Playing Catch-Up

Well, I’ve just been reading back over old posts and I realized I haven’t updated since late 2019. Here were are in October of 2021 and there’s been a whole global pandemic since then. Also, most of my last post was about my husband’s medical emergency, and I’ve had my own since then. So let me just play catch-up for a few minutes and bring everyone up to speed.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or in a similarly very isolated place, you’re aware of COVID-19, a.k.a. “coronavirus”, a.k.a. “the ‘rona”. Okay, maybe I’m the only one who calls it that last one. But you know life started getting weird for most people in early 2020. Many people were quarantined/locked down, only leaving the house for purely essential things. Not this girl… I’m an essential part of this city! As a pharmacy technician, we were officially busier than ever. The only real changes for me were that I got more hours and had to wear a mask and gloves at work (eventually they realized the gloves were hindering us from actually doing our jobs and let us just wash/sanitize like crazy). The first thing to even strike me as odd or out of place at all was when Andrew and I couldn’t go out for our anniversary dinner in late March of 2020 because all the restaurants were closed, and they had only closed just the week before.

In April, my then-18-year-old son, who had moved to Oregon to live with my parents at Christmas of 2019, sent me a text message in the wee hours of the morning asking for help, saying he was having suicidal thoughts and he had thought he’d be able to handle it on his own but he’d realized that he couldn’t anymore. After a flurry of phone calls and discussions, we brought him home less than three days later to our new house which he’d never seen (oh yeah, we bought a house in February of 2020… forgot that part). I was able to use the EAP through my employer to get him hooked up with six free counseling sessions, of which he ended up using four. He said that between using what the therapist had told him and the change of environment, he really didn’t feel like he needed to go there anymore. He elected to stay on with us in Arizona and start looking for a job.

I pretty much continued in my only-slightly-altered “new normal” until May of 2020, when I had my annual with my PCP and she started hounding me (again) about getting a colonoscopy. Even though I was only 37 at the time, I was technically “past due” since my mom had been diagnosed in her late 40s. I very reluctantly let her refer me for my first colonoscopy, which took place in late May.

I already had cancer, y’all.

I was at work when I found out. My boss knew I’d had the procedure (because I got the prep kit at my own pharmacy, and also we talk about that sort of thing), and she knew I was expecting results soon, so she thought nothing of it when I told her I was going to step into the back and take the phone call. I don’t even remember the phone call itself, though I’m sure the message was conveyed in there somewhere, but when I hung up I just stood there for a minute in shock, and then I think I said, “Shit!” My boss was happening by and she asked what was wrong, and I said, “They just told me I have cancer.” She’s a good boss, and I call her my “Arizona mom” since my actual mom lives 1,200 miles away from me. She just pulled me into a hug and said, “And you’re standing almost exactly where I stood when I found out I had cancer. I know how it feels.”

While trying to let that shock settle in, I was suddenly referred to both a surgeon and an oncologist, who worked as a trio with the gastroenterologist who had done the colonoscopy in the first place. I was told that there had been lymph nodes involved in the tumor, and that the recommendation was surgery to remove 8-12 inches of my colon and as many lymph nodes from the area as possible. And yes, they wanted to do this surgery really soon.

It was barely a month and a half after the colonoscopy that I went in for surgery on July 14, 2020. Because of COVID, my husband couldn’t accompany me past the lobby of the hospital, nor would I be allowed any visitors during my stay. It was an odd, lonely experience and I’m extremely grateful to my excellent surgeon (who has literally written medical journal articles about this type of surgery) and all of the nurses at Tucson Medical Center. Especially poor Greg, who had to deal with me as a broken mess of a human being when I moved wrong and was convinced that I’d torn my stitches.

I was out of work for three weeks post-surgery. My son was fortunately around the house to help out if I needed him and run to the store for things and drive me to appointments (I wasn’t allowed to drive during those three weeks either). So even though it was less than ideal circumstances under which he came home, I was sure glad to have him there. Andrew was able to keep working, and I was able to get partial temporary disability pay. It was about a week after I got home that I got the call from the lab and they told me that they’d tested every one of the 19 lymph nodes they’d removed during the surgery, and all of them were cancer-free. I had officially beaten cancer. The first week back at work was hard, though, and I was still technically on “light” duty for three more weeks. My boss took good care of me, though, and one day she even had me just sit down in a chair and make phone calls (we never sit in the pharmacy… we don’t even HAVE chairs). After my six-week follow-up, my surgeon released me back to full duty and “broke up” with me, as did my oncologist. I didn’t have to do any chemotherapy or radiation treatments, for which I am extremely grateful. I feel like I got off easy.

After I was fully recovered, I actually managed to get my son in the door at my work, and now he works there too. He has even worked his way up to management now on the retail side.

Not much else of note happened until July of 2021 when my son got an apartment with his girlfriend and moved out. He lives about 7 miles from me now and I mostly see him at work. He seems to be happy and thriving, though he is learning that being an adult with your own place is definitely not all fun and games. Also in July of 2021, I had my first annual follow-up colonoscopy post surgery. They told me everything looked well-healed (which you can’t see from the outside) and they did find a couple of small polyps that didn’t look threatening yet, so they removed them. I’m still on the annual colonoscopy plan for the foreseeable future.

Now lets talk about August of 2021. And if any of my relatives are reading this, you may want to skip this bit. I was very civil and diplomatic in person, but on the inside I was a seething ball of rage, and this is my blog and I can say whatever I want.

It is important to note that my parents, an aunt and uncle, and a cousin and her family are all anti-vaccine. It is also important to note that I have been a certified immunizer since February of 2021 and have personally administered close to 3,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine at the time of this writing, so we have a fundamental disagreement here which my mother says we’re not going to talk about because we love each other and it’s okay if we have different opinions. I think you’re gonna see why it’s not okay.

In early 2021 my grandma was looking at probably having to go on dialysis, and it was decided that she and my grandpa couldn’t live alone any longer (they were 89 and 88 at the time, Grandma is older). So they moved in with this particular aunt and uncle, who happen to share a house with this particular cousin, her husband, and their three children. Cousin’s husband is an RN, so that was all well and good. I went up to visit in July of 2021 for my grandma’s 90th birthday party, and all seemed okay.

Less than a month later, cousin starts feeling sick right before she’s scheduled to fly to Connecticut to visit husband’s family. She has all the symptoms, but ignores them and flies anyway. Ends up testing positive for COVID in Connecticut and getting quarantined, and being mad about how it’s ruined her visit. Back home, aunt and uncle both start feeling sick, shortly followed by Grandma and Grandpa. The first three test positive for COVID, Grandpa refuses to be tested because he has Alzheimer’s and “doesn’t need that thing in his nose”, but everyone knows he’s got it too. One night, both Grandpa and Uncle have to go to the emergency room because they’re having so much trouble breathing. Uncle gets sent home with an inhaler. Grandpa comes home on hospice.

Now I know for a fact that my grandparents are not anti-vaccine. I discussed the matter on the phone with my grandma one time when the COVID vaccine was still in development and she said that “some of her kids had weird ideas about vaccines” and “all of my kids always had all their shots” (meaning my mother and aunt, who vehemently protest their grandchildren getting any sort of vaccine, both had all of their childhood immunizations). My siblings and I were also immunized as children, as were my cousin and her siblings. But something changed when Cousin went to Connecticut for school and came back all crunchy-granola-earth-mama. Next thing I know, her kids are unvaccinated and when my nephew is born, my mom convinces my brother not to vaccinate him either. I mention this because I’m pretty confident my grandparents would have taken the vaccine if any of their caregivers had offered to take them to get it.

Anyway, my grandfather died on September 3rd, 2021, at age 88 of COVID-19. He died at home, and my grandma was holding his hand. He died just 3 days before their 68th wedding anniversary. I ended up flying back to Oregon in September for the memorial, at which nobody was wearing masks aside from me, my son, and a different cousin and her family. So many people packed into this relatively small church, maskless, and I’m like, “Doesn’t anyone remember why we’re here?!”

I couldn’t even be sad about my grandpa’s death for the first few weeks. I was just furious. He didn’t have to die. Other than Alzheimer’s and being 88, there wasn’t anything really wrong with him. If someone had just let him get vaccinated, he’d probably still be here, but instead he ended up being cared for by people who were having someone buy azithromycin and ivermectin in Mexico and mail it up to them. And none of these people were willing to acknowledge, not even at the funeral, that maybe they could have done something differently and he’d still be alive. I even asked my mother directly if anyone was having second thoughts about maybe getting vaccinated, and she said, “No, not really.”

I’m getting my third vaccine next Thursday, and I administered the vaccine to both my husband and my son myself back in March. Why? Because it works. You know how I know it works? I got my first vaccine (Pfizer, for the curious), on January 2nd, 2021. My husband tested positive for COVID on January 6th. And I was thinking, “Oh shit, I’m definitely going to get it. We sleep in the same bed, we live in the same house, and my little four-day-old vaccine won’t have had time to build a full immune response yet.”

Guess what? I never got it. Tested negative four times over the next two weeks, and finally decided to move on with my life. Got my second dose on January 23rd. (Because I’m a healthcare worker, I got my first two doses fairly early on and I’m entitled to a third dose even though I’m not 65 or older.) The vaccine works, people. And yeah, people still get “breakthrough” infections and catch COVID after being vaccinated, but these people are not the ones ending up hospitalized and/or dying. Those people are the unvaccinated. Which means the vaccine is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do… keep you from getting sick enough to be hospitalized or dying. That’s all it’s for, and it works.

Also, my grandpa’s funeral was the day before my 39th birthday, so worst birthday weekend ever.

Now that I’ve brought you up to speed, let me tie this in to fitness. Yeah, I bet you thought I forgot what this blog was about. Well, I’ll tell you, with all the pandemic and other drama over the last almost 2 years, I have definitely let that side of things slide. A lot of us did, and it’s okay. But now we’re starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel and in many places life is back to near-normal, so it’s time to get our collective rears back in gear.

Very mindful of the fact that I’ll be turning 40 in less than a year, I’m now on a personal quest. I want to be in the best shape of my life when I turn 40. That is admittedly a pretty low bar to clear, but I’m not going to half-ass it. I want to be in better shape at 40 than I was at 18 (which is the last time I was in reasonably good shape). So everyone keep me accountable, and feel free to join me if you like. I’ll be starting another round of PB21 tomorrow, which I have false-started three times before and made it as far as week 4. I’m going to get through all eight this time, mark my words! If you’re interested in PB21 and don’t have it, click HERE and you can see what it’s all about. I think I can invest 21 minutes a day, hopefully you can too.

Sorry for the relative lack of pics in this post, but I’m just trying to get back into the writing thing too so I decided to focus on the text today. If you made it this far, thank you.