Year Number 4

Another year since that awful afternoon spent in the oncologist’s office. This year has proven to be the roughest yet, but here I am, on the other side of it.

In general, life stuff is pretty much the same. Josh and I are still both working at the same places and our jobs are going well. We moved at the beginning of the summer and we’re now living in a really nice rowhouse in the middle of Baltimore. We have so much more space in our new house and our commutes are much much shorter! I can make it to the lot I park in in 9 minutes on a good day (15-20 on the worst days) and Josh has been biking to the Aquarium.

All the critters are doing well. We adopted a new cat just last week and he’s pretty much the sweetest cat we’ve ever met. His name is Badger and he’s about 4. He, Charlotte & Chloe are still adjusting to each other, but they’re doing fine together. 

Here, have some cat pics before this blog post gets sad:

As for what made a rough year? 10 points to whoever guessed “my health”! When I left off last year, I was having issues with my migraines and my heart. I got a full work-up from cardiology and they found pretty much nothing wrong with my heart. Just some occasional tachycardia (increased heart rate) and dropped heart beats. They sent me back to my primary care doc who did some more bloodwork and found 2 things: 1. incredibly low vitamin D and 2. babesiosis. Babesi-what? Yeah! It’s a tick-borne illness similar to malaria that I probably picked up from a tick bite I got last summer. From a tick that hitched a ride home on Josh’s field clothes. Because yours truly is probably the only person in the world who can pick up a rare tick borne disease without hardly leaving the house *bows*. Anyway, we treated that with antibiotics and anti-malarial meds and got me on some vitamin D supplements and that mostly took care of that (my most recent bloodwork showed that my vit D is still low, but it is what it is).

The migraines have been a whole other disaster. I’ve trialed med after med over the past year and a half and we seem to have settled on a combo of 3 meds that mostly works, though the side effects of this combo kinda suck (mostly GI stuff). I have an appt in a few weeks with Hopkins’ Headache Clinic and we’ll see if there’s anything else they can do. I originally scheduled this appt in January and Oct 21 was the earliest they could fit me it. I’ve been working with a different neuro since January, so at this point, the Hopkins crew will be pretty much just a second opinion. It’ll be nice to have some additional input, though, since I’m at the point where my next step, should my current meds fail, is to try Botox injections. I got to have a sleep study as part of my neuro work-up and it’s been determined that I don’t have sleep apnea, I’m just a normal obnoxious snorer. And I kick my legs excessively at night. But Josh could have told you all that without having spent the contents of my FSA account by the end of April lol!

On top of all that, the grief and sense of loss about how my diagnosis has affected my life over the past 4 years really came to a head and resulted in some pretty ugly mental health stuff. Depression and anxiety are not new struggles for me, but this cycle seemed extra rough in terms of getting meds straightened out and finding a good therapist to start moving in a positive direction again. After 3 tries, I’ve finally found a therapist I really like and my meds seem to be balanced again, so that’s good (my migraine meds are all psychiatric meds as well, so messing with those messes up everything as well). I just never took the time to really process being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s at 26, losing a job I loved because of it and having to struggle to get back to where I was before this all happened (still not there...). The career hit. The financial hit. The health hit. I shouldn’t have let it go as long as I did, but I guess the important thing is that I’m dealing with it now. I know I get some readers here from cancer forums, people who might be early in their journey, and I’d encourage you to seek out support or therapy because having cancer, especially as a young person, is an incredibly huge deal. Trust me, riding the high of having beaten cancer and then simmering on the sadness for a few years is a bad route to take!!

(I almost completely forgot that I also had a crazy mystery GI something or other in the spring. It presented sorta like gallbladder issues, but testing showed my gallbladder to be in near perfect shape. I got to have an upper GI scope and the only answer we ever came up with was that it was maybe a combo of GERD and one of my migraine meds. But as a bonus, I now have pics of the inside of my stomach!)

So, what’s in store for year 5? I’m not really sure. I’m trying to get everything together to start seeing an oncologist at Hopkins. In doing so, I now have a copy of all my records from Dr. Sharma’s office. Reading through all 81 pages of records was...interesting. If I could turn back time, I would have fired him and switched oncologists early in my treatment. Even just getting a copy of the records was a major pain in the butt. You should all be pleased to know, however, that they did a karyotype on my bone marrow sample and I am, indeed, genetically female!!

Hopefully the headache clinic will have some suggestions or answers. I’d love to say this will be the year when we finally get all the financial and health stuff together enough to consider having kids, but I doubt that’ll happen for another couple years yet. And in the meantime, I’ll just keep taking life like I took treatment...one day at a time!