Grateful.

I've been thinking that there are lots of things worse than being in my situation. I've known four people in the last few years who have been diagnosed with ALS, for example. I saw a few kids at Mayo who looked like they'd already, at their young ages, been through a lot more of the scary poking and probing and testing than I have. And closer to home, an acquaintance of mine was recently assaulted and is so traumatized by this that she is having trouble functioning. Meanwhile, I'm adjusting to having a life-threatening illness that my doctors (at the Holy Grail of Medicine, which my insurance is covering) think they can probably cure.

So - yeah, even in the midst of this, and there have been truly agonizing and despairing moments (like the other day, when I had to have an ultrasound to find out if my liver had benign cysts or if the breast cancer had spread (it was cysts - but even so, just typing this sentence is making me anxious)), I am still pretty damn lucky. I just need to remember that.

Chemo should start this week. I am also grateful for how far anti-nausea medication has come in the last five years - I hear that patients tend to gain weight during chemo, which speaks to the success of this medication.