In the weeks that have followed since my last round of A/C Chemo, I have started a new type of weekly chemo. Well, two of them actually- taxol and herceptin. Since there's so much to catch up on with what we've been doing, I'm just going to give you a captioned photo update so you can see just how well things are going, peppered with only a few days of not feeling so great. I know it's a little scattered, but I still hope you enjoy! xoxo, Ry
First we found this little turd
Up in Duluth, a skeleton in the woods
Steve and Duckie hang out in Duluth
William and SK embrace after a dance party
Botzy and Lauren love Duckie
Donna and William get their root on
Jord and Botzy play outside
Pig meets Dog
William loves Duckie
Donna and William
William at Gooseberry
Mr. Monkey Man
Ninja Turtle Sighting
Rock the Garden from the cheap seats
We run into my favorite little Wulfric
We kidnap a five year old
Astronautalis and Sims show
Working on Que Sehra Farm
Amy hennas the littlest leg and our friends leave for tour
So, it's been a short while since our event. Sorry we haven't gotten around to a post until now. We've been busy, and all in all exhausted!
Before getting into anything else though, a HUGE Thank You to everyone that has helped us out through this. Whether you were able to make the event or not, helped us meet our fundraising goal, or have even been sending positive vibes our way, Thank You!!!
We've been amazed at the incredible amount of support we've received so far! Thank You, Thank You, Thank You! We can't say it enough, and will hopefully have some time to decompress and say it a little more personally soon.
The event itself was a huge success!
Thank you to AmberJean and Salon Ori for letting us host it there, shaving all of our heads, and providing post shave gift certificates!
Thank you to Kaylyn Knopp for catering the event. Check out her catering facebook page: Vegano Private Catering.
Thank you to Amy and her business Mehndi Moments for doing all of the awesome henna!
Thanks to Chelsea, Snorine, Amy, Al, Shell, and Piper for raising money and shaving their heads with us!
Thank You AmberJean!
Thank you to everyone that provided silent auction items!
Before Head Shaving
After Head Shaving
First cut!
I think she enjoyed this immensely.
Mehndi Moments. Thanks Amy!
It was an awesome event. We really enjoyed it, and we hope you did as well.
Some amazing news, is that we've far surpassed our initial fundraising goal! When we first started talking about doing any sort of fundraising, Ryan wanted to set the goal at around $8000, as that's what we figured would get us through with minimal difficulty. I objected because I thought there was no way we would raise more than $5000. We compromised on a goal of $6000, as that's what we figured we could make it by with.
Well you've helped us raise about $9000!! Your generosity and kindness has absolutely blown us away. Thank you again!
All the Hugs!!
~ William Veldt
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Onto the update...
This should probably be two different posts but when it rains, it pours. So there.
This past week has been unusually difficult for me for some reason. Chemo is cumulative so perhaps it's just catching up with me. This has been the most challenging post chemo recovery yet. I've been more nauseous than usual, making it increasingly difficult to eat and I feel like I've exhausted all my food options. Nothing sounds appealing so right now I'm eating a lot of cereal. On top of that, if I even think about chemo and a particular thing that goes with it**, I immediately need to drink something flavored or I feel like I'm going to be sick.
Port Picture
My hearing has come back. Hopefully to stay but it will be a couple days, like last time, if I'm going to lose it again. This is one of those hurry up and wait side effects. Dr. Bloom says my ears look good in general so...
I just had my last Neulasta shot yesterday, which is brutal. It causes an unreasonable amount of pain for two days. I cried Sunday night thinking about having to go in for it Monday morning, which is really the first time that I've cried related to having cancer. I'm not really even sure why. I'm not upset about it. I don't think it's "unfair", as if there's some man in the sky doling out what we each do or don't deserve. Maybe it's just misplaced irritability over not being able to eat and then feeling super shitty when I don't eat.
I'm a little nervous for the next round of chemo. Twelve weeks worth, every single week. My oncologist says it's more tolerable. We'll see. My chemo schedule will continue to be on Fridays so I'm currently accepting applications for chemo buddies.
**Saline Flush
I appreciate all of you more than you will probably ever know. Literally each and every person that's ever so much as liked a post or even thought a nice thing about me. Thank you.
xoxo Ry
** The particular thing that goes with chemo that Ryan avoids thinking about at all costs is the saline flush that they do of her port almost every time we're in. They attach a syringe filled with a very concentrated saline solution to her port and pump it in to clean the port and the tube that goes into her jugular vein. The taste goes straight to her mouth and she makes some of the funniest faces, but she absolutely hates it.
For about 5 - 7 days after a chemo injection, I end up with pretty decent nausea. It's not so bad the day of chemo because the first drug they put in you is some steroid anti-nausea stuff which helps you get through the rest of the day. The next 3 - 4 days are spent just trying to get a regular amount of food down. If I even *start* to get hungry and don't eat immediately, I become very sick and uncomfortable. Trouble is, when I'm hungry, thinking about food makes me nauseous. If I even get the littlest taste of something, meaning that if I can conjure the taste in my mouth before I eat it, I immediately don't want it- it makes me sick to think about it. So I can't really ever think about what I want to eat. When I get hungry, I have to decide on a food and then immediately put it out of my mind or I wont want it. If that wasn't bad enough, most of the time I'll get through a few bites of something and then I don't want any more of it. That's not to say that I'm full or don't need more food, it's just that it starts to taste gross. Oh wait, it gets better. And by better, I mean worse. As you all know by now, chemo destroys rapidly growing cells. Those aren't just cancer cells, those are also hair follicles and cells in your mouth. Ever eaten a piece of toast or a chip and felt it scratch your mouth in some way? Or suck on some sweet sugar coated candy and have your mouth feel a little raw afterwards? Fortunately, your mouth heals very quickly from that. Mine doesn't heal at all. Well, not until almost the end of my treatment cycle, so just before I get another treatment. So basically I can eat soft foods like bread or liquids with minimal discomfort but anything else I end up paying for. They say you're supposed to rinse many times throughout the day with a salt-water rinse which does help a little bit but it definitely doesn't heal the owies, it's more preventative than anything else. This coming Friday is my last type of this kind of chemo (unless I skip it since the lastest side effect of chemo is total hearing loss- more to come on that...) and my oncologist says that the next type of chemo has different side effects but nausea isn't one of them. Stay tuned! xoxo Ry
I'm sure you're all wondering what we've been up to the past week so let me tell you! It's been an epic week of chaos.
Last Tuesday morning we went to Duluth for a work conference where we got to see Chris Heeter and Tuu Weh. We got back from Duluth late on Thursday night where we finished packing and got a little bit of sleep. Friday morning I went off to chemo while William, Amy and Steve started on our great move to St. Paul. Trevor joined us later and helped during the last leg of the move.
Saturday morning in the midst of all the unpacking, we picked up a kitty from Amy and Steve that we're fostering. His name is Botzy and he's totally a teenage boy.
Random pics of the move. Late Saturday night we worked the merch table for the last Culture Cry Wolf show which meant we didn't get home until nearly 3 am. We were so pooped.
Sunday we had to run back out to the storage locker to get pieces of the bed frame that we were missing and it was my mom's birthday so we stopped by for a quick visit followed by book group for Confronting Animal Exploitation. As you can tell, we're exhausted and there's no letting up yet. Wednesday is William's birthday and this weekend is the benefit which we're totally stoked for. Here are the totals for the head shaving contest as we enter the last week. We're so close to meeting our goal - less than $200 to go! Chelsea $975 Snorine $515 Shell $316 Amy $310 Al $90 Hope to see you all on Sunday at Salon Ori! xoxo Ry
A woman's risk of having breast cancer in her lifetime:
1960: 1 in 20
Today: 1 in 8
Women living in Industrialized countries have a higher risk of breast cancer than those in unindustrialized countries. (1)
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Please try to tell me that the way we live, the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe aren't causing cancer along with a slough of other diseases.
I'm not at all upset about where Ryan and I are in our lives. I'm the happiest I've ever been despite the fact that we're dealing with cancer.
Here's what I am pissed off about though.. The consumer lifestyle fed to us by large corporations and a complex globalized world doesn't care about people living healthy fulfilling lives, but only about what is going to make more money.
My degree is in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and throughout the course of the program I honestly just became increasingly depressed about the state of the world and what we can actually do to stop long term global climate issues. We can however do what we can to at least contribute as little as possible to the problem and escape the world of profit by any means.
If we were paying for the actual cost of what we eat, the products we consume, and the electricity that powers our homes, the common conveniences would be a lot more expensive.
This blog post will be focused on food and I'll follow it up with more about air and water quality.
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The average American spends $150 per week on food (2) - $7,800 annually, or $624,000 in their lifetime assuming an 80 year lifespan.
Courtesy of Komen
We found out just over a month ago that Ryan has cancer and the actual cost of everything so far is quickly converging on $100,000. I have no doubt that by the end of this year we will be over the $600,000 mark. I would much rather pay marginally more for healthy food than pay the pharmaceutical companies for their poison.
An indirectly related but fun coincidence - the CEO of the Susan G. Komen foundation, which only used 15% of its donations for research last year, received a salary of $685,000, a 60% increase over the previous year.
Back on point though. What I'm getting at is that the cost of food is grossly underpriced. If you had to pay for all of the costs associated with the normal processed garbage that we eat every time you checked out at the supermarket, you would likely be paying at least double.
Yet, that's not the case. Large corporations such as Cargill, Monsanto, PepsiCo, etc., control the food market and keep prices for processed, mass produced, nutrient poor, pesticide and chemical laden crap artificially low. It makes the decision to buy organic, locally grown, healthy food an extremely difficult one.
Yet, it is such an important one! I consider myself to be pretty thrifty. I live a fairly simple life. The one thing I don't mind spending money on more than anything else though is food. Putting good food into your body is the one environmental health factors you can actually control. You have no immediate control over the air you breathe or the water you drink.
Our Breakfast This Morning
Consider this example of why you might want to buy organic vegetables. Eli Lily, the pharmaceutical company that produces the cancer drug Tamoxifen, also produces widely used estrogen mimicking pesticides that were banned in Europe. It should be noted that their profits from Tamoxifen are through the roof, as they continue to help cause and treat cancer.
I could write hundreds of pages on the links between the everyday food in the standard american omnivore diet, but I'm going to cut it off here. I'll let Ryan speak to the links between animal proteins and cancer if she feels so compelled to do so later, as she knows much more about the subject.
I hope this inspires at least someone to look at their diet a little more closely and think about what it is that the recently gigantic food corporations are doing to us in the long term. I know that it's definitely made my decisions easier every time I go to the store.
If you read the last blog post, A Day in the Life of Chemotherapy, you know that the end of Friday was not a bright shining moment in my life. I felt pretty crappy and slept on and off most of the evening. Saturday picked up a little bit. We tried to go to a pancake breffis. Well, we succeeded in going there but the pancakes weren't vegan and our friend wasn't there. Then we tried to go to the farmers' market. We also succeeded marginally in that we bought some interesting lemony leafy greens, parsley and a few other greens, but we didn't really get anything else because it was all just resellers. Then we had a super fun visit with SNorine and her smooshers. We'll just let the video speak for itself:
We had lunch at Ecopolitan with William's dad and went for a walk. I didn't have a whole lot in me after that. My energy came and went a little bit but we spent the remainder of the evening at home. We watched an interesting documentary called Pink Ribbons, Inc. It's pretty slow going but about halfway through it gets into some pretty interesting stuff about what I already suspected to be true of the large breast cancer fundraising organizations.
Sunday was like a brand new day. We went to early lunch at Namaste with Amy and Steve. They made us enchiladas and Amy got to help pull out some of my hairs, which I'm sure was super fun for her! Next we went out with my family for early mothers' day brunch where the following pictures ensued! After that we drove out to Baker for long boarding and bike riding with Kristin and Gabe. It turned out to be a really great afternoon for that. We went to the coop, received a really great phone call from a far away friend, rested back home for a couple minutes and then met them back up at Common Roots along with Jackie. I started to feel pretty wiped out by the middle of the evening but it was still really nice to feel sort of back to normal. Now please enjoy this short clip of us being able to enjoy spring:
