7/2/96
I was just trying to answer some email, but I had to stop, for that throw up feeling crept up on me. I am OK now. I threw up yesterday morning, which is normal for day #6 after chemo. On that day, my body just decides to purge any remaining iota of poison stuck to my insides. It always makes me feel better.

We are moving in two weeks, and I get chemo again right after that. At least I will have fresh walls to look at, and I will be very glad to leave this chemo-house behind. I love moving, for there is no better way to get a house really clean. It forces me to toss out the old, and organize the new. I can't wait until we are all moved in! Ah!

I see Dr. Cooney tomorrow for a blood test, and based on that he will advise me on how much Neupogen to take next week. Except for a week or so, I have been on Neupogen for months. It took a long time to learn how to give myself a painless stress-free shot. I now know that I must harpoon my stomach quickly, and then I can hardly feel it. I am so proud to have a new skill. One day, I just might be somewhere where someone needs a shot, and I can jump up and yell, "I will do it!"

I began my "Back to Fitness" program, but this time, I had to invent an even smaller way to start. I stretched a little, and later I did some isometrics. It is time that I incorporate some of my body building tricks into getting better. Somehow, I have to believe that building a little muscle sends a message to the body, telling it that muscle is a sign of a healthy body. Soon, the body starts acting healthy, and then the body becomes healthy! Nature is very smart, it wants to protect us!

7/6/96
I have kept my promise to myself to exercise, mostly stretching and keeping active. The active part entails packing boxes for our move and walking short distances. I already see a change in my muscles, they are reacting like they used to, before I got sick. My body is just going to have to get used to the idea that it is too busy getting healthy to be sick!

Yesterday, our gardener told me to "eat nature", for if I did, I would have "health and beauty forever!" He is right, for I have always believed that nature holds the key to almost everything. In fact, the last time I had chemo, the nurse needed to put my religion on my chart, and I told her that my religion was "Nature." She thought it was funny and wrote it down, but I really meant it. The nature thing also goes along with my eating beliefs, eating natural, as nature intended it. It is as close to magic as it gets!

I do not have chemo until August 30th, and in that time, I could almost become classified as normal. My doctor thinks there is nothing normal about me, but I shall shoot for it anyway. Actually, not being normal is kind of a compliment, and it allows me to ignore statistics. I was never great with numbers anyway, they make my head spin. You see, I have some sort of spatial dyslexia, where right is left and left is right, and numbers fly around when I try to add them in my head. I would make a terrible accountant, and that makes me happy!

I am going to have a good day today, I feel good and I have nothing pressing to do. Actually, I do have one thing I really want to do, and that is to fix a piece of art, a map to my brother's store for his web site. He has a nifty book store (now on-line) called World Wide Wessex, and my piece of art is a map to his store. I will do it in the next few days. If you have a chance, and you like books, please visit his store. It is not your average book store! You will see!

7/7/96
I feel great today! There is lingering chemo in my body, but I do not feel it. I did a tiny bit of artwork for my brothers' web site, and he has already received it via email. It was a smart idea to have taken a break from my computer these past few weeks, for now I have a fresh head to work with. I get overly entrenched in my work, and it is a big feat to make myself stop or slow down. I am now going to try to work very slowly, and remember to plan ahead exactly what I want to do. I like to create the initial ideas on paper with all kinds of colored pens and pencils, then I take my hard copy and put it on the computer. It is the most efficient way to do it, and the only way to keep track of it all and add to the paper trail. I have tons of ideas all mapped out that I wish I could do right now. It would make me really happy to see it done! In the meantime, I have a big idea brewing now that I need to map out tonight. I am really going to enjoy it! I must take it sl-o-w!

Today was hot, especially with a mask on my face in the grocery store. All around my nose and my mouth, I was sweating profusely. I could barely breathe while I waited in line, and Brittany was all over the place. It is the most suffocated that my mask has made me feel so far. Luckily, I feel strong and I have a lot of stamina today. It is amazing how much better a little activity has made me feel. I now believe that exercise is a necessary part of my getting better, instead of feeling like it is something that might make me sick. I need to be physically fit again, I think it will save my life!

I saw Dr. Cooney last Wednesday and all my counts were fine, but he still wants me to take Neupogen all this week. Sometimes, I get a lot of pain from Neupogen, like last week when my hands, wrists and elbows felt like I had terrible arthritis. It lasted 3 days, and nothing made it go away. I was relieved to find out that it was the Neupogen that caused it, and not actual arthritis. That would have been rude!

Time to get out the pens and pencils!

7/12/96
My only complaint today is that my left wrist has that arthritic feeling, but it will soon go away for I have taken my last shot of Neupogen for a while. Now my bone marrow is on its own to build WBCs, but I am not worried at all. By now, my WBC making capabilities have been well established, and all I have to do is visualize their existence. My brain has been well trained these past 6 months to help out my body!

My site, this site, is hopping today, and that makes me very happy. I have the urge to create something new for this site, and it will be good training for me to learn how to work s-l-o-w-ly! I am now at the stage where I have to think about how to live once I am in total remission and the treatments stop. I really believe that my type-A, frantic, hurry-hurry, rush-rush behavior contributed to my getting HD in the first place. I must make some slowing down type of changes in myself to prevent a reoccurrence, for I do not want to go through a bone marrow transplant. I know I would live through it, but I would rather not go through the ordeal. I have a friend, Joe, who I met through this site, who is on day +78 of his auto-BMT, so I know what a big deal it is. A BMT does everything to destroy the person, just short of death, then the person must almost start over like a baby. I hope that one day the medical profession discovers some new form of treatment for cancer, one that treats the patient like a human being!

I did some cycling yesterday, just 7 minutes, then I jumped on my rebounder for another 4 minutes, and I also stretched and did 3 push ups. I love my bike, it is a stationary recumbent lifecyle, and it works the entire body. I want to get back into really good shape, partly because I used to be such a stud and I miss it, but mostly because I think that my health depends on it. I ran into one of my fitness students from 12 years ago, and she was shocked to hear that I had any form of cancer. She looked at me with my mask on and said, "Geez, what happened to you?" I guess I was the last person that anyone thought would get cancer, but I did. I am not that person that people want to be like anymore, so I guess I will just have to shock everyone by returning to a similar healthy state.

Now it is time to stretch while I watch a movie. I kind of feel guilty, for I am able to have this long extended vacation, while all those healthy people are out there working long hours at jobs they may not even like. I better not brag!

7/14/96
The chemo level in my body is definitely diminishing, and now that I am no longer on Neupogen, I am just about without pain. Besides a little achiness in my feet, the only part of me that hurts is the good kind of pain that was caused by my mini-workouts. All in all, I am feeling pretty darn good!

Now, I wonder what it will be like to live once I have been officially declared in remission. I also think about how to get myself in remission, and that means that not even one Hodgkins cell can remain alive or capable of reproducing itself in any way. My dad had the idea that I come up with some sort of visualization that sends out a spy who looks for all those elusive unwanted cells, and then gets rid of them. These spies would then be in charge of detecting future bad cells, which would keep me from relapsing. I have been letting the idea simmer in my head, and this is what I have come up with. The bad cells must be easy to detect, so I see them as smelling awful, looking greenish and being malformed. I think I came up with the perfect spy, one I could live with for the rest of my life, her name is Tazzle and she is one of my Blortland characters. Tazzle is always fresh and clean, and she would instantly spot something with the stench of a cancer cell. She would be disgusted by it, and then she would fly over it on her Fax Pad and suck up the bad cells like a hovering vacuum. She would be very relieved and then she would take a deep breath. I will very s-l-o-w-l-y illustrate it in the near future.

Since remission has been on my mind, I have had the urge to add something about it on my site. Plus, I have been fooling around with a new web design I just saw, so yesterday I created a page using the new layout that is about 3 links deep in my new Remission Section. Unfortunately, right now, Netscape (2.1) is the only browser that supports it. This is a shortcut!

I must say that I have been eating well lately, which I needed to do for I have been caving in to my sweet tooth. The other day, I ate a low fat Milky Way bar and then I chased it with a king sized one. Luckily, I got myself back on track with healthy eating, even though it took a few days. In fact, I am in a very healthy mood today, and I am just about to hop on my cycle. I predict that in 2 weeks I will feel positively strong! I am getting the urge to arm wrestle, it used to be one of my favorite things to do. Once I arm wrestled an entire band, and even though I could not beat them, they could not beat me! I would have rather had my arm ripped off than lose, but that was then and this is now. Luckily, I have all those memories of opponents mouths dropping open when they were stuck in an arm wrestling stand still by a 5' 3" girl in pink. Gosh that was fun!

7/19/96
I went to see Dr. Cooney today and had a full blood work up. My WBCs were 2,100, RBCs (HGB) were 10.7, and my platelets were a whopping 267! Dr. Cooney said it was just as he expected, and that my low WBCs did not put me in the danger zone, because 1,400 of them were the kind that fight infection. He also put me on hormone replacement for the hot flashes I have been having, or as he puts it, ovarian failure. So I am now taking Estrogen and Provera. Then we talked about the upcoming restaging, and I asked him again about what he would do if he found no disease in me, and he said that I would not have more chemo. Of course, that is only if he can officially say that I am in remission. I am open to anything!

I have been riding my cycle for 10 minutes at a time, jumping on my rebounder a few minutes at a time, and I have been taking 20 minutes walks everyday. Plus, I just had my first Aikido energy lesson from a friend and ex-competitor from my bodybuilding days, a second level Aikido black belt, who is teaching me. She is the most grounded person I have ever known, and she used to scare the hell out of me on-stage. She was a heavy weight and I was a light weight, and somehow it was hard to feel really big standing next to her. We competed several times where we would each win our weight class, and then we would pose down together. Then she would win! We both laugh about it now!

I am happy to report that I can now wake up and have my hair stick out funny! It is almost 1/2 an inch long! Wow!

7/24/96
I will not have a lot to post in the next week or so, for I am feeling too normal without chemo in my body. My next chemo (ABVD) is scheduled for August 6th, and it could be my very last chemo, so I am going to enjoy every little drip! In the meantime, I think I will just kick back and let my hair grow!

7/29/96
I have been spending the day driving around in a black car with no air conditioning during a muggy heat wave, plus I had a few hot flashes along the way. I had to drive fast with the windows down, and although I did not wear a hat, sweat still poured down my face. I kept picturing a cop stopping me for speeding, and I would have to explain to him that I had to create some wind to cool me off. If that didn't work then I would have gone into detail about my chemo brain and hairdo, the chemo induced menopausal hot flashes, my millions of errands, and my hungry 5 year old passed out in the back. I am not in the mood for a ticket!

I am thinking about posting a questionnaire on the net to find out information about how one gets HD in the first place, because I get the feeling that the medical world is not taking the time to do so. I have put together some questions, and this is what I have so far.

Possible Causes of Hodgkin's Questionnaire What kind of diseases (especially viruses) have you had in the past? Are you a type A-workaholic personality? If no, describe your personality. Have you been exposed to pesticides? If yes, which ones? Did you use cosmetics or hair spray? Did you dye, lighten or perm your hair? If yes, which ones and how often? Was your stress level high? If yes, how long was it high and why (optional)? Were you tired and rundown prior to being diagnosed? If yes, for how long? Have you ever smoked? Did you use drugs (optional)? If yes, which ones and how often? Did you drink alcohol? If yes, how much and how often? Do you have any allergies? If yes, what are they and how long have you had them? Did you eat a healthy diet? Was your diet low fat? What kind of meat did you eat? Were you a heavy meat eater? Did you eat fast foods? If yes, what kind and how often? Did you maintain a stable weight? Did you eat a lot of sugar? If yes, what form of sugar? Did you eat a lot of fruit and vegetables? If yes, what kinds and were they fresh? Did you exercise? If yes, how often and what kind? Have you lived in the city or the country for most of your life? Did you own a cat? Have you ever been scratched by your cat? If yes, how long ago was it? Did you change your cat's litter box? Have any of your relatives had HD? If yes, how many and what is their relation to you? Do you come from a middle or upper class family? How old were you when you were diagnosed with HD? Are you male or female? What stage were you diagnosed at? Did you itch? If yes, where did you itch? Do you have any other ideas on the possible causes of HD? Feel free to answer the questions here!

Wouldn't it be funny if someone like me found the cause of Hodgkin's? It could be something as simple as owning an infected cat or highlighting your hair!