2012: Worst. Year. Ever.

Today is a lovely, snowy day. Soft flakes are falling and blanketing everything in white. Nice try 2012, but giving me snow for what might be the last time in my life just can’t make up for the rest of the year, so 2012…

 

 

 

 

 

**CAUTION: CONTAINS LANGUAGE**

 

 

 

It can’t make up for months of gemzar/carboplatin treatments that repeatedly destroyed my platelet levels. It worked great at first, but then my platelets and hemoglobin began to plummet and I swelled up with 15 lbs of fluid, sending me to the hospital with mega-doses of Lasix and blood and hemoglobin transfusions. Every three weeks it was the same: one infusion, the next week my platelets have dropped to the point that I need a blood infusion, and the next week no treatment. My oncologist did this over and over again. When I told her I wasn’t comfortable pulling from the blood supply for something being done intentionally when there were people who really needed the blood for emergencies, she just started letting me get down to a platelet count of 13 (I needed a minimum of 100 to get treatment) and waiting until it went back up to about 70 for another infusion.

I finally gave up on her and went to St. Louis to a different oncologist, he took me off the chemo until I had a PET in November.* A week before my scan, I had a grand-mal seizure and they found 17 mets in my brain. Seventeen. How did I go through all these treatments and scans without anyone looking at my brain? I was put into full brain radiation treatment without even realizing what was happening. Everything I looked at on line to try to learn something told me I was going to die in 2-8 months.

In fact, everything has been tinged with death. My sister came from Los Angeles for the holiday and it was lovely. It snowed, we ate yummy things, spent time together and exchanges wonderful gifts. But the feeling was that it was for the last time hung over everything. Last winter, last holiday, last new year. My beautiful husband left alone.

So 2012, I am not sorry to see the back of you. The world wasn’t destroyed this year, but my future feels like it pretty much was.

Welcome 2013. Right now you are nothing but possibilities, and I could use some of those right now.

* Ironically, the PET scan results were great. The two tiny lesions I had left when I stopped chemo were still there, with only minuscule changes.

About these ads