Second Chance

I just scanned through my posts and can't believe I haven't posted here...

Back in June, I opened my own fitness center! For anyone who's been following all along (or long enough), you know that keeping my body moving is a priority. You know that I exercised whenever I could through treatment. You know that my oncologist attributed my good health to my relative ease of side effects through treatment. You know that since the active cancer experience ended, I've completed three triathlons.

You might not know that years ago, before cancer was part of my daily living, I was quite heavy. I changed how I ate, I started exercising, I lost weight, I felt (feel) great. Baby steps. No fad diet. No hours upon hours on a treadmill. Lifestyle changes. Pieces I could handle when I could handle them.

You might know that I am a teacher. I teach elementary band for a living, but really, in my essence, I am A Teacher. I can't imagine a career that had no teaching component in it, regardless of the content.

Put this all together, and you have Second Chance FitCenter. I converted a room in my house into a studio. I want to help people who want to make changes to their lives, whether it's because they want to lose weight, they want to reclaim their bodies during or after cancer, or they just want to be in better shape (to whatever that means to them). I'm not your go-to gal if you want to shave half an hour off your marathon time.

Sound interesting? Take a look at my website: www.secondchancefit.com. You'll find my story, my services, my philosophy, testimonials from those who have been working out with me since April (I've been certified that long and took on a few "practice clients" before opening my doors to the public), links to reviews on Yelp and Merchant Circle, my contact info.

Check it out, pass it on.

another clean scan :)

I had an appointment with the oncologist today, after a chest X-ray and blood work on Thursday. X-ray was clean, blood work looked good. My next appointment is in late May.

Today is two years since I finished radiation. So much has happened in those two years... It feels like much longer ago than that, but I've been a busy chica, and being busy certainly makes time pass more quickly.

This blog has become pretty not interesting, but I guess that's a good thing :)

In the last couple of weeks, I've had three more people comment that I have hair now. This is slightly annoying, since my hair started growing in before I even finished chemo, and that was over two years ago. Not a huge deal by any means, but come on now people. I've moved on. You can, too.

At school, they're participating in the Pennies for Patients drive, which supports people with blood cancers. I'm pretty sure this had nothing to do with me, that it's coincidence. But I told the counselor, who is organizing the whole thing, that if she wanted to let kids know that I had a blood cancer, so this might help people like me, she was welcome to, and that if anyone wanted to talk about it, I'm happy to answer questions. I had quite a few kids ask me questions, which was cool (some of them have been my students for long enough that they remember when I was out). I also had a few kids come in and put change in my box, which I thought was cool. They are competing with other homerooms, so change they give to me doesn't count towards their competition, which makes it that much sweeter for them to do.

I've given up the search for an answer or a cure for chemo boobs. I am dealing with my heart rate issue when I exercise in hopes that it will come down eventually. And I still wear sunscreen, though I don't know if I need to be as vigilant about it or not. No need to press my luck.

Otherwise, lots of good stuff going on professionally and blissfully little to report on the health front. I've been using my NetiPot almost every day when I get home from work, and I'm convinced that is the primary reason that I haven't been sick yet this season. There's still plenty of time, I know, but so far, so good...

brief holiday musings

I am constantly reminded how lucky I am.

It's Christmas — a holiday I don't really celebrate but my family does, so I do by proximity — and I am healthy. I'm working, I'm exercising, I'm doing pretty much whatever I want ... well, I'm not restricted by a tumor or white blood cell counts or anything of that nature, at least. We're not gathering this year in fear that it's my last. I'm not in a hospital.

For the people who are in one of those situations ... I would do something for you, but I don't have the first clue what that would be. If you have a suggestion (in general, for yourself, for someone you know), let me know. In person visits need to be local ;)

In the mean time, it's a day of celebration. If you celebrate and love Christmas and look forward to today all year — here it is! Merry Christmas! If you celebrate it and dread it, or if you don't celebrate it, it's a day of celebration — in another few hours, it'll finally be gone for another year ;)

Since I decided to stop doing a post a day, I have gotten a bit lazy over here. Well, lazy on the blog.

Fortunately, there's not much going on on the cancer front.

I was given a neat pair of silver earrings in the shape of a ribbon for my two years cancer free anniversary. I wore them to work one day and was asked if they were breast cancer earrings.

ARGH!!! NO!!!!

Shit. Ribbons don't even necessarily signify cancer awareness, much less cancer awareness. The pink ribbon has got to go.

I am still in the process of becoming a Certified Personal Trainer. I have big dreams of opening a small studio in my house where I can help fellow survivors make their bodies strong. I will definitely post more when I have more to post.

In the mean time, just living life. Lots going on at/for work, lots going on with the CPT stuff. I've managed to keep myself healthy so far this school year which is nice (and is no easy task!).

Life is good :-)

I am not a cancer warrior

So I'm a card-carrying member of the Cancer Club.

I'd say that half the time (maybe more?), it's not anywhere in my consciousness.

The other roughly half of the time is split between many things:

• There is a good amount of time that what I'm doing is because of the cancer, though most of the time by now, the action/reaction is pretty habitual and "cancer" isn't in the front of my mind (i.e. sunscreen, avoiding plastics, avoiding synthetics and pesticides in foods).

• I have periodic conversations with people about health-related things — whether it's my experience with cancer, theirs, their experience in something else equally as crappy.

• I continue to have run-ins with physiological chemo leftovers (chemo brain, chemo boobs, heart rate issues).

• There are cancer blogs that I follow and cancer-related organizations that send me e-mails and show up in my Facebook news feed.

• I get an e-mail every so often from the oncology counselor at the hospital, letting me know about an event at the hospital.

• I learn about someone else getting cancer, which always instantly puts me back sitting on the hospital bed in the ER on that fateful day.

• I very rarely get an e-mail from someone who stumbled across my blog and writes to me looking for advice. I always answer those.

• And every once in a great while, I think, "Yeah, I had cancer ... Holy crap! I had cancer!" It is somehow still kind of surreal.

I have friends who I've met through cancer treatments and cancer-related events. There are many people who have started organizations, websites, etc. in their survivorship. They are very active in the cancer community (most often in the young adult cancer community). They (seem to) feel a deep connection with others with this disease and an angry passion about eradicating it.

Every now and then, I feel like I should be like them. Or like I should want to be like them.

But I don't.

I certainly believe that cancer is an awful thing, though there are many other conditions that are much higher on my "don't want it" list. I believe, more or less, that people don't deserve it, and that the current treatments for it are barbaric and awful — in too many cases, worse than the disease itself. I would love for there to be no more cancer, but I also believe that regardless of how much money we raise for research and awareness, we will always have cancer because we love our carcinogens too much.

It surprises me how many people go through cancer hell and don't change what they put into their bodies. (Not judging, just surprised.)

I have been told that Hodgkin's is not a lifestyle-related cancer. That means that it happened regardless of whether or not I was making healthy choices. It means that the plastics I am avoiding, the grilled meat I am avoiding, the cigarettes I am avoiding, the belly fat I am keeping off, the sun I block most of the time, have/had no influence on my cancer. But those things can help to cause other cancers, and I don't want those, either, so I have made choices. They're not always easy choices (have I mentioned how much I hate sunscreen?), but in my opinion, they're worth it. Suncreen is better than chemo. Life is still worth it, even without meat, without convenient drinks, without artificial sweeteners.

I'm rambling. I'm not really sure where I'm going. I guess I feel like there's a lot of ducking personal responsibility in this whole cancer thing. It's easier to yell at other people to fix the problem than to see how we are contributing to it ourselves. If we refused to purchase/consume items that were carcinogenic, companies would need to find another way to produce/package. Of course, that includes damn near everything, it seems, including carpet, particleboard, stain-master-type fabrics, most plastics, canned food/drinks (they line the insides with plastic), the list goes on and on. But I think food and drink would be the best place to start, followed by cleaning agents (soap, shampoo, detergents — we absorb a lot of the crap we put on our bodies).

So I suppose my efforts to gently influence people to change their habits, or even one habit could be considered cancer advocacy.

Of course, we've known for a while that smoking causes cancer, and there are still plenty of smokers. I don't suspect most people are even going to give a second thought to lesser evils. But it does frustrate me that they hand out water in plastic bottles at the Race for the Cure.

99% of the time, I have no negative feelings about not being a cancer warrior, so this is really not a quality-of-life issue. It just pops up every now and then.

It's not really even "popped" right now — I just felt like blogging and this issue was on my list of things to blog about. I'm sure I put it on the list the last time something triggered it. I wonder if that post would have been more interesting. Or more off-putting. Hm.