. Unfortunately, we do live in the United States, and all these hospitals just care to make profit and the insurance companies try to get away with as much as they can. We have been fortunate that the insurance has covered a lot of the cost, and we do have a mountain of medical bills. The struggle and the fight continues.

This has definitely caused my mental health to be a roller-coaster ride and it has thrown my self care off the rails. I am trying to be there as much as possible, as my health is also important to me. I’m hoping that things will improve with my husband’s side effects once treatment is started.

” We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.”

Monday 8/5/19 – This weekend was really tough. When people that say enjoy the days that our loved one with cancer isn’t experiencing the cancer symptoms… Well I finally get it, because the chemo on the first diagnosis was working well and he was his normal self throughout it. While the time that the doctors decided to not do the chemo he was currently on because it wasn’t working, all his cancer symptoms came in… the nausea, the fatigue, plus depression and a roller coaster of emotions, sure makes things fuuuunnn (sarcasm). I got him as much of God’s plant as I could get him. It has been the one thing that makes his face to look as not sad or as nauseous. I am certain things will get better, but having to come to work while my hubby is going to start a new chemo that he is frightened about is definitely a challenge to stay composed at work. I really need to speak to someone that can help me lean on them through these tough times.. I do not want to burden my husband with my problems. Please keep us in your prayers and send us love and good vibes. Funds are tight, so please donate at our gofundme https://www.gofundme.com/f/AAlfaro

Much Love, xoxo Karry

August 12th 2019

Weekends are the beginning of a new week for me. The weekends mean so much to me because I am able to spend two full days with the man I have loved for close to 10 years, he is my everything, and he is the love of my life.

Watching him struggle with hospital procedures, body pains, constant fatigue, and now with his sleeping schedule all out of wack, is definitely hurting me more and more each week. I do not know what the future holds, ever since we got the news of the cancer coming back in May 2019. It was devastating. Then after doing 3 rounds of high dosage chemo, and finding out that the chemo was not working. We both broke, and I seem to continue to keep breaking down emotionally.

Anyone would feel crushed and devastated after so many bad news. These news brought the thought of death back in my mind. When my husband was first diagnosed, I had constant panic attacks, and couldn’t stop myself from crying. I am proud of myself for resorting to getting professional help with a therapist and seeing my general doctor about the body pains that the stress and anxiety are doing to me. I have been taking medication for anxiety and depression daily, and a sedative for whenever I get panic attacks.

Now that we are in the path of treatment once more, I am uncertain as to where I fit into this relationship. I have definitely been there for everything my husband has needed, I try to help him stay relaxed and give him advise. But is that all my life will be from now on? Taking care of my husband? I try to take care of myself, but that has gotten far off the rails. I don’t know what to do or where to start. I am a lazy social butterfly. I am definitely chatty, but lack confidence in myself. I get social anxiety when going to new places. I want to continue living my life, but what about my husband? I do not know how to deal or cope with this. Until next time.

xoxo Karry

August 20th 2019

First Cancer diagnosis was on Dec. 12, 2018 (250 days ago from today). Second Diagnosis was on May 31, 2019 (80 days ago).

It seems like it was yesterday that my husband was in ICU, that he was in remission, that he was his happy self making useless jokes that only made him laugh. On July 31, 2019, we saw the doctor for the new treatment plan. My husband said something along the lines of.. If God decide’s its his time, he will be all around us, because we’re all made out of energy and energy is recycled in the universe… something like that. When I first heard him talk about death like it’s nothing, it broke me inside.. I’ve never thought of my life without him in it… but what if that does happen. This whole experience has been traumatizing. My jaw is always clenched, my teeth are constantly chattering, my hands shake, and I am emotionally numb. I hate to give into the thoughts of death, but they are normal. I have always tried to prepare for the worst case scenario in everything in my life, but nothing could of prepared me for this. My husband’s current diagnosis is Central Nervous System Lymphoma, the statistics that can be found on the internet in regards to this cancer are very grim. My cancer support group that has plenty of survivors, tell me to not think too much on those numbers, some were given a couple of months to live and they have lived years since then. I hope that God can bless my husband with plenty more birthdays, and in the case that my prayers don’t get answered he will always live in my heart, in the hearts and memories of all the lives he has touched.

These past few weeks the treatment has made him extremely weak. He has lost his balance after so many LPs (Lumbar Punctures), plus the medications that he is on make him extremely fatigued and this has caused his legs to get weaker where he cannot get up, sit up, or walk without assistance. I pray that he never falls. We are all here for him for anything that he might need, and we are extremely proud of his strength and motivation, even though there are those bad days where I have to kind of nudge him to take his medications. For pains, or headaches he keeps wanting to treat it with marijuana or caffeine instead of taking his medicines. On top of all this, his left eye is pretty much gone. He can no longer see through it, and last night he was telling me that his right eye was hurting.

Staying hopeful, but I am broken.

xoxo Karry

September 20th 2019

A lot happens in a day in the lives of my husband and myself. The final day of radiation is 9/11/19… his niece’s, Haqua’s birthday.

A quick recap of the second diagnosis… Diagnosed on 5/31/19 with CNS lymphoma. First treatment was liquid high dosage chemo, and it was not working. 7/31/19, Second treatment was chemo pills with LPs and some liquid chemo. I believe on 8/26/19 he was admitted to start radiation.

Since he was on the chemo pills he became disabled and could no longer see out of his left eye. Once his oncologist saw the cancer claim his eye and starting to take away his mobility, he wanted to start on radiation right away. He was admitted for about 5 days to start his daily radiation treatment. After he was discharged, the doctor assigned physical therapy for my husband twice a week or so… In just a week of the radiation and physical therapy he has completely turned around. It’s still a struggle to bend down for him, but other than that he is able to see a little bit through the bad eye, can walk faster than before, get dressed, and shower without assistance. MD Anderson has made a miracle with my husband’s case. The radiation has completely turned things around. He will get a 2-3 week break before redoing the scans and imaging. I am sure that after the doctors get the imaging they will reevaluate and see what steps we will take on.

Keep us in your prayers. xoxo, Karry

October 8th 2019

Starting Oct. 15 the husband is going to go back to the hospital to do imaging and test to see how the cancer situation is.

In that time, I have noticed that we keep ending each month in the negative (financial wise). I am trying all kinds of things to have as side hustles to maintain us afloat, but it doesn’t seem to be in the cards yet. I am definitely falling into some dark time, but what can I do? This shit is out of my control, but I can always do my best with what I got.

In a more personal note, my relationship with my husband has not been well for a couple of years now. We do enjoy each other’s company, but that is it. I have voiced to him my concerns and what my needs were in the relationship over the years, he would agree and change for a brief amount of time and then return to being content. I let this continue for weeks, months, and years. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, but we were no longer on the same page. Love, passion, and chemistry all abandoned our home. Like any other human being, I thought it was all my fault because I am the only person I can control. The summer of 2018 I started working out, eating healthier, and trying to grow and become a better person for us. I took on a second job and side hustles so that we can have more disposable income for us to enjoy life. When his health started to decline that fall/winter it was a very difficult and traumatizing time for us both. Seeing him multiple times at the brink of death from then to now has made me mourn my husband one too many times. I have done everything in my power to take care of him and make him happy, as I would expect him to do for me if I was in his shoes. But after years of constant disappointments, constant emotional and physical drain, of trying to rebuild this relationship on my own; I have thrown in the towel. He is and always will be in my heart. He is and always will be my best friend. He is and always will be my family.

People will judge me, but they haven’t walked a mile in my shoes. People will call me selfish, but they haven’t experienced what I have been through. If I don’t take care of myself, who will? It’s okay to do nothing. It’s okay to speak up. It’s okay to let go. I have been hiding this for too long. I have been pretending to be okay for too long… After I finished my therapy with AbleTo, I have been on a path of living my truth. The people that know me very well know that they can tell my mood or feeling just by looking at my face. Life is too short to live a lie, to live unhappy, to not be heard. I will continue to live my truth, I am proud of my battle scars and my self; nothing and no one will change that.

xoxo Karry

#persuit #of #hapinnes #broken #hurt #mental #health #help #life #cancer #lymphoma #caregiver #girl #problems #damaged #heart #love #relationship

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pete-and-pete · 6 years

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Fred Hopkins (Frederick): 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

Fred Hopkins, the Vietnam veteran husband of a well-known family and divorce lawyer in South Carolina, was identified as the man accused of shooting seven law enforcement officers in Florence, South Carolina, killing one of them.

Seven law enforcement officers were shot and one – Officer Terrence Carraway – has died after authorities say Hopkins opened fire on them near Florence, South Carolina on October 3, 2018. At about 6 p.m. that evening, the Florence County Emergency Management department said the suspect was in custody.

Fred Hopkins, who is also known as Frederick Hopkins, is 74-years-old. He is in the hospital because he fell at the scene. He is the husband of Cheryl Turner Hopkins. You can read about the life of Officer Terrence Carraway here. He was a former football coach and family man who worked in law enforcement for three decades.

A source close to investigation tells me the suspect in the shooting of 7 officers in Florence yesterday is Fred Hopkins. I’m told Hopkins remains in the hospital. Deputies say he fell yesterday at the scene. No word on his condition.

— Tonya Brown (@TonyaWPDE) October 4, 2018

Here’s what you need to know:

1. Fred Hopkins Was a Vietnam Vet Who Claimed He Suffered From Agent Orange

Fred Hopkins

In rambling posts on Facebook, Fred Hopkins indicated that he was a Vietnam veteran who was a cancer survivor, an ailment he attributed to Agent Orange exposure. A 2000 court document in an old child support case indicated that he was wounded in Vietnam. “Father was injured in the Vietnam war; his sole source of income is his disability check of $1127.00 per month,” the documents say, referring to Fred Hopkins.

In one post on Facebook, he wrote, “Today was a fantastic day! I went to the Dorn VA Hospital in Columbia, SC, and spoke with my oncologist, who gave me some very good news. My recent P.E.T. scan from the Charleston VA Hospital shows that I have no evidence of an active case of ‘b-cell lymphoma.’ Once I complete my schedule of chemo sessions, they will let me rest for several months and monitor my case with simple scans. That means — no radiation treatments in the near future. I am in remission!!! My family couldn’t be happier. Looks like I will be around for a few more years. I just might make it to my birthday in two days! The sun was shining and the powers above looked upon me with kindness.”

He wrote that he had “many things to be thankful for and life is one of those miracles. Now I can concentrate on my nine little pups and give them hope. Have a great day, one and all. Today I tried to remember those who passed on 9/11 and all those friends of mine from EMHS who crossed over much too early! Be patient, we will all be together in the far future. I miss you all very much and especially those who died 6 May 1970 on the slopes of FSB Henderson, RVN. Time magazine in the May 1970 issue it was the bloodiest firebase attack in the Army’s history. I lost more than 50 of the best brothers I ever knew my short life. They deserved better.”

He wrote about Agent Orange exposure: “Had the biggest ‘gut check’ of my life yesterday. I underwent 8.5 hours od chemo for ‘mantle cell lymphoma’ because I was exposed to heavy doses of ‘Agent Orange’ while performing combat duties with the 101st Airborne Division in Viet Nam in 1969-1970. I have been fighting this disease for five years on my own and the VA finally found out why I had pain and swollen nodules in my neck. Next chemo on June 12th. Feeling well so far, but was allergic to several meds they gave me. No pain, no gain! My eight kids are all in the house and one on the way — due about August 8th, plus or minus ten days. Updates to follow.”

2. Hopkins Was Married to Cheryl Turner Hopkins, a Prominent Attorney

Fred Hopkins

On Facebook, where he posted pictures of his family, his wife, rifles, and her Mother’s Day presents, Fred Hopkins wrote that he had studied Aerospace Engineering at Polytechnic Institute of New York University, went to Elmont Memorial Junior – Senior High School, lived in Florence, South Carolina, and was from Brooklyn, New York.

He was married to Cheryl Turner Hopkins, a well-known attorney in the Florence area. He recently posted a series of pictures of flowers and other gifts his wife received for Mother’s Day, writing, “These are pictures of my Bride’s (Cheryl Hopkins) many presents from Mother’s Day (13 May 2018) and posted on my timeline.”

On Facebook, he indicated that he had been married to Cheryl Hopkins for more than 30 years. “Today I spent several hours getting medicine for my wife of 30+ years,” he wrote in one Facebook post. “I am very proud of her and know how important good medicine is a getting it on time. I would be lost without her good cheer and great jokes and stories from the courthouse. I am about to go to dinner in Garden City, SC and hope to meet my fourth son, Jeremy, who is now attending Clemson. Since I received my doctorate from USC, he is bound and determined to tell me that Clemson (ranked #3 nationally) is the best. Well, whatever.”

3. Fred Hopkins Wrote About Rifles on Facebook

A photo on Fred Hopkins’ Facebook page.

Hopkins sometimes wrote about weaponry. “This is my rifle…….. this one is my gun. This one was built just for me and this one was for fun!” he wrote in one Facebook post.

“IT’S 12:20 HRS and the temp is over 100 deg F. Too hot for yard work. So I’ll quit for now and get ready for a long EKG because of the accident. Seth and I got our Fiat RR tire fixed and remounted in no time. We’re ahead of schedule and tonight we play Trivial Pursuit (Red Neck style) at Southern Hops in Florence. Our team has won the past three weeks, so we have quite a war chest established. Time to upgrade our meager meals into something more expensive. Feeling good. Peace to all.”

In another post, he wrote, “The day after my 70th birthday, I took my 12 year old son to my favorite rifle range in Lexington County SC for the monthly service rifle match. It showered all day and I fired my M-14 rifle by Federal Ordnance in 7.62mm NATO. The rifle is set up exactly like one I used in Viet Nam in 69-70. I scored 338-0X’s and had a blast! I have been shooting competitively since 1984 and lovin’ it. I just love the smell of gunpowder in the mornin’s. The guys at the range sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me — gosh, it doesn’t get any better.”

4. Cheryl Hopkins Helped Fred Hopkins With a Previous Divorce

Fred Hopkins and his wife Cheryl Turner Hopkins.

A Supreme Court decision from 2000 indicated that Fred Hopkins was married before to a woman named Carol Hopkins and that Cheryl Turner Hopkins, his second wife, helped him with the divorce.

“Mother and Father were married in 1967; they divorced in May 1983,” that court case said, referring to Fred and Carol Hopkins. “They had two children: Sean, born May 26, 1972, and Fred, born December 4, 1969. Father was ordered to pay child support of $350.00 per month. In November 1986, Father was found to be $18,693.00 in arrears in his child support, and an order garnishing $432.60 per month of his military disability payments was entered.”

The court case continued: “The younger son, Sean, went to live with Father for approximately 5 months, from late April, 1990, through September, 1990. In early May 1990, Father instituted the instant action seeking custody of Sean; a hearing was held on May 13, 1990, three days prior to Sean’s 18th birthday. Father sought termination of support for his older son Fred, claiming he was over age 18 and was not entitled to post-emancipation support; Father did, however, request Mother be required to pay post-emancipation support for Sean. The family court gave Father temporary custody of Sean but required Father to continue making his child support payments pending the final hearing.”

The documents indicate: “he was represented at trial by his current wife, attorney Cheryl Turner Hopkins.”

5. Authorities Said Gunfire Was Being Shot ‘All Over’

#officerdown Police Officer Terrence Carraway, Florence Police Department (South Carolina), EOW 10/3/2018 @scflorencecity Six other officers and deputies were wounded! #rememberthefallen https://t.co/PSXdA4K1ov pic.twitter.com/joxTuwW7lk

— ODMP.org (@ODMP) October 4, 2018

Authorities said gunfire was being shot “all over.” They said officers saw fellow officers down. The way the suspect was positioned, his view of fire was several hundred yards. “So he had an advantage. The officers couldn’t get to the ones who were down.”

Initial reports had said that five officers were shot. However, later reports said as many as seven officers (four City of Florence and three Florence County sheriff’s deputies), and a 20-year-old man, were shot.

NEW INFORMATION: Four City of Florence officers were shot, three deputies were shot, and a 20 year old male was shot

A City of Florence officer has died @WBTWNews13 pic.twitter.com/AUBZt5COB6

— Teresa Galasso WBTW (@TeresaOnTV) October 3, 2018

One officer, Carraway, died in the shooting. Two of the other officers’ conditions were described as “touch and go,” according to WPDE-TV. The officer who died is a City of Florence police officer. “Carolinas Hospital System in Florence is on a temporary lock down following the shooting,” WPDE-TV reported. The station added that, according to neighbors, the initial call was for shots fired inside a home.

“****Major Update**** The active shooting situation is over and the suspect is in custody. We are asking everyone to stay away from Vintage Place as there is still an active crime investigation in progress,” the Emergency Management office wrote on Facebook.

According to WMBF-TV, three Florence County sheriff’s deputies and two city of Florence police officers were shot. A female officer was among those shot. The motive and identity of the shooter were also not yet clear. You can watch live stream video from the scene here.

Three Florence County deputies and two city officers have been shot during an active shooter incident that is in progress in Florence County, according to sheriff’s deputy Chief Glenn Kirby. pic.twitter.com/lGxIHWblmI

— M. Jennings (@RealFriscoKid) October 3, 2018

Florence County Emergency Management confirmed the incident on Twitter, writing, “Due to a high priority call in Vintage Place off of Hoffmeyer Rd in FLORENCE. There is an active shooter incident in progress at this time. We are advising everyone to stay away from this area. We have FCSO along with City PD and other first responders handling this situation.” Photos and videos captured a massive law enforcement response to the scene.

BREAKING: Report: 5 law enforcement officers shot in Florence South Carolina, Police confirm "active shooter". pic.twitter.com/Zs6HJOfxll

— Keith Esparros (@kesparros) October 3, 2018

The message was stamped “high priority” on Twitter. Gov. Henry McMaster wrote on Twitter, “This is simply devastating news from Florence. The selfless acts of bravery from the men and women in law enforcement is real, just like the power of prayer is real.”

#BREAKING: Photos from the scene of the 'active shooter' in Florence, South Carolina where 5 law enforcement officers has been shot. (Photos: @TonyaWPDE) pic.twitter.com/o01IRs2ouP

— BreakingNNow (@BreakingNNow) October 3, 2018

The Florence County, South Carolina Sheriff’s Department is located in Effingham, South Carolina. Florence is a community located about 80 miles from Columbia, South Carolina. A local high school was put in lockdown as a precautionary measure.

Due to a high priority call in Vintage Place off of Hoffmeyer Rd in FLORENCE. There is an active shooter incident in progress at this time. We are advising everyone to stay away from this area. We have FCSO along with City PD and other first responders handling this situation. pic.twitter.com/qvpYJPIAZk

— FCEMD (@FlorenceCoEMD) October 3, 2018

Representative Terry Alexander, who represents parts of Florence, released the following statement to WPDE: “It’s just a very sad situation. We have got to do something about these guns. We should also remember to be calm and let the process take place. Let’s see what our magnificent law enforcement officers come up with to make sure that our people are safe, especially our children. I am in prayer for all six families who are hurting right now, including that of the shooter.”

This post will be updated as more information is learned about the incident and about the conditions of the law enforcement officers who were shot.

source https://heavy.com/news/2018/10/fred-hopkins-frederick-cheryl-florence/

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the-spoony-bard · 7 years

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A Matter of Leverage - 12

Fandom: Fire Emblem Awakening

Style: Leverage!AU; modern setting; adventure/drama

Word count: 3166 words

Read on Ao3

“I am really starting to think you are crazy, Bubbles,” Gaius accuses as soon as the hotel door is closed safely behind them.

“We had the money for Donnel and you just threw it away!” Nowi adds. “Money! Beautiful, green money!”

“T-this is b-bigger than just Donnel now,” Olivia says, coming to Robin’s defense.

Robin, for her part, ignores the chatter as she pours herself a drink. Olivia turns on her as she does so.

“Robin, please!”

“You’re right, Olivia.” Robin turns around slowly, carefully swishing the glass around and watching the clear golden brown waves. “This is bigger than just one client. Four hundred homes… this is a chance to give a voice to so many more victims.”

“It’s also a chance to get caught by the cops,” Lon’qu cuts in, eyes narrowed. “There’s too many ways this can go wrong with them involved.”

“But if played right, it can go even better.”

“What are you talking about?” Nowi laughs uncomfortably. “You’re always so weird and cryptic when you’re drunk. And you’re always drunk, so…”

“Nowi,” Olivia cringes.

“We’re going much bigger,” Robin presses on, ignoring the dig at her alcohol problem. “An even bigger scam. So Norris likes to invest in people’s misfortune? Let’s see how willing he’d be to invest… in death.”

Silence reigns in the hotel room as Robin stares pensively out the window. Nowi takes a deep breath.

“I’m sorry, you said invest in what?”

○

“You see, it’s very simple,” Robin spreads out her arms to her audience of two: Olivia and Norris, sitting together in the office at Roddick’s house. “You have your average run of the mill person. Hasn’t done anything too extraordinary. Except now, they figure out they have a fatal disease with only months to live, if that. What would you do in a situation like that?” Robin pushes her chair back and stands. “You want to live even more! Travel the world, spend more time with the kids, things like that. But see, most people have no savings left after preliminary treatments. So you’re let knowin’ that you’re gonna die, and on top of that, you’re broke.”

“Okay,” Norris says, hardly convinced, instead glancing down at his phone.

“Now here’s where it gets interesting.” Robin points at Norris, attracting his attention again. “Your big juicy insurance policy is just sitting there with nothing else to do. So what we do, our group—” she gestures to Olivia “—we buy their policy. They get a nice chunk of change now, and we can get our pay after they kick the bucket. It’s a win-win for everyone. They get to enjoy their last days, and we get a healthy profit from the exchange.”

“Lyn’s been in insurance for over ten years now,” Olivia explains. “She approached us with some… insider information.”

“You wanna know what I got?” Robin asks enthusiastically, clapping her hands together. “I’ve got databases full of sick people and some specialists with detailed reports that helped me compile a short list of people with fat policies and less than six months to live.” Robin leans forward conspiratorially, passing the list to Norris. “Do you have any idea what I’ve just handed you? This is a game changer, my friend. This, well… this will triple your money or more.”

“Lyn has a select number of investors already,” Olivia inserts smoothly. “With your contribution, we could buy even more policies.”

“Eh?” Robin grins expectantly.

Norris glances over the list before shaking his head, handing it back.

“No. It’s too risky. You can’t control when someone’s gonna croak.”

“Are you not listening?” Robin replies with a half laugh. “This list is our golden goose! I mean, just look at it.” Robin clears her throat before reading with gusto, “here we go. Lung cancer, middle aged man in Renais. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, twenty-something in Gallia. Do you see this Rolex? Yeah, this baby’s all thanks to some sucker’s melanoma.”

“Alright, alright!” Norris relents. “But I want independent confirmation myself with a doctor of my own choosing.”

“Hey, fair enough,” Robin grins. “But…” she pauses as she picks the list back up, swinging it back and forth in the air. “We do have one condition. No one gets a look at this list without a little buy in first. Ten thousand up front.”

“Of course,” Norris snorts.

“Of course,” Robin replies as they shake hands. She hands him back the list. “Take your pick, my friend. Take a good, long look. Pick a patient, any patient…”

“Uh… okay,” Norris points to a name. “Sain Kent, inoperable brain tumor. He’s even nearby.”

“Well…” Robin smiles humorlessly. “Nice choice. I’ll set it up. You bring your doctor.”

“Alright,” Norris makes a note of it as the phone rings. “Oh, this is gonna be good,” he snickers at the caller ID. “Florina!”

Olivia hurries over as Norris answers, putting the call on speaker.

“You damn weasel!” Murray exclaims without preamble. “You had one job, man. All you had to do was write the check!”

“Oh, but I did. Just ask our friend Florina.”

“What? What’s she doing there?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, darling,” Olivia cuts in. “We just decided to… go in a different direction.”

“What—what did you say to her?” Murray shouts.

“Oh, I wouldn’t know. I just sit alone in my office all day counting numbers,” Norris returns in a mocking impression of his brother. He and Olivia share a laugh.

“Norris, you little asshole!” Murray thunders. “We’ll see how happy you are when dad hears about this!”

“Sorry—kssshh—you’re—kssh—breaking up!”

“Norris, you fu—”

Norris hangs up, then spins around in his chair to look at Olivia.

“Oops.”

“Now that is what I call control,” Olivia chuckles. She looks up and meets Robin’s eyes. “We’ll meet you later at the hospital, then.��

“Yeah. I’m looking forward to it.”

“I’m looking forward to a prosperous partnership,” Robin says, shaking Norris’s hand.

○

There’s something relaxing about driving with no destination in mind, even more so when Robin thinks about all of the griping she faces back at the hotel. Between Olivia’s attempts to talk about Robin’s reasons for drinking and the other three still hung up on the decision for Olivia to refuse the check, being alone on the road with vodka in a water bottle sounds like the better alternative. Robin pauses at the flashing red and blue lights in the mirror. Confused as she is, she pulls over, stashing the vodka safely away and shoving a couple mints into her mouth in an attempt to mask the smell. She rolls down the window.

“What seems to be the problem, offi—”

The man opens the back door and sits down behind Robin.

“Ah. Judging by the ill fitted suit…” Robin chuckles despite herself. “Now, what would the state police want with my business, Lieutenant…?” She pauses for the name.

“Deen. Racketeering and Corruption Task Force. What business do you have in Alabama?”

“Oh, you know, I just like the country side.”

“We know you came from a meeting with Norris Roddick. Now, what I want to know is why an ex-insurance agent is trying to make a deal with that family?”

“Racketeering? That’s what you’re trying to get them with? I realized that you couldn’t get them on the fraud, but… you must be pretty desperate.”

“We’re going to get the Roddicks.”

“Oh, of course.”

“Now, if you and your people still happen to be around when that happens, well… we’re not going to stop to sort all of that out.”

“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be talking to me right now if you had anything. You’re fishing.” Robin looks at him in the rearview the mirror. “I must have hit a nerve. Either way, two days. Two days, and the Roddicks will have made a mistake, and we will be gone and out of your way. Just keep your eyes and ears open, and they’ll be yours.”

“There’s no reason I should trust a drunk.”

“Your choice, Lieutenant.”

The lieutenant leaves without a backward glance. Robin watches the other cars go by for a while before she pulls back onto the road.

○

“How are we going to do this? It’s not like any of us have any brain tumors,” Gaius quips, rolling a lollipop from one side of his mouth to the other.

“Nowi, would you be able to edit the image on the computer?” Robin asks.

“I don’t think so,” Nowi replies from her seat on the bed of the medical scanner, legs swinging back and forth as they dangle over the ground. “Not easily, anyway. The images from the brain scan go directly from here to the computer, and trying to make any adjustments between the two could get messy. I don’t do messy!”

“Sure…” Robin trails off, recalling all of the times Nowi’s visited her apartment.

“Not in my work anyway!” Nowi adds with a pout.

“So our only option is to scan a brain with some sort of artificial tumor that we plant in there directly.”

“Yeah… no,” Gaius cuts in. “I am not risking permanent brain damage for you, Bubbles.”

“We’re obviously not going to put anything in your brain. We’ll need another one…”

“Creepy~” Nowi sings.

“Even if we get another brain, how will we scan it if Gaius is in this one?” Lon’qu says from his spot near the door.

“The computer from this bay doesn’t need to be attached to this scanner,” Nowi grins.

“There’s another bay next to this one,” Robin says thoughtfully. “Nowi, if you could cross the wires and send the scans from the other scanner to this computer, we can get through this without having to kill Gaius.”

“Why do you always talk like you have plans where I die?”

“Don’t ask question you don’t want the answers to.” Robin favors Gaius with a sly grin.

“Creepy~” Nowi sings again.

“Well,” Robin takes a deep breath, clapping her hands together. “We need to secure both rooms and a brain for tomorrow morning. Let’s get on it.”

○

“There you are!” Nowi calls, jogging forward to Lon’qu pushing a table with a sheet covering what can only be a body.

Olivia jumps in surprise as they burst through the door together. Her eyes zero in with horror at the motionless lump underneath the sheet.

“Do—do I w-want to ask wh-where you…?”

“No,” Lon’qu answers.

“Olivia,” Robin says from the earpiece. “Norris should be here soon. Could you join me in the waiting room?”

“S-s-sure!” Olivia scrambles out, giving the body a wide birth.

Lon’qu pushes the table next to the bed then slides the body over. He flinches as he notices how close Nowi hovers behind him, though she seems not to notice.

“So what do we have?” she pulls back the sheet and immediately jumps back, throwing her arms in front of her face. “Oh gods! Gods, so icky!”

“What were you expecting?” Lon’qu asks dryly. “This is even a clean corpse.”

“It smells!” Nowi protests, two fingers pinching her nose closed to accentuate her point.

“Just do it,” Lon’qu sighs, grabbing the injection from the nearby table and holding it out.

“No!” Nowi cries, recoiling as if struck. “You’ve killed people before! You do it!”

“I’ve never killed people by sticking giant needles into their cranial cavities,” Lon’qu says, an edge of discomfort in his voice.

“Excuses, excuses!” Nowi says shrilly, attempting to push away the needle that Lon’qu still holds out to her.

“One of you is going to do it or I’m coming up there,” Robin threatens in a voice so stern and threatening that only a mother can really manage it.

With a shudder, Lon’qu jams the needle in. Nowi spins around, making gagging noises.

“Worst job ever! Worst job ever!” she cries, not even looking at the garbage bag that she holds out for Lon’qu to deposit the evidence into.

“Hey, guys!” Gaius opens the door and pokes his head in. “Which hospital gown should I wear? Dead inside off green, or borrowed time rose gold?”

“Pink! Pink!” Nowi replies.

“Really? I thought the green brings out my eyes better.”

“Just pick a dress and put it on,” Lon’qu deadpans, brushing past him into the hallway.

“Norris is here,” Robin reports. “Get in position.” She steps forward with Olivia, shaking hands with both Norris and the doctor he’s brought with him. “A pleasure,” she smiles once introductions have been made. “Shall we?”

A few minutes later they stand in front of the glass window as Gaius is shown in by a rather disgruntled looking nurse Lon’qu. He looks blankly ahead as he is directed to the bed.

“That’s Sain Kent?” Norris peers inside as his doctor preps the computer to receive the scans.

“Yes,” Robin replies. “Poor guy.”

They watch in silence as Gaius is laid down on the bed, then slid inside.

“I’ve got our other brain scanning in here,” Nowi reports from the room next door. “And we’re sending you our other brain… now!”

“Well… what do you think, doctor?” Robin asks the balding man Norris brought with him.

“Oh, he’s terminal alright,” he replies, leaning forward to better view the screen. “It’s almost too large to believe… he has weeks left; a month at best.”

“There you have it,” Robin says to Norris after the doctor had been thanked and sent on his way. Norris smiles, half chuckling as he stands in a quiet hallway facing Robin and Olivia.

“I had my doubts, but yeah,” Norris concedes. “So, what’s my cut?”

“Your cut? Oh,” Robin laughs. “That’s it?”

“Yeah, I put my money in, now I want my cut.”

“Fine, fine,” Robin holds her hands up in surrender before pulling out her checkbook. “Gone scared on us. Can’t say I’m surprised; you don’t look like the sort willing to take a risk. Let’s see, first stage investor?” Robin pauses to give Norris an appraising look. “One hundred grand?”

“What is wrong with you?!” Gaius howls from over the coms. Robin doesn’t even flinch.

“This just might work out after all,” Norris whistles, looking up only just in time for Olivia to recover from her grimace.

“Yes,” Olivia chuckles woodenly. “With this money you could even start your own company and leave your father entirely.”

“Yeah,” Norris says, perking up. “Yeah, it would be easy. I just need to move some accounts around and—”

“What?” Robin cuts in, flinching away. “Moving some—moving accounts? What sort of… who do you think we are? We don’t operate this way!” She whirls on Olivia as she throws her hands up in the air. “What is this nonsense? Who did you bring me to?”

“You don’t understand, I just—”

“No, you don’t understand,” Robin interrupts Norris, turning away to storm down the hallway. “I can’t help you, sir. You just don’t get it. It’s fine. Keep the money. We don’t need you.”

“What is she…?” Norris looks helplessly to Olivia.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, I’ll talk to her,” Olivia says hurriedly before rushing after Robin.

“I want serious investors, Florina!”

“Lyn, a word?” Olivia chases Robin around the corner into one of the dark hospital rooms.

Robin is met with three intense glares as soon as the door is closed securely behind them.

“I know,” she says evenly, not intimidated in the least. “Save it until we’re back to the hotel.”

She receives nothing but more stony glares as she leads her team back to the van.

○

Nowi immediately races to her laptop as soon as she steps foot inside the hotel room.

“I’ll have the payment canceled in a jiffy!” she announces with forced cheerfulness amidst the general animosity directed towards Robin.

Robin, for her part, remains unfazed, already reaching for a bottle and glass.

“Just let it go,” she remarks, settling down in a chair as Gaius stalks over to her, brows angled downward over his narrowed eyes.

“Let me just get this straight so you get how stupid you are, Bubbles. We had half a million dollars, and you tossed that away. That’s enough on its own. Now you’re offering up a hundred grand of our money. Our money.”

“Please, you know how this works. It’s just a stall.”

“You use a stall when you have someone on the hook.”

“Guys, please. I know what I’m doing. You’ve got to trust me. You’ve trusted me before.”

“Not when you’re drunk like this,” Lon’qu cuts in.

Robin pauses for a long moment, matching Lon’qu’s look with one of her own. She sighs when he shows no signs of backing down.

“Please,” she scoffs, aiming to play it off when no other argument can be found.

“Robin…” Olivia starts uncertainly.

“Listen,” Gaius cuts in, pacing back over. “You’re welcome to drink yourself into a stupor for all I care, but I’m not going down with you.”

“Pfft,” Robin tips her glass back with a snort. “I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re all exactly the same as you were before. Always caring about nothing but yourselves.”

“I need to speak to Robin alone!” Olivia blurts out suddenly, standing between Robin and the others.

“Good luck with that, Twinkletoes,” Gaius mutters, shoving a chair aside roughly on his way out. Lon’qu and Nowi follow him in similar humors.

Olivia moves only once they are alone, turning around to face Robin in silence. Robin rolls her eyes, swirling her glass around moodily.

“You’d better not give me some kind of ‘but we’re all family’ speech.”

“No speeches,” Olivia shakes her head, looking down pensively for a long moment before raising her gaze to look at Robin’s eyes. “Just… a question: is this helping you?”

Robin silently watches her bourbon swish around in her glass.

“I-if you help Donny and his mother to keep their home and stay together, will you find some peace?”

“Olivia, you know me,” Robin says, though she finds herself unable to meet Olivia’s eyes. “You know I can do this.”

“I knew you two years ago, Robin.”

“I’m still the same person.”

“N-no. No, you’re not.”

Robin pauses, at last tearing her eyes away from her glass to look at Olivia. The usual pity is gone from her eyes, replaced by a grim sort of acceptance. Robin lets out a sigh, feeling those two years all too well as their weight settles down in her bones.

“No, I’m not.”

They lapse into silence, neither one wanting to broach all of the unspoken thoughts and questions hanging between them. It’s Olivia who breaks the spell, averting her eyes as her cheeks flush pink.

“…Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Robin says, though she feels far from it.

“I-I’ll… let you sleep.”

Olivia slips out of the room as silent as a ghost. Robin watches her glass of bourbon again for a few moments before setting it down on the counter. Slipping off her shoes, she shuffles over to the bed and falls face first into the pillow.

#fire emblem awakening #fea #fanfiction #fire emblem fanfiction #fea fanfiction #A Matter of Leverage #adventure

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