High Hopes

Hi darlings...

Today I tried to accomplish things and I was completely thwarted at every turn...

Let's start with the tummy bug I had last night at 2:00 am...

on second thought NO ONE wants to know about that...it wasn't fun...but hey it passed quickly...

It gave me a little worry about what being chemo "sick" might be like but I'm 10 days out from chemo so I am pretty sure it was either food poisoning or a bug and I think it was a bug...

but when I went back to bed I found myself wide awake and that is always trouble....

because at 2:30 am (took me a bit to get over the sick) I do one thing when I can't sleep...

I

Google...

BAD mistake

huge...

giant...

bigger mistake than the snotty shop girls made in "Pretty Woman" when they wouldn't help Julia Roberts and then she went on a big spree elsewhere...

bigger mistake than most of The Bachelor's have made when choosing their final girl...

bigger mistake than Mariah Carey made by not showing up for her sound check for NYE...

Big stupid awful mistake...

because after I had googled "how long after chemo do you get sick" and got all the satisfactory answers I did the one thing my General Practitioner expressly forbade me to do...

she told me; "under no circumstances do I want you to get on the internet and look up survivor rates and anything about your cancer"

I have been good about that until last night...

when my fingers typed out:

survival rate for stage 3C uterine papillary serous sarcoma...

OMG

OMG

OMG

There was all this medical stuff and abstracts and...

numbers

bad bad numbers

numbers where the "less than" sign was pointing to numbers that did not look positive or good

um....

shit...

yeah...

I know now why she told me not to do it...

I hear her voice in my head warning me not to look at the numbers...because most are old..and they don't take into account ME and MY HEALTH and Dr. Rockstar and all kinds of things....

but still...

I saw the numbers...

it was like someone telling me the movie I was watching was not going to end the way I wanted it to.

It felt like I had walked in on a meeting saying the world was going to end...

and trust me on this: please don't do it either...please...

If you do one thing for me, do not google those stats...

because we all need to believe that I am going to get better...

Football coaches live and breathe by stats and make decisions based on stats.  We as fans often look at the stats and use them to place bets or do our office pools.  We look at the numbers and react.

and if the stats aren't good for one player he might not hit the field...

but maybe if the coach doesn't know that the reason the player messed up last time and didn't run much was because he had something wrong with his foot, well he might not play the guy and his foot is just fine and he might be the best running back he has...but his stats aren't good...

so if we look at my stats we might see things don't look positive and we might lose hope...

so we can't have that...

so don't go to Google...

I gotta go into this with nothing but positivity

and now I know why she told me not to Google...

when I was younger I remember the first movie that made me aware of "cancer"

it was "Love Story"

(Love means never having to say you're sorry...)

Ali McGraw's character died at the end.  She was still gorgeous and not wasted away and she had all that beautiful hair...

During the 70's when I was growing up there were a lot of tv movies about cancer...none looked all that good...

And there was that damn Brian's Song...

(if you saw it you hate me right now because you are remembering it...sorry....)

And Death be Not Proud...

and all those other "this awesome person died of cancer" movies...

Well folks...that WON'T be my story...

I can't do that...my story is gonna end on a high note and not some tearjerker movie with a great theme song.

I have to look forward to the sun and not see it as darkness

I have to move ahead for an end game of happiness and not death

I have to look ahead and see my future with me as a very old lady...

I have to dream of the day I have grandchildren and not just of getting to next Christmas.

So...now that I have seen the bad stuff I am not supposed to see it's a little like meeting Voldemort (this only makes sense if you know Harry Potter).  I can't "un"-meet He Who Must Not Be Named...I met him and it was scary...

So now I have to defeat him (the cancer) but first I have to gather the horcrouxes (my chemo) and kill each one and then I can be set free...

So what I am asking for you is to continue what you are doing...send me happy videos, send me silly memes, send me jokes and funny stories...

Keep me looking forward and help me to scrub from my mind what I saw...

Keep my positive
Keep praying for my healing
Keep praying that my cancer will be gone
Keep me from drowning in fear

I need positivity and I need to only think of defeating cancer and it not defeating me...

Because the dark places are scary
and I don't like scary
and I don't like fear

I like light
and hope
and love

and I freaking hate Google...

Inspiration Song: "High Hopes" by Frank Sinatra...because if an ant can move a rubber tree plant I can beat uterine papillary serous carcinoma...

Lyrics:

Next time your found, with your chin on the ground
There a lot to be learned, so look around

Just what makes that little old ant
Think he'll move that rubber tree plant
Anyone knows an ant, can't
Move a rubber tree plant

But he's got high hopes, he's got high hopes
He's got high apple pie, in the sky hopes

So any time your gettin' low
'Stead of lettin' go
Just remember that ant
Oops there goes another rubber tree plant

When troubles call, and your back's to the wall
There a lot to be learned, that wall could fall

Once there was a silly old ram
Thought he'd punch a hole in a dam
No one could make that ram, scram
He kept buttin' that dam

'Cause he had high hopes, he had high hopes
He had high apple pie, in the sky hopes

So any time your feelin' bad
'stead of feelin' sad
Just remember that ram
Oops there goes a billion kilowatt dam

All problems just a toy balloon
They'll be bursted soon
They're just bound to go pop
Oops there goes another problem kerplop

Bye Darlings...last night scared the bejeezus out of me and I won't lie it haunted me for a bit...but I made sure that I looked at those numbers and said "I will be on the greater than side of those numbers" because I am greater than statistics show...