One kind of list

As cancer treatment recedes into the not so distant past, I find myself with less and less to say here.  There is not so much to describe, really.  I run, I swim, my burns are fading.  I feel physically normal!  The exception would be the wierd chest muscle configuration that I feel while swimming, but in the scheme of things that seems small.

Here's a funny story:  My hair has been growing in, which is nice, but very, very gray, which is not so nice.  There is nothing wrong with gray hair, don't get me wrong.  It's just that, at just shy of 50, I simply DO NOT want it at this time.  So...  Given that my hair is about half an inch long, I did not want to spend the dollars going to the salon for a color.  Instead I opted for the $7.99 box of Clairol at the grocery and in about 15 minutes the deed was done.  I chose medium golden brown and in hindsight I will go with plain old medium brown next time, but fortunately it will wash out in four weeks so I can regroup and try again.  At least it is not gray any more.  My son, who is colorblind, asked me tonight at dinner why I made my hair green.  (Our dog Zoe, rest in peace, was reddish brown and white in color.  When we stood outside and buried her ashes back in 2005 and forced our reticent children to say something nice about her, Tim said, "Zoe was a good dog.  She was green and white," which was when we learned how he saw her all his then seven-year-old life.). Depending on the shading he sometimes sees brown properly and sometimes not.  My hair is actually brownish goldish sort of, but to my boy, it's green.  Every time I am in a room with him, it occurs to me that what he sees when he looks at his mother is a middle aged badly put together St. Patrick's Day partier, and every time this occurs to me, I'm forced to smile.

I call myself post-cancer treatment even though I still have Herceptin infusions and will begin taking Tamoxifen this week, but I seem mentally to be in the typical post-treatment that I've read about.  I'll give you a little list of the feelings through which I fluctuate in any given couple of hours:

Relieved
Anxious
Grateful
Full blown panicked
Sad
Depressed
Giddy
Afraid
Focussed
Unfocussed
Worried
Lucky
Happy
Sense of dread and/or impending doom

I'm sure there are more.  The social worker at the hospital in Portland gave me a bunch of breathing exercises to do to calm myself.  They really do help, sort of.  So onward and inward in an attempt to re-enter some iteration of a normal life.