First Post

So I am starting a blog for some selfish reasons, but if there is ever a time I am allowed to be selfish, I am thinking that this is the right time. Selfish reason number one: I get to give updates to all my friends and families on the state of my health and the news with the baby without making individual phone calls or emails. Saves me a lot of time. Blogging is a timesaver! Secondly, I have found while writing the few emails I have sent to friends and family that typing out my experience is really cathartic. Sometimes rereading what I am going through turns the experience in to a 'story' and in a way it becomes a story about someone else that I can separate from and then I get a break from the emotion I am holding inside and I sometimes see the humor when before it wasn't there. And finally, I'll have a cyber record of all that I have gone through so I can look back and say, I did that. I fought cancer and had chemo and lost my hair and had a baby and a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery all while on maternity leave.

But that's all I have to say tonight because my husband Greg gave me an Atavan (sp?) to help me sleep and it's starting to kick in. Sleep has been elusive the last week. And the latest enemy to a good night sleep is my hair pain. Actually scalp pain. It's the follicles swelling up in reaction to the chemo as the cells on my scalp are dying. It feels like there are little hot bugs crawling under my head and it's the worst at night. I turned in to a little bit of a freak in front of my poor friend Sharen who bough over yummy persian rice, chicken, yogurt and cucumber tomato salad and best of all, her adorable son Spencer to cheer me up. I just couldn't stop pulling my hair out. Morbid fascination. Then I went in to the shower and had more of a psycho moment, but this time in the shower, and started to pull even more out. I couldn't stop. Good news is that my head feels a lot better and lighter. Bad news is I look like I am malnourished and a bit skanky for lack of a better word. I think it's the head buzz for me soon. I just so wanted to hold out so that the first few pictures of my baby and me, we weren't both bald. It's funny how vanity can just get in the way of the bigger picture which is that all that should matter is I get a healthy baby girl in a few days and this whole bald issue will dissolve in the background in comparison to how excited I am going to feel when I first hold her little body next to mine.

Photo above, which I wanted to show below was taken by my friend Dennis Sanner and made even more possible by his girlfriend/partner/mother of his baby Mollee. It was taken the night before my first chemo treatment and I thought pretty photos of my pregnant were going to be a waste of time since I felt freaked out and didn't get the purpose at all. But I am very grateful they urged me to do this because what I like best about these photos is that I look calm and that the only thing I am thinking about is this baby and getting her our safely and taking care of her which is all I really do want to think about.