50 Tries

A Tremendous Loss

Kiersten passed away early in the morning on February 2nd, 2008.  Any of you who have spent time with her through this blog know that she was a devoted mother to Kylie, a loving wife to me and funny and insightful as could be.

I realized today that the news of her death had probably found its way onto the internet and I see that has happened on a few other blogs and within Sybermoms (you guys are the best.  So sweet to her and so many prayers and thoughts for me and my dd).

The comments and contact from her regular readers were a comfort to her in these last few months.  I can't thank you all enough. 

Kiersten's battle with cancer was brutal and brave.  She was always most concerned with those she would leave behind and she was heroic in her efforts to smooth the path she knew we would walk without her.

For those of you who would like to do something (and I saw the Sybermoms groundswell for some walk team to be dedicated to her.  She'd like that.), there are two charities that I have suggested to friends.  One is the Young Survival Coalition and the other is Sanctuary for Families.

There is so much more to be said about her and about the hole she leaves in the lives of those she touched.  Still, this is her blog so I'm keeping this short.  I wrote a eulogy for her funeral and I will post it as a comment rather than add more of my own words here.

Adam

Not Dead Yet

Forgive me if I have posted the likes of this in the past.

I spent two out of the last four weeks in two different hospitals. I'll try to post more about the reasons later, but for now, suffice it to say that we're hainging in there, and will proceed with our annual Christmas/Chanakah party as planned, consisting of Chinese food, stockings, and hopefully also Egg Nog and various pies.

The beauty of Christmakah--what makes it superior to Christmas, and Chanukah, and even Festivus with its alumuninum pole and feats of strength, and really all other holidays is that it goes on, regardless of ice storms and myriad, seemingly endless hospital stays. There may be less pie, but there will always be Chinese food and, if I know my husband, Nog.

Just wanted to let everybody know.

That Cute Little Cheetah Girl Got Robbed, I'm Telling You

Adam and I just finished watching 2.5 hours of "Dancing with the Stars" in an hour flat, thanks to TiVo. Civilization may well lead to the extinction of all mankind, but don't tell me it hasn't produced some miracles along the way.

Endless drama with my foot, but nothing worth going into detail.

I Would Change Them If I Could, Okay?

I've been wearing the same underwear for three days, but at least my hair looks good. Not that it's clean.

Why this phantasmagoria of poor hygiene? I'm back in the hospital, of course! My foot went septic again one week ago, which necessitated surgical cleaning (twice, under general anesthesia). We've been kicking it hospital-style ever since.

It hasn't been so bad; friends have stopped by, and Adam has been here all week. What with all the frustration, nausea, and discomfort, it's sort of like the crappiest vacation you've  ever taken. Hopefully, we're going home tomorrow. At rush hour, but we'll take what we can get.

Where Have You Gone, Six Million Dollar Woman?

Jaime Sommers was my hero.

"The Bionic Woman" was the first primetime television show I was allowed to stay up to watch. I thought  Lindsay Wagner was not only the most beautiful but also the best woman in the world. I didn't question that she could hear through walls, but only after she first swept her hair away from her ear. I mean, I had the action figure.

Now NBC has turned it into crap.

Not to get all Angel-is-a-centerfold, but I could only watch 20 minutes of the new show before I had to leave the room. My Jaime Sommers was an independent, professional, adult woman who not only didn't need a man, she actually rejected the hunky Steve Austin (because the amnesia that resulted from her tragic hang-gliding accident (which necessitated her bionic restructuring) left her with only tantalizing glimpses of their former romance). You wanted them to be together (and I believe that in later made-for-TV movies they ended up that way, complete with a bionic dog), but Jaime didn't need them to be. In fact, former astronaut/secret agent/original $6 million-personage Steve Austin was the one doing all the pining.

This Jaime Sommers is a bartender with bee-stung Angelina Jolie lips and an apparent inability to understand how to use birth control. The first words we hear her say to a man are to ask him what he sees in her. Also, there's another rogue bionic woman out killing people; her big tagline is "Tell me you love me."

That was as much as I could stand, but from what Adam said, it didn't get better.

Lindsay Wagner and Lynda Carter had a formative, positive impact on my life, and fine, one of them fought against evil in a bustier. Dana Scully and Buffy Summers gave me hope. But who will be Kylie's role models now? One of the Cheetah Girls and a Bratz doll? Give me cheesy slo-mo and those wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh noises anyday.

Yeah, What She Said

Catherine Price's recent Broadsheet column for Salon discusses how she generally finds the New Yorker's Shouts & Murmurs column unfunny, and references a post from a blog called The World's Fair discussing the statistical breakdown of female to male writers for the column. Christine Cupaiuolo, of the blog Women's Voices for Change, gives a nice summary of it (and is kind enough to reference this site).

The chemo seems to be working, but it's getting to me. I'm exhausted, and my hair is falling out, though I'll supposedly get to keep most of it. I want to hold on to the summer, turn it back into what I thought it was going to be.

In Memoriam

My friend Nina's mother died yesterday, from ovarian cancer. I just saw the message.

Nina and her husband had their first child a few weeks ago.

It's funny how you can care about someone you don't really know. I never really met Nina's mother; we certainly never had so much as lunch together. But I think I was probably introduced to her at our college graduation, and I remember, once, glancing through the window of a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, and seeing her and Nina having lunch, and how intimate they looked. She got sick right around the same time I did, and I would ask after her, and she would ask after me.

I just made a donation in her name at the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation, realizing, while I was in the process, that I didn't even know her first name. So I made it out to "Mrs. Abraham," and I hope that somewhere, she finds that funny.

Not to Worry

Just taking a little time off. In September I'll be having lots and lots of unpleasant scans and invasive, painful procedures, so I'm sure I'll have plenty to complain about then. Right now it's just my ridiculous spray-on tan, which looks as though I lay out in the sun after leaving odd stencils all over my legs.

It's Even Larger Now

I'm slowly doing better. I can breathe without oxygen, and climb a flight of stairs without gasping for air. My voice sounds normal.  I'm still gaining weight, and am now either a size 0 or 2, not a 0 petite--being a size less than zero always made me feel uncomfortably like a character in a Brett Easton Ellis novel.

The wound on my foot is still in the process of closing, 14 months after the botched surgery: the wound is about two inches long and is closing at a rate of about a millimeter every two weeks.  The doctors had originally thought I would lose about a third of my foot, so I'll take what I can get. (Note to Dr. Karwowski: not only did I not lose "a chunk" of my little toe, the nail is even growing back!)

We even went on vacation last week. It was a little too cold to read Harry Potter on the beach, the way I'd planned, so I spent a lot of time just watching Kylie building sand castles and jumping in the waves. It doesn't get much better than that, bad foot and oxygen machine or not.

Of course, I could have done without her asking whether we could go to the pool instead of the beach 87 times every day (before breakfast), but you can't have everything.

My Ass Is Back

...and I don't mean in a "I'm back on the scene" kind of way; I mean that at least some of the fat has returned to my ass. I've gained about 19 pounds since I got back from the hospital three weeks ago. I'm obsessessed with eating now and try to have bacon every day. Once I get started on a meal, I can't stop and I think it's actually interfering with my breathing, but it's certainly better than slowly wasting away.

For a while, my body wasn't sure what to do with the fat: my arms and legs were still gaunt, but I had a Homer Simpson-style spare tire around my waist.

So I currently spend my time eating, coughing, and spitting up phleghm. I couldn't cough for about six months, but now sit around making horrible wrenching or little-old-man gargling kind of noises, and then spit a seemingly endless amount of tacky, foamy white phleghm into paper cups--when the phleghm isn't a  rather solid, glob-like yellow mass. That's the really desirable phleghm.

I still get very short of breath for what seems like no reason, and sleep with oxygen prongs in my nose, but my last x-ray showed that I've gotten the top third of my left lung back. So there's progress.