Single White Male seeks...

I started to write this post yesterday but got sidetracked even though I was feeling so much better than the day before. So I’ll just be lazy and edit what I’ve already written and add a bit more :-)

I made it through the dreaded 2^nd day after chemo (Wednesday) and was feeling at least 10 times better yesterday. Wednesday, even after 10 hours of sleep the night before, I still needed 3 naps during the day! I’ve heard that this 2^nd day after chemo is the worst for other people too. My mom’s friend at work who went through chemo for breast cancer said it was her worst day also, and some chemo patients my friendly grandmother chatted with in the waiting room at the cancer center said it is also their worst day. So hopefully it will be an uphill climb from here! I know that I could still get sick so I’m going to be carefully to try and avoid potential hospitalization by washing my hands constantly and avoiding big crowds of people and especially sickly people.  I also know I have some unpleasant bone pain coming up because of the neulasta shot. I think that was only bad for about 24 hours last time though and it’s completely worth is if it helps keep me healthy. I’ll be out partying all night again in no time (clearly joking!). Next round should be April 2nd.

So many, many posts ago I mentioned seeing a giraffe scarf that I really loved in Target but that I didn’t buy because money is tight and I didn’t want to spend the $15 on it. Both my parents are so sweet and have been on a crusade to get it for me! My mom went back to the Target where I saw the scarf but it was sold out. When I told my dad about the scarf he checked some other Targets and eventually found and ordered it for me online! It came in the mail yesterday! I got a picture of it so you can see why it was so highly coveted, lol:

I’ve been talking a lot with the guy I went on the coffee date with, Aaron. I don’t want to say too much or say anything awkward because he reads this blog, but I really did have a great time on the date and he seems like really, really nice guy so far. Oh, and he has sexy eyes! He’s also been great about all this cancer stuff. We even chatted on Skype while I was bald, which doesn’t bother him at all. Going through chemo definitely makes dating a lot more difficult (also that he lives about two hours away). It’s still very early but it’s nice to have met someone I feel so comfortable with, especially while dealing with this difficult situation. We plan on hanging out again as soon as I’ve feeling up to it and he can drive out here. 

Even though I felt horrible most of the day Wednesday, something did happen to cheer me up a bit towards the end of the day! I made up with my penpal that I’d had the fight with and was all upset over. So readers, you no longer have to stress yourselves over this! He lives in Sweden and is very busy getting his master’s degree so I just have to understand that he doesn’t always have much free time to chat. Last night I decided to try to find him a Swedish lady friend on the dating website we are both on but wasn’t having much luck. There just weren’t very many options on the site. So any single Swedish ladies reading this post, listen up! I have a great friend who is in Lund, Sweden. I mistakenly said before that he has blond hair and blue eyes, but he actually has kind of a lighter brown hair with green eyes (oops!). He is smart, funny, and handsome! He is 23 and 5’11. He is currently getting his master’s degree in ecology and cares about the environment! He has done volunteer work in other countries and is also a great photographer. According to match questions on the dating site we are on he is more adventurous, more independent, more compassionate, more progressive, and less old-fashioned than the average straight male his age. A personality test he took on the website also says he is good boyfriend material, though if you would just like to use him for sex, I don’t think he would be upset! I can’t post his picture here or he would probably be really ticked off at me, but he is very cute! So let me know if he sounds like your type! :-D 

No news on my pretend wedding at the moment. My fiancé has been too busy trying to help me figure out how my own computer to discuss it. I hope that he doesn’t decide that I’m too stupid to pretend marry! He tried to send me a movie to watch and I had so much trouble getting it to work, lol. It’s supposed to be an awful movie (Caligula) but now I’m curious and have to take a look, much like driving passed a car accident.

My parents and I have still been exploring options for when I have to be booted off health insurance in September (age 26 is the cutoff). The whole system is incredibly frustrating and confusing. If I’m off of health insurance for any period of time, my diabetes and cancer are labeled “preexisting conditions” and I think at that point it is impossible to find someone to cover me again. For now, it looks like our best option might be a program called COBRA. It would be expensive, but I could still stay on their insurance and get the same benefits. I wish the health system wasn’t so twisted and broken here. I suppose it’s fine if you’re healthy and make plenty of money, but for those of us in a different situation, it’s just bullshit.


My sweet friend Linnéa shared this with me:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vvncK7e8CU


It was amazing to watch and hear people thinking and feeling a lot of the same things as me. It's a moving video.

Coffee Date

The date was a huge success! We hung out for over 3 hours! I'm not going to say anything else about it partly because he reads this blog and that just seems awkward, and partly because I feel I deserve to keep some of my private life private :-)

Busy Friday

Latest side effect of chemo that has popped up: headaches. Really bad headaches that happen randomly throughout the day.  Or the headaches could be the result of a sinus infection that I think I’m developing. I don’t do so well with really bad headaches. I’d almost rather go back to vomiting a lot instead. Though I don’t want to be, I know I’ve been irritable and short tempered because of the headaches. It always makes me feel really shitty do be bitchy to someone who doesn’t deserve it at all so I really hope that these headaches won’t stick around.

Yesterday was a busy day. Well, busy by my current standards. I was going to have a coffee date at 1PM with a really nice guy I’ve been talking to for a little while. This went out the window because both of our dogs ran away while I was in the shower and stayed gone for about 3 hours. My date had a distance to drive to get here so when it looked like the dogs weren’t in a hurry to get back, we rescheduled for today. I ended up being stressed out the whole time the dogs were gone because even though Gordon has run away a hundred times and always comes back, Emma, who is still so much like a puppy, has never run away before. I was really worried they would get hit by a car or Emma would wander off too far and get lost. But when I heard the dogs of the neighbor in an uproar, I knew ours must be outside. I ran outside with my bald head and my bare feet in the chilly weather and discovered them in the neighbors’ driveway. I brought them back home wet, dirty, and stinky. Well, I hope they at least had a good time!

I decided to put on some makeup to get ready for what was supposed to be the second date of the day – a skype date with my pretend fiancé! He was out having Friday night fun while it was still midafternoon for me (10 hour time difference between me in Alabama and him in Russia!) so I decide to do my online thing until he got back. This mainly involves responding to messages I receive on facebook, email, and on this dating site, and chatting with my online buddies. One of my penpals that I’ve been talking to since right before I found out I had a mass in my abdomen, but that hasn’t been online much lately, logged in so I was really happy to chat with him for a bit. The chat seemed to kind of dissolve into a bit of a fight at some point though. Because we been talking for a while online and have talked about everything from the mundane to the intimate, I feel that he is more than a stranger behind a computer screen. To me he is my friend now. I should also mention that he is just the type of guy I would develop a huge crush on if I knew him in real life: smart, funny, kind of nerdy, handsome, tall, and now it seems he is also elusive. The little spat started because I’ve wanted to skype with him for a little while now because we’ve been getting to know each other more and it would be nice to finally have a kind of face to face conversation. The reasons he gave for not wanting to do this didn’t make any sense to me, like not liking to hear his own voice and not having skype downloaded (takes a couple minutes to set up!). I went into girly mode and got my feelings hurt and yet kept bugging him about it (I think I’ve mentioned that sometimes when I get an idea in my head, it will simply not unlodge itself no matter what). The chatting winded down with me saying I didn’t want to talk anymore at the moment because I was too upset and that I would try not to send him so many messages since he can’t take 5 minutes to respond to them even though I always put some thought into them as I’m writing. He did say he has enjoyed every message I’ve sent him but I pointed out that I would have no way of knowing that since he hasn’t been responding at all. My Russian logged on just in time and I ended my girly hissy fit (hey, we all have one every now and then right? Say “yes” so I won’t feel like such a whiny baby!)

I called up my pretend fiancé on skype and he answered wearing a hat kind of like this:

Ушанка?

I laughed so much! He’s hilarious. He was so cute on skype too! I really liked his Russian accent but he speaks English really, really well. He tried to get me to say a few words correctly in Russian but I think I mostly butchered them. I joked about my name becoming Maria Kharybin and he had to correct me. Even last names have masculine and feminine versions in the Russian language! I don’t think I’ll ever learn! Maria Kharybina would be the correct name. We ended up talking for 2 hours and 45 minutes on our first skype date, so I think it went well, hehe. We talked about everything from the Russian election to movies to parents, and other private things that will remain between Машулечка (me) and мой жених (him). :-)

We did decide yesterday to have our honeymoon in the Philippines:

Since I’m white pale, I will have to bring a gallon of sunscreen and maybe a big hat so I don’t end up looking like this:

I’m excited but the beach is not my natural habitat. I think I'm about as pale as a person can get. In addition to sunscreen, I will also need a bikini that somehow hides my tummy surgery scar. The port will be long gone by then and I think that little scar above my right breast should heal nicely (and hopefully my breasts are nice enough to distract from it!)

 

My mom came home from work last night with a surprise for me. She had “business cards” made for my blog to pass out to people! They are light blue trimmed in red with a big yellow flower on each. At the top they say “Adventures in Cancer by Cancer Girl” and below that it describes my blog a bit. “Intimate and real, this blog is about a 25 year old American woman who is diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer on January 2012.” Then at the bottom it has link to my blog. I have no idea yet who I might pass these out to but they are pretty neat! I desperately tried to scan one but simply could not figure out how to.

My mom likes to go out to eat on Friday night and wanted me to go with her. I thought it would be nice to get out but between the headache, tiredness, and lack of much of an appetite, it wasn’t much fun. A super busy restaurant is not a fun place to be when your head is pounding and you just want to go to sleep. 

I know this post is really getting long, but I’m starting to get the jitters about chemo on Monday. I’ve been feeling a lot better… well for the most part… lately and don’t want to go back to feeling extra shitty. I’ll try not worry. I have my rescheduled coffee date today and I might go to the movies with friends tomorrow if I’m feeling up to it, so keeping my mind occupied is good.  :-)

This post is under construction!

I'll have more to say later today since I sort of have two dates today (will explain later) but for now I found some pictures on my computer that I didn't realize I had so I will post a few of those:


My mom, my brother, and my grandmother a few years ago:

My grandmother's 70th birthday (she is to the right of me in the picture):

Emma when she was still a baby (she weighs 100lbs now!):

Being silly! I hope that this is the craziest I've ever looked! (and hope I never look crazier!):

No, not my real glasses!

Me with someone that will always hold a special place in my heart:

right before bowling

Will add more tonight about today (unless I'm exhausted, then tomorrow).



*EDIT*

It was an eventful day but I'm too tired to write one single thing about it until tomorrow!

Dating and chemo?

I've been on this dating site for years. It's a free site and a lot more laid back than say match.com. I think I originally joined because a guy I was really into was on it and I wanted to scope out his profile (kind of creepy, I know). Wow, I must have been on and off this site for about 6 years. No, I'm not embarrassed about it either. Yes, I've met up with some weirdos (mutant guy and crazy guy who talked so loudly that everyone in the coffee shop had to stare), but I made some real friends too and it resulted in a two year relationship. Though that relationship didn’t work out, I wouldn’t undo it if I could. But this website has fun tests and a neat matching algorithm. I know some of you will think this is lame no matter what I say about it, but because I have cancer, I can be as lame as I want and it’s ok :-)

So I posted the link to my blog on my profile on this site. Since then, the quality of the messages I get on the site has increased dramatically. Messages of encouragement, messages from people who had cancer or know someone who did, and the always welcome messages that simply say, “I think you will still look hot bald.” What’s surprising is the amount of offers I’ve gotten to be taken out on a date. Really? Am I more appealing with cancer or just more approachable? Fellows, you might think you want to take me out to dinner, but I’ll be exhausted and no fun the whole time, and there is a decent chance I will throw up my meal. Still interested? If this is about you thinking my pictures are pretty, I’m concerned that my looks are going to steadily decline, between an upcoming lack of hair and my steady weight loss. In theory, it might be nice to go out and get a taste of romance and/or sex, but in reality, I don’t think things would go so smoothly. My level of energy says, “Stay in bed!” Current relationship status: only available for online chatting. 

On a cancerous note, today someone asked me what stage my cancer was, and I knew the answer straight away, “Stage 3.” But I couldn’t remember exactly what that means so I had to go and look it up. It’s a good thing my mom keeps a log of all this stuff because I’m not hanging on to all of it mentally. 

I found out I can get a free wig from the Cancer Society so I might go do that at some point. I’d like a short wig for upcoming warmer days.  Maybe blonde?