This morning I received a quirky forward from my mother of an email from Jane (formerly of Siena College as the director of the Counseling Center), my godmother (yes I know, I know I'm jewish what's this about a godmother but there it is nonetheless).
It didn't contain my mother's writing at all so no way to know exactly what the fabulous Miss Jane was responding to, but somehow there was just enough for me to know, just know deep down, that Sunny had chosen to do chemotherapy.
Of course being her daughter, I chose to ignore this bit of knowledge and go on with my day. The Girlfriend and I took The Boy to the dog park. GF insisting that I leave the house and go with. {sigh} I haven't the foggiest notion of what she is speaking of, I'm sure I left the house yesterday to retrieve the paper. Before that you ask? Hm. Um. Well. Oh wait I remember we to Target, Saturday evening to get the household holiday (chrisoltichanukwanzaa) gift. It was decided that rather than carry the singular dvd player back and forth between the living room and bedroom and doing a dance of wires, we bought one of those DVD/VCR player thingys by Samsung that was on sale. Why Saturday? Because that's when the sale ended, of course! Where was I? Oh yes, I remember now.
We got home and I saw we had a voicemail, which was a celebration in and of itself as we have been without voicemail and caller ID for several weeks, and I spent considerable time this very morning getting services restarted. Hm, it's from Sunny. I thought, "not good, just simply not good, I tell you!".
I call her back and sure enough she has changed her mind about getting chemotherapy and starts....TOMORROW! The regimen recommended to her is "AC protocol, the more aggressive of two the doctor recommended. A is for Adriamycin, C stands for Cytoxan. AC: 4 treatments, every 2 weeks, each treatment followed by a shot the next day to restore my blood count."
She of course was trying to reach me, one to tell me, and to vaguely inquire about whether I could come out there sometime in the next whenever. Since she is also having some computer issues, GF is more than welcome to come, and "yes I know that means animal care but we will work all that out".
Did I mention that I am years behind on cloning myself?
Somehow I found the news of her deciding to do chemotherapy very upsetting. I think that if she didn't do it, it somehow meant this wasn't such a big deal. It feels like each step of this process has been assessing everything as not too serious, unless contradicted. Well damn it, this contradicts my world view that she is fine. She's just fine, damn fine, thank you very much.
So how did she go from sounding like she wasn't going to do to having the first treatment tomorrow? Thanks for asking. I would hate to dump information when it was unwanted. It seems that given all the factors of her particular situation, if the cancer comes back, the greater liklihood is it would return in about 2 years or less. Somehow all this talk of the 10 year survival rate overtook some rather crucial data points. It was easier to think about not doing chemo when it was possible that sometime in the next decade she might have a recurrance. But two years? Well it was too hard to think about that in such a short time her odds might look very different. I don't blame her, I really don't.
But my mind, hell my life, was ordered around her NOT having chemotherapy. The GF is very happy about her doing it because it signifies Sunny doing everything possible. I get that I really do. I, on the other hand, am totally not clear where I am about this decision. Yeah, I realize that she and I are two individuals, even if once upon a time I resided in her uterus and I share only half her DNA. I really do know this but damn it, why is happening. That's really all I keep coming back to. Yeah, it's happening to her, but by extension and 50% of DNA it is happening to me as well. Besides this is my universe, as stated in the title of this blog, and therefore it is all about me. Despite me telling Sunny that it was all about her not long ago. I lied. I am not ashamed. Nope, not in the least. Not even a little bit.
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