Baldies' Blog began originally in the UK by a 26 year old journalist with a blood cancer on a mission to inform the world about bone marrow donation.

He has since died, and I took on the cause of making cancer care more transparent for everybody.

Cancer is a disease that will touch everybody through diagnosis or affiliation: 1 in 2 men will be diagnosed and 1 in 3 woman will hear those words, "You Have Cancer."

I invite you to read how I feel along my journey and
how I am continuing to live a full life alongside my Hodgkin's lymphoma, with me controlling my cancer, not my cancer controlling me.

I hope that "Baldies' Blog" will prepare you to handle whatever life sends you, but especially if it's the message, "You Have Cancer."

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Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Losing It, my weight that is

I’ve lost some serious weight.
It can’t be seen on the scale.
I don’t know where those extra pounds are, but they’re certainly not in my abs or on my behind.
How do I know this?
My pants are misbehaving. They like to fall off.
My belts are too big, and I’ve been increasing the notches I was for a while now.
Pretty soon, you’re going to be able to see right past me if I turn sideways.
One time, Miss no butt, that’d be me, tried to sit on the ground forgetting I lost what I once had. My estimation of the distance between the ground and myself was wrong.
I ended up trying to sit, but falling on my ass and tumbling onto my back.
This was at soccer practice in front of all the kid’s parents.
I thought the parents were aware of my situation even though I never overtly told them.
I did run around with gloves on my hands so as not to touch the children and infect myself. This was when I was preparing myself for my transplant.
I think that they summed this up to me being a “germaphobe” and that I was a little “quirky,” but still a real fun coach that ran their kids until exhaustion.
I think I handled the situation of informing them wrongly. I thought everyone knew about me until one day I just disappeared, leaving J, my Dad, or the rumors to speculate.
C-town is small. Stories about people like me get around, but leaving my situation to speculation is a bad idea.
That’s how people decide I’m dying when I’m not. This is how rumors get started.
The thing about rumors is not only do they strike fear among those who have known be, but they also get to people who come into my life, such as my son’s teachers. I don’t want the people influencing my child’s life to have a foundation of misinformation regarding his life.
You can probably imagine why this would worry me. At five, X is very receptive to the messages, both spoken and unspoken, he receives from those who carse from him.
He can sense the tension in his teachers that feel sorry for him for having a mother so sick. He knows and will capitalize on this.
If he does not capitalize on this to get want he wants, he will at the very least sense the fear among “grown-ups” about my situation.
If these people are afraid, he must know, he should be very very afraid.
I think these fears need to be halted, on some levels. As for announcing my feelings, I did this to ease the burden and tension in basic communications between acquaintance and I when we would see each other, especially in front of Xander. Though X speaks little, he is very receptive to the verbal cues and emotions of those we speak to.
Knowledge can be power, though everything is only good in moderation. Please understand that when communicating in the presence of my child, or my niece who has verbalized fears about the loss of her aunt, keep the tone light. Keep the conversation upbeat. Ask straight forward questions I can answer with a mater-of-fact response. Unless you’re sooo happy, do not cry.

2 comments:

emjay. said...

this needs to be your logo for the cards.

Anonymous said...

This picture is the one that now resides on my cards. If you're on the Christmas list, you'll be getting one in the mail.
Hill