Missy Diggs

Last week was a crazy busy week here at Casa de Diggs. I made a wedding cake (and yes, I am planning to write a post about that), and also we have some dear friends visiting us (they live in Panama!) with their 21-month old daughter, and then of course there was going out of town to the actual wedding, which both Mr. B and I were in, and in the midst of all that I also started a weekly farm subscription so we got a big box of veggies and stuff. Whew! It was a lot, and I haven’t even mentioned what a big job it was helping the Vivid Girl identify and manage all the feelings she was having about all these major events. Suffice to say that it was a very big job, and since we were using all our regular time to do all the other stuff, we mostly worked on that job during the hours previously dedicated to sleep.

So, by Sunday evening, with all these fun and sometimes not-so-fun things behind us, we were all very very tired. And so we said, “Let’s take it easy this week.”

This was my plan all along. Over the past two or three years, since I’ve been dealing with cancer, I’ve had to slow down a lot. I used to be kind of a go-go rah-rah-rah just-say-yes sort of person, but since I got sick and went through treatment I’ve had to pay for every busy day by spending the following day in the ugly mauve La-Z-Boy. And this whole wedding extravaganza was way more than just one busy day; it was more like six busy days, and I can’t remember the last time I managed something like that. And Mr. B? well, he can do it but he really truly prefers not to. He likes downtime, and a lot of it. The Vivid Girl is like me, but also like him. She’s a study in inertia: once set in motion, she has a lot of momentum and will go for ever (in the absence of friction), but you’ve got to apply quite a bit of force to change her state. And the more friction there is, or the more often force is applied, the more things devolve into entropy and chaos.

So, being a wise woman who knows how to take care of herself, her husband, and her child, I left the calendar blank for this whole week. No meetings, no appointments, no playdates. No special events of any kind. Just resting and getting back on track.

You probably already know stories that begin just like that. And so you know what happens next.

What happens next is the houseguests from Panama realize that your house is much nicer than a hotel, especially for their toddler, and ask if they can stay a few more days. And because we love them and rarely get to see them and because it is more fun having them than not having them, we say YES! STAY AS LONG AS YOU LIKE! and we mean it.

Even though that decision has the unforeseen consequence of making the Vivid Girl not want to go to school. This is unforeseen because the Vivid Girl, who often tried to find ways of getting out of going to preschool, almost never tries to get out of going to her new school. In fact, she often wishes she could go to school on Saturday and Sunday. And she resents all those times when there is no school, like Spring Break, because school is so much more fun than Spring Break, even if your mama lets you eat nothing but trailer food and takes you to the zoo to see baby lions and helps you collect and carry a whole pail of rocks from the Llano River. School, it turns out, is better than all that. But the Toddler from Panama? she is even better than school!

So this week I have been taking the Vivid Girl to school late (two or three hours late sometimes, but that’s okay, because her school is cool like that), or picking her up early (today, four hours early). It’s really cutting into my taking it easy time. Because no matter what I am doing when I am spending time with the Vivid Girl, I am not taking it easy. Unless I’m asleep. And usually not even then, I think, because lately I have been waking up sore from fighting for my space in the bed. (The Vivid Girl is sleeping in our room with us, and the Toddler from Panama is sleeping in the Vivid Girl’s room. Not that the Vivid Girl would be sleeping there anyway. Even if we paid her.)

There is also the totally-foreseen consequence of making the Vivid Girl not want to go to bed. This was easy to predict because she has never ever once in her whole life wanted to go to bed. But over the past six years we have actually developed a bedtime routine that usually results in her being asleep sometime before nine’o'clock if we’re lucky. The excitement of having a Toddler from Panama to bathe with and read to has been a very sweet disruption to our bedtime routine. The wrathful disappointment of having a Toddler from Panama who is still out with her parents when bedtime arrives has been a little less sweet but just as disruptive.

But still we are enjoying having our friends with us, and it is very touching and sweet to see our two girls having such a good time together, and the sweetness of seeing our child reading to a younger child who is wearing her old pajamas and tucked in to her very own bed is more than compensation for any minor disruptions in our daily routine.

So naturally when my friend called and said that she had to leave town for a family emergency and asked if we could take her dog for a week or so, I said YES! OF COURSE! FOR AS LONG AS YOU LIKE!

And I meant it.

And for being able to say that, and mean it, after the busy days I’ve been having…. for that, I am truly grateful.

Okay, so you guys want recipes and all like that. Which makes sense, because it’s hard to take that crazy leap of faith and start cramming a bunch of green leaves into your blender when you are so excited about the otherwise fruity and delicious drink you are about to enjoy.

I don’t really use recipes.

But I do read them for inspiration, and I have also found some resources that have given me a fair amount of guidance about how to do this crazy thing of drinking my greens.

Be warned: many of the people who are inspired enough by the greatness of green smoothies to want to shout it from the Internet rooftops are a little…. well…. enthusiastic is a nice word…. totally wacked out is also fun to say. You’ve probably had some encounters with True Believers before. They’re delightful and informative, as I’m sure you know, and sometimes they can be wildly emphatic and dogmatic. It’s okay, though; it’s just vegetables. Lovely green and organic vegetables. (Though some True Believers claim –and I agree with them actually– that leafy greens should get their very own food group and not be considered vegetables at all. )

The first book I read that really turned me on to the green smoothie situation was Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko. She has another book that I haven’t read yet called Green Smoothie Revolution: The Radical Leap Toward Natural Health. She is a raw foodist, and she and her family are not fooling around! They don’t just buy some bag of triple-washed spinach and stick a few leaves in with their bananas and berries: Oh No! They go tramping around in the woods looking for wild edibles, and there are videos on YouTube of her son Sergei doing just that. Anyway, if you do any reading about green smoothies you will definitely run across Victoria and Sergei. Green for Life has some smoothie recipes and is also just a great read if you are wanting to get fired up about going green.

I really like the greensmoothie.com web site too. It is wacky and has all kinds of crazy highlighting and outrageous health claims (which may very well all be true; what do I know?) but it also has good basic information about how to blend fruit and greens together to get a good smoothie. Here’s their basic recipe (note the highlighted title; they love highlighting over there at greensmoothie.com):

Basic Green Smoothie Recipe:

• 2-3 sweet fruits, e.g. apple or pear – blend first to form a tasty base,
• 1 vegetable fruit or a celery stalk – add next for extra minerals, e.g. summer squash or zucchini,
• One tray of organic baby greens like sunflower or salad mix from my Sprouter, or one packet of pre-washed organic greens, or a handful of farm greens or wild edibles.

And here are the week’s worth of green smoothies I posted on Facebook recently. Like I said, I don’t really measure quantities or use recipes per se, but I usually like the results pretty well. And if I don’t like it, I just drink it anyway and make a yummier smoothie the next day.

• Tuesday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, collard greens, frozen cherries, and coconut water. Yum? well, it tastes healthy, for sure. And the rats…. they love it.
• Wednesday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, honeydew melon, coconut water, arugula, frozen peaches. Tastes like spring! nom nom nom
• Thursday’s green smoothie: grapefruit, celery, Asian pear, amba hardar (mango ginger, from the Indian grocer), arugula, coconut water. Sweet and grassy! Hardcore and delicious!
• Friday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, cacao pods, banana, apple, dandelion greens, frozen strawberries. Color: scary dark olive green (scary? or sophisticated?). Mostly tastes like banana but has a seriously bitter afterbite. Not for sissies. Me, I’ll drink anything if it’s been run through the blender with a banana, so I’m okay.
• Saturday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, raw cacao powder, cinnamon, banana, frozen strawberries, almond milk, spring mix. OMG y’all this is GOOD! It has a very rich dark chocolate color and a perfectly sweet choco taste. This week’s winner!
• Sunday’s green smoothie: almonds, cacao pods, flax seeds, dates, oranges, romaine lettuce, almond milk, cinnamon. I wish it were colder, but it’s delicious! Very creamy and exotic. Lovely green color. If I want to drink any more of it, I will have to chase away Miss Kattie Rat: she is dipping her paws in and scooping up great handfuls.
• Monday’s green smoothie: honeydew, avocado, matcha (green tea powder), dulse (seaweed), coconut water, romaine. Speckled and refreshing. Tastes a bit like cold California roll soup, if there were such a thing. At first I thought it needed something sweet and crisp, like fresh mint, but now I am grooving on it.

My green smoothies are not always green. Sometimes they are red, sometimes they are brown, and sometimes they are the hideous green color that lies in the totally unappetizing range between red and brown.  For me, a nice color can be a nice benefit, but I haven’t found a real correlation between taste and color or anything like that.

Also! a lot of these green smoothie Internet people love to go on and on about two big lies:

1. you can put certain greens in a smoothie without affecting the taste at all, and
2. if you use those certain greens, your kid will drink a whole green smoothie and beg for more

I can taste pretty much every type of green I’ve tried. Probably the least conspicuous taste is baby spinach, which probably means that’s a good one to start with if you’ve never done green smoothies before. It also means you can put a whole bunch of spinach in there before it really affects the taste much. I read one web site that claimed green cabbage would be undetectable in a fruit smoothie and so I mixed up a big batch of strawberry cabbage delight and I will tell you now that the cabbage was totally detected. (I think it was the horrible taste of wet farts that gave it away.) And I don’t know about your child, but my child does not like to be in the same room with a green smoothie, and she has never consented to actually taste one. She doesn’t actually care much for fruit smoothies either, as a rule, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I am guessing that she is not the only kid who isn’t going to be eating two pounds of greens a day any time in this decade.

I have made a lot of smoothies with spinach, either raw (I buy the big bags of triple-washed spinach at Costco) or frozen. I also love to use arugula, because I love love love arugula. I love it so much I would like to write a waltz for it and dance it around the room. I also buy from Costco those big plastic bins of prewashed organic salad mix and I grab great handfuls of it and shove it down into the blender. Beyond that I have also tried collard greens (fresh or frozen), frozen mustard greens, cress, sprouts, dandelion greens, parsley, cilantro, kale, chard, romaine, and various other lettuces. I always have big bags of frozen berries and fruit from Costco and I use whatever fresh fruit or melons we have sitting around as well. Bananas and avocados make things very creamy. To my surprise, cucumber seems to make things creamy as well. I often put in flax seed, cacao pods or powder, cinnamon, or turmeric. Sometimes I throw in some nuts, or sesame seeds, or tahini, or nut butter. I use nut milk, soy milk, water, coconut water, or juice. If I want it sweet, I’ll use dates or agave nectar or honey or molasses or xylitol. Our ice tastes funny to me so unless I use frozen fruit or frozen greens my smoothies tend to be a bit warmish and that’s not always good. If that happens I’ll usually stick it in the fridge and go take a shower or something.

I like posting about my smoothies and sharing recipes because that keeps me inspired and trying new things. Otherwise I get in a rut and the next thing you know I’ve eaten Cheerios for breakfast three days in a row. So, here’s my challenge/request to you. If you read this, and you make a green smoothie, post a comment telling what you put in it and how it was. And that’ll keep me going for awhile and give me time to figure out what I’m going to blog about next, and we’ll see how many posts I end up with this quarter, thanks to the power of green smoothies.

Lately I have been telling everyone on Facebook what I put in my green smoothies everyday. And the funny thing is that I have been getting a lot of comments and questions, and it seems like instead of being freaked out by the whole concept of green smoothies, a bunch of people are actually thinking something like, “Hey, that sounds like something I should get into.”

And so I thought it would be a good topic for a blog post, especially since it does seem to be about time for my quarterly update. (jeesh, where does the time go? well, that’s a whole ‘nother blog post for sure. Look for it in June or so.)

I have always liked greens. My dad grew up in Arkansas and so my sweet midwestern mother would valiantly try to recreate the meals he loved and remembered, with varying levels of success. Liver and onions, with the liver cooked until it is chewy and tastes like the tongue of a shoe soaked in blood: ewww, yuck. Stewed tomatoes and okra, with the okra so slimy that it is almost impossible to spoon out just one serving from the bowl: no, thank you. A mess of greens, cooked with bacon until the fat turns green and the greens are nearly vapor: yes, please, and I’ll eat my sister’s serving as well.

I have also always felt that every truly good day contains a salad. I had a friend whose family liked to tease their mother about how she could not eat a dinner that didn’t begin with a green salad, no matter where she was or who was paying. They bought her a t-shirt that said “Veni, Vidi, Veggie: I came, I saw, I had a salad.” As a salad lover myself, I wanted one of those shirts and I was sure that EVERYONE would want one. Obviously this was the next great t-shirt, the “I’m with stupid” of the 90s. Strangely, I’ve never seen another one. I guess they didn’t really catch on.

But even though I willingly ate greens (and sopped up the pot liquor with my cornbread) and loved salads, I still needed to be clued in to just how much I liked the green leafy stuff. The next clue came from a woman I met in a series of self-realization type seminars I did. One of the things we were working on at some point was figuring out how to care for ourselves so we could get out there and do all the unreasonable and powerful things we were supposed to be doing all the time. This woman said that she felt best when she ate greens at every meal. At every meal, y’all! My first reaction was, that’s weird. My second reaction, right on its heels, was How would you even know that? and my third reaction, the one that stuck, was I bet I’d feel better if I ate greens at every meal too. It has taken me years to even get close to managing anything like that. (There is one other thing that has stuck with me about this woman, and so I have to share it here because I probably won’t have any reason to bring her up again: she said the word “donkey” as if it rhymed with “monkey.” Seriously, isn’t that odd?)

Finally, what happened is that after my cancer treatments were pretty much finished I started wanting to eat the healthiest diet I possibly could. And I read lots of books that seemed at first to take a lot of the joy out of life. And some of these books are pretty fringey and weird, and some of them are pretty mainstream and well-researched, and a lot of them say the same thing. And one thing they say is that green leafy vegetables are the key to health. And this is not just in the yeah yeah yeah I know eat more vegetables way: some of these people advocate eating TWO POUNDS of green leafy vegetables EVERY DAY. And,  basically, because there is no way to really do that if you have to actually chew every bite, green smoothies are the way to go.

But then it turns out that green smoothies have their own benefits, aside from just making it even remotely possible to eat the amount of greens recommended. For one thing, when you blend the hell out of your greens, you take out some of the work of digestion. This is a boon for people who have difficulty digesting vegetables (many cancer patients fall into this category), people who have trouble chewing or eating large quantities of food (hello, cancer?), and people who simply want to absorb as much nutrition as possible from every ounce of their food.

When it comes to nutrition per ounce, greens are the hands-down winner. They have crazy high nutrient density, which basically means that 100 calories worth of green leafies has more nutrition than 100 calories worth of anything else. It is also a relatively large serving size of food so it’s filling and it can be a lot of work to eat. However, stick that stuff in a high-powered blender, sweeten it with fruit, and stick a straw in it, and you can slurp up more nutrients for breakfast than most people eat in a week.

I started making a green smoothie for breakfast almost every day. It was hard at first, partly because I burned out my trusty old Oster blender in the first week. Also because it is hard to figure out how much produce to buy, how to keep it all fresh, and what combinations will taste good. Luckily for me, the taste is not a huge issue because it turns out that I will drink almost anything that you can pour out of a blender and suck through a straw. And there are lots and lots of recipes available, both on line and in books. And, though I still can’t afford a Vita Mix, the rock star blender for the green smoothie lifestyle, I bought a Breville with a glass pitcher and have learned to live with it. (Many green smoothie lovers also advocate the Blendtec but I don’t like it because the pitcher contains dangerous plastics, and the website has a bunch of research claiming to prove that dangerous plastics are safe. I just hate that.)

Here’s the question everybody asks, and that I don’t know for sure how to answer: what benefits have I experienced from drinking green smoothies?

The first benefits were unexpected and totally clear: by the third day of green smoothies, my chapped lips were smooth and soft, and my fingernails seemed stronger. Soon after that I experienced a welcome change in bathroom habits. The other benefits are harder to define and explain, but I believe that drinking green smoothies is the single best thing I am doing for my health, and I would never want to give it up.

Here are some things I have noticed, that I think come from the greens:

• I don’t crave sweets anymore.
• I don’t experience blood sugar crashes like I always did before. If I get hungry, it’s not a crisis. I can wait a while to eat and hunger has become a pleasant sensation.
• I sleep better, and fall asleep more easily at a reasonable time.
• My teeth feel cleaner, my breath is fresher, and my sweat smells clean.
• My mood is more stable.
• I have a much greater sense of well-being.

In some ways, it’s vague. In other ways, it’s totally clear to me. I love the clean and  bitter taste of greens, I love knowing that I have had half my veggies for the day before 9 am, and I love thinking of all the precious nutrients being released from their cell walls and ready to enter my blood stream through my fancy hand-blown glass straw. It’s better than chemotherapy, I’ll tell you that! It’s virtue in a glass.

And the rats, the lovely pet rats, they really do love the green smoothies. And that gives me a good feeling, too, because I remember some study about how rats wouldn’t eat white flour, and I like to think they are attracted to what is good. It’s also just so cute to watch them pull themselves up on the edge of the glass and take a sip!

Here’s a copy of an email I just sent to my lovely and wonderful support group, in response to recent news reports about some government panel’s new mammographic screening recommendations.

Y’all have probably been hearing the news about the government panel that just issued new recommendations for mammographic screening, and what they said was: Don’t worry about getting mammograms every year when you turn 40. Just wait til you’re 50. Some people have also gotten the idea that it’s not worth it to do self-exams, either.

I’ve been reading a lot of reactions and debate about this recommendation from all the folks in my various cancer communities, and here’s what they (and I) think:

These guidelines are based on some kind of huge “public health” financial model and do not actually apply to individual people. For most individuals, the most prudent thing to do is go ahead and get mammograms starting at 40. Or before that if you notice anything or feel worried. And definitely continue to do self-exams.

Here are some facts to take into account:
Most cancers and recurrences are found by patients, not by doctors or through screenings. (so do self-exams!)
Most women who die of breast cancer were not receiving annual mammograms. (so get mammograms!)
Most women who develop breast cancer have no family history of the disease. (you may be at risk even if you don’t know it!)
Men can get breast cancer too. (so if you think something’s going on, get it checked out!)

It doesn’t have to be a lump to be cancer. Monitor any change in the color, shape, texture, appearance of breast tissue. IBC, for example, often starts out looking like a rash or a bug bite. If you notice any change that lasts for more than two weeks, see a doctor and ask them to rule out cancer.

Here are some statements that doctors sometimes make but that do not count as ruling out cancer:
“If it hurts, it’s not cancer.” (sometimes cancer hurts. Why wouldn’t it?)
“If it responds, even slightly, to antibiotics, it’s not cancer.” (Trust me, this is not necessarily true. If it does not respond completely to antibiotics, it may be something other than an infection. Get a mammogram. If that doesn’t show anything, get a biopsy. Find out what it is.)
“If you had cancer, it would show up on the mammogram.” (not necessarily: IBC and some other types of breast cancer can be difficult or impossible to detect on a mammogram. If you have a clear mammogram and nothing else is going on, congratulations! If you are still concerned about changes you have noticed in your breast, keep going. A clear mammogram is good, but if you still have questions, get them answered.)
“You’re too young to get breast cancer.” (The youngest breast cancer patient is not even 12 years old yet. If she’s not too young, you’re not too young.)

I don’t usually send out bossy emails like this but the recent news is so concerning to me because even the people making the recommendations admit that lives will be lost. Mammograms are not fun, and it can be a huge relief to hear that the experts say you don’t have to start getting them yet. But I encourage you to do more research before you decide to wait til you’re 50 to start being screened. Find out what your doctor thinks. I don’t want any of you to have to go through what I’ve gone through. I was 37 when I was diagnosed, and I am the first person in my family to get cancer. I love you, so please take care of yourselves.

If you know me, you know that I love to eat. (Even if you don’t really know me, you may have been able to guess.) And what I love to eat is EVERYTHING. Especially if it’s wrapped in bacon, filled with cheese, or basted with its own juices. If it’s a roast turkey, I like to eat the crackly skin. If it’s a roast chicken, I like to break the bones and suck out the marrow. For a special restaurant meal, I love to be taken to the Salt Lick Bar-B-Q, where you can order family style and when you finish your platter of brisket, ribs, and sausage they will bring you another one! Or Fogo de Chao, where they give you a little round coaster, red on one side, green on the other; and when you turn the green side up a seemingly endless parade of gorgeous Brazilian men, each wearing gauchos and brandishing a skewer of meat, approach you and ask, “Would you like sirloin? Would you like lamb chop? Would you like butt roast?” until you are totally overwhelmed and swimming in your own juices and you slam the coaster back over to red so you can catch your breath and savor your meat. (All the while keeping your eye out for the guy with the filet, so you can flip back to green as soon as you catch his eye.)

I also like butter. And cream. And frozen custard. And the whole milk yogurt with the cream on top. I am a regular customer at a certain Indian buffet where I’m pretty sure they put crack in the meat balls. When I buy beef bones from our massage therapist who raises her own meat, I don’t just want the bones, I want the hooves. And the liver. And maybe the heart. (But not the brain, or the tongue…. cause that’s just gross!)  (unless maybe you have a good recipe?)

I also eat vegetables, and fruit, and grains or whatever. More than once in my life I have eaten so many orange and red vegetables that I have turned a bit yellow: once when I was a baby and my mother rushed me to the doctor convinced I had jaundice, and then again as an adult when I saw myself in the mirror under fluorescent lights and gasped at how very yellow I was.

So, up til now, I have not exactly been the poster child for moderation. (Don’t even get me started on chocolate!) Or, you know, healthy choices. Though I have actually always been interested in nutrition, and in supporting local farmers and finding the best organic pasture-raised animal products. And I have also always eaten a lot of salad (with blue cheese! and bacon!) and more collard greens and okra than your average person. I also got through pregnancy with the aid of a smoothie so healthy even my hoola-boola midwife was impressed when I told her what all I put in it.

In other words, I have tried to eat healthfully, more or less, but I have not hesitated to pursue full-out high-fat pleasure when it presented itself. Which was probably more often than it really should have.

And then I got cancer.

And the thing about having cancer, or at least one thing about it, is that at some point you are going to wonder why it happened to you. And you are going to think that maybe you did something to cause it… or maybe you just failed to do something to prevent it…. or maybe there’s something you could do now to prevent it from happening again. And if you’re like me, you’re going to wear yourself (and everybody else) out researching that last part of the question, which to me is the only one that even seems possible to answer or to make any difference at this point. When I was in treatment, I talked a bit about this stuff in my support group, specifically about how to figure out what to eat to prevent cancer from recurring, and my support group leader said that “cancer treatment is the worst time to make major lifestyle changes or major changes in your diet.” And this was kind of hard for me to get, at that point, though now I definitely see the wisdom. (Also, for getting me through chemotherapy with any shred of dignity I would now like to thank chocolate milkshakes. I couldn’t have done it without them!)

But now that I am pretty much out of treatment I decided it was time to find some answers. I had seen a nutritionist during treatment, who advised me to eat low-glycemic-index foods, to eat lots of protein (140 grams a day!), to always always have some protein whenever I had any carbs at all, to eat no bananas or other tropical fruit EVER (or melons), to eat nothing but protein and vegetables the day before chemo and then as soon as they started the drip to eat all the carbs I wanted for twenty-four hours. I went home and researched all the advice he gave me, and it was all based on scientific stuff. And more importantly, when I tried the protein/carb chemo routine I felt much better and had fewer side effects. I also lost some weight during treatment (many breast cancer patients actually GAIN weight, how unfair!) but not enough to be dangerous, and I stayed healthy enough to keep receiving treatment. So I called that a success at the time, but then when I got off chemo I started to gain back some of the weight I had lost (probably a sign of health but not the one I was really hoping for!) and I started to really miss bananas and to be really really tired of forcing myself to eat so much protein.

I also was feeling pretty worried about recurrence, and wanting to do whatever I could to prevent it. Most importantly to me, I was getting tired of worrying about what I was eating. And I was exhausted by the prospect of the cancer coming back and me feeling guilty because I hadn’t done whatever I could to prevent it. I just did not want to find out I had cancer and then spend my precious time thinking, “If only I had stopped eating those ice cream sandwiches!!!!” or whatever. So, basically I wanted some control over the uncontrollable, and I wanted some control over my own future mind.

So I started to research what to eat to prevent cancer. Here is an incomplete list of some of the books that I read:

Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber

Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss by Joel Fuhrman and Mehmet Oz

Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler

The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health by Dean Ornish M.D.

The China Study by Campbell T. Colin

And now I am tired of listing the books, of which there have been many more, and it’s not like I’m recommending that you read these books, which in many ways have only made me sad. So instead of listing more I will just tell you some of the more interesting things I learned from them.

• When possible, eat organic. It really does make a difference. Organic food is more nutritious. Also, kids who eat organic food have fewer chemicals in their blood, or urine, or something. Seriously, it’s worth it.
• If organic is not available, but the food is good for you, eat it anyway. This applies mostly to fruits and vegetables, and beans and grains I guess. The benefits of the food really do outweigh the negatives of the way it was raised. Good to know, right?
• Eat more fruits and vegetables. You already knew that, right? Actually, here’s the important thing: eat MOSTLY fruits and vegetables, of which most are vegetables, of which most are green and leafy.
• Making small changes to your diet will result in small changes to your health. If you want large changes in your health, you are going to have to make large changes in your diet.
• Nutritional research is notoriously difficult to perform and difficult to analyze. Most researchers do not have enough evidence to prove anything, and they probably never will. If you want scientific certainty to guide your choices, you’re probably out of luck.
• The diet that is best for preventing heart disease is the same as the diet that is best for preventing diabetes, cancer, and other ailments. In most cases.
• And here’s the kicker: there’s plenty of research to suggest quite strongly that the risk of disease goes way way down as people consume fewer animal products. All other things being equal, or as equal as possible.

Well, shucks. Based on all this, I have already made quite a few changes, and I am working on making some more. During some parts of my nutrition reading marathon, I was despondently convinced that I would have to become a raw food vegan or something equally terrible. Moderation has never been my strong suit, remember. But as I read more, and thought more, and tried to gather some kind of consensus from all this information I found a more middle-ish path. On a very successful day, I eat mostly vegetables and fruit, beans, whole grains, some nuts and seeds. I eat some food cooked and some raw, in salads or smoothies. I aim to have more and more days like those. On the other days, I might have some cheese, or even an organic burger! I still have ice cream with my daughter, occasionally. I have been known to eat a cupcake here and there. It has been easier than I thought it would be, and I do feel better most of the time. I’ve lost some weight, and my tumor markers went down a bit.

But even though I am now mostly a vegetarian, and mostly a vegan one at that, I still cling fiercely to the idea of myself as a person who eats everything. I still get to be an omnivore, just not all the time.

When I was a kid, my mom had a book with the word “re-entry” in the title.  It was a guide for stay-at-home moms who wanted to return to the world of work. It always puzzled me, maybe because I never knew my mom before she was a stay-at-home mom, so the “re” seemed to be overstating things a bit. I think I had also heard the term “re-entry” in the context of space exploration, and I spent some time worrying about my mom (and other moms) “burning up on re-entry.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, as I try to piece my life back together after cancer treatment. I’m disoriented, time-shifted, jet-lagged, weary, bleary, timid, exhilarated, enthralled. Dealing with cancer knocked me off my feet. I keep thinking that it knocked me off my path. Now that I have my feet back under me most of the time, I don’t recognize the path I’m on. It’s new. I’m so relieved and grateful for this that it makes me swoon.

I’m trying to figure out how to let that gratitude guide my steps. At this point I am still letting my eyes adjust, trying to figure out which way to go. I’m going around in circles. I know for sure that I do not ever want to end up back on the old path, the one that led me to cancer in the first place. I also know that I might not actually have any control over that. It’s a balancing act: how to enjoy life to the fullest while doing everything I can to live as long and healthily as I can.  How to identify, and then give up, habits or activities that might increase the likelihood of recurrence. How to identify, and then take on, habits or activities that might increase the possibility of not dying of cancer. How to do all that without stressing myself out!

Reading the paragraph I just wrote, I am struck by two things: first, that it is a pretty accurate description of my state of mind, and second, that it is no wonder I am having a hard time relating to other people these days. I am all twisted up in a meta-, existential, out-of-context thought ball. Over the summer “MOMENTUM!” was my battle cry. I had just finished chemo and was taking on full-time mommying for the first time since I got sick. I made a plan, scheduled our weeks, and kept us in motion. And it worked. Now that school has started, my momentum has disappeared. My eyes feel huge as I look around at the whole big world and try to find the path for me. I think it’s just going to take some time. I’m trying to feel comfortable with that, even while I am haunted by the feeling that time’s a-wasting, that time is too precious to waste.

I just started playing around with the cute and awesome online word cloud generator at www.wordle.net. It is super fun and neato mosquito.

I had it make a word cloud of this blog and it was groovy. I think there’s some way for me to link to it but I can’t figure it out so if I get a chance I’ll ask Mr. B to help me. Otherwise, just go check it out for yourself. It could be interesting to put your writing in just to see what words you use the most. For example, I use “think” more than “know,” “hope” more than “dream,” and “water” more than “vinegar.”

Regardless of what I may think about the American Cancer Society and other “big box” cancer organizations, (read this essay if you didn’t know there was anything to think about) I have found myself very pleased to see the big ACS billboard in town that says “‘Happy Birthday’ is a victory song,” especially as I noticed this sign a few days before my actual birthday. I am now 39, two years older than I was when I was diagnosed with stage IIIc IBC, and at that time I didn’t know if I’d be here now. Also, at that time things had been stripped down to their barest elements, and everything in the future was completely black and white: I’d either be alive, or dead (or, possibly, dying). I couldn’t imagine that I would be alive, still healing, energetic enough to take my daughter swimming several days a week but still needing a nap on the weekends. I couldn’t imagine that I would have the stamina and energy to swim for an hour in Barton Springs but not the immune system strength to protect from bacteria in the water. My diagnosis was a huge disruptive obstacle and I couldn’t see past it at all.

Now I’m older and hopefully wiser and definitely more psyched to be here than I ever thought possible. AT one point in the early stages of my treatment I ran into an aquaintance at the toy store, where we were both shopping for presents for the same birthday party. I didn’t know this woman well, but felt that I knew her well enough to answer somewhat honestly when she asked, in a meaningful way, how I was doing. I said that I was tired, that treatment was hard, that I didn’t have the energy to get through the day, but that other than that, I was doing pretty well. She said brightly, “But it’s gotta make you love life, right?”

Well.

I can say now that cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment did not so much make me love life. Sometimes I felt guilty abou that, especially when I was afraid that I might not have much life left and didn’t want to spend what time I had in misery and fear. But cancer SURVIVORSHIP, now that’s different. There are some things about my life as a cancer survivor that really suck, and some that are just nuisances, but YES, by golly, surviving cancer sure as heck makes me love life.

It makes me love life so much that it’s sometimes scary. Because there is still that shadow circling around…. or maybe it is a flock of shadows, because there are the more likely scenarios (recurrence being statistically quite likely) and then there are the things that are not cancer but that could still cause my untimely death…. some of these are related to my cancer and its treatment (infection, for example, or heart damage caused by chemotherapy) and some of them are the random unexpected things that could happen to any of us at almost any time, but that we usually manage not to think about much. Car accident, you know, or seemingly minor head injury…. blood clot to the lung,.. hanta virus….swine flu… whatever.

One of the things that the cancer experience has left me with is a tiny little case of PTSD. This is pretty common among cancer survivors and so it was fairly predictable, but still it was something I couldn’t imagine living with, back when my only concern was whether I would get to live at all. So far, for me, it has mostly just meant that I am more aware of those circling shadows than I’ve ever been before. Though it has also made me a more difficult patient (for the first time in my life I am afraid of needles) and made it impossible for me to drink bottled water or any kind of icy drink out of a styrofoam cup. At least those last two are potentially better for the environment!

It has also left me with a poor memory, a weakened immune system, and a permanently damaged lymphatic system that requires lots of daily maintenance. I hope to post soon with pictures of the various garments, machines, and accessories that are required to keep me from swelling up in a painful and disabling way. (Won’t that be nice for you all?)

But this is a post about my recent birthday, and how glad I am that I got to have a birthday, and how much I hope to have many many more. And how I hope to enjoy them in good health and good spirits, and how I enjoy once again having a future that (though I am aware I really can’t see it at all) I can once again imagine in color and texture and light.

It makes me want to jump up and march around to some kind of fight song or victory song. The Notre Dame Fight Song being the one I know best of all, it’s the one that comes to mind first. I can hear it now:

We never stumble, we never fall

We take chemo infusions of wood alcohol

We’re the young adult cancer survivors

And we want to have more birthdays!

Or something like that, anyway.

I finished chemo a couple of weeks ago (yee-haw!) and while I am feeling quite a bit better I am still not quite up to par. I took the Vivid Girl on her class end-of-year field trip extravaganza the other day (boat ride on Ladybird Lake, then swimming and lunch at Deep Eddy Pool), which was immediately followed by Trophy Day at gymnastics…. and now it’s three days later and I’m still not back in full swing.

Meanwhile I have been taking a fabulous Artist’s Way workshop, based on the book by Julia Cameron, and it has stirred up some creative energy that I had lost touch with for awhile. Unfortunately, I am still at a point where I have more energy to dream up things to do than to actually do them.

So my list of Virtual Crafts (crafts I don’t actually do, but which I investigate on the Internet) is growing and growing. And I am doing a lot of pretend online shopping too, in which my wishlists grow longer and longer.

Here are some of my favorites right now:

Go to Etsy.com and do a search on “steampunk.” Thousands of fabulous items will appear! Including this awesome Kraken necklace and this gorgeous and lavishly priced dress!
Also this lovely journal and this awesome magnifying lens that clips onto your glasses and makes you look like a mad scientist.

I have also been spending a lot of time looking at the Retro & Mod fabrics on fabric.com and imagining myself spending the summer looking cool and crisp in swirly dresses.

Of course, that means I have to go back and read all the archives at A Dress A Day.

And sometimes I have to watch old movies with great dresses for inspiration. A recent fave: How to Steal a Million with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. You can Watch It Now on netflix.

Yesterday, we welcomed our new Saturday babysitter into our life (the Vivid Girl is so happy to have a babysitter again she wanted to throw confetti to welcome her!) and Mr. B and I went to the Blanton (WARNING: JAZZ! or try this link) to see the Birth of the Cool exhibit. It was good, though not quite as extensive as I had hoped. In particular, there were no clothes and not enough pictures of clothes. I also would have liked more furniture and objects of a household usefulness. More of everything! There was an awesome birdbath and some great architecture photography. We also popped upstairs and enjoyed looking at the fabulous Antiquities and Modern/Contemporary Art (some of which we thought was crazy though someone obviously loves it and some of which we loved though other patrons clearly thought it was crazy).

After that, we hopped on over to the east side to check out the book store Domy. It was awesome, and we both want to go back and spend more time there. The people working there were super nice and helpful as well. They had the kidrobot Luckies zipper pulls designed by Friendswithyou so we got some and mine was a cute little swirly piece of candy which I immediately put on my new puffy night vest. They also had the new book What It Is by Lynda Barry and Mr. B bought it for me as a gift. He said there was so much stuff he wanted in the store that he couldn’t narrow it down to what he wanted the most so he will have to budget some money and go back with time to decide. The store sells gift cards so I think we know what Mr. B is getting for his birthday (coming up on June 5)!

And now I am tired of doing the links and I just took my chicken out of the oven (Sunday dinner!) so I am going to say bye y’all! and I hope to be back soon!

In my dream world, no one would ever get cancer.

In my next-best dream world, those of us who do get cancer would breeze right through treatment (which would be 100% effective) and would then get right back to normal.

In this world, though, cancer strikes all kinds of people it should really leave alone and the treatments are not too breezy.  For me, I would not say that the treatment is worse than the disease, because if I had declined the treatment there is just about a 1% chance that I would even be here to complain about it. But I will say that it has not been very much fun (despite my determination to make this the Most. Fun. Cancer. EVER!). And getting back to normal, well…. that’s actually never going to happen. In cancer circles they often refer to the time after treatment as the “new normal” but I’m pretty sure I’m not even there yet.

Obviously cancer treatment has all kinds of side effects… some that show up right away, some that take some time to appear, and some that just linger as a possibility to keep you on your toes. Some of these side effects are too small to complain about, some are temporary, and some are permanent and a real pain in the ass. (One of the most annoying “side” effects of some cancer treatments: CANCER!) For the past few months, I’ve been struggling with lymphedema, a permanent and extremely annoying result of having lymph nodes and lymphatic tissues removed by surgery and/or damaged by radiation.

When I had my surgery, I was less upset about losing my breasts than about losing my lymph nodes. I mean, yeah, they had cancer in them, but I was still using them! But the cancer was using them too, to spread itself throughout my entire body, and so obviously they had to go. A month or so after the surgery I noticed that my right arm (aka “the affected arm”) was achy and tingly and puffy-feeling in a way my left arm was not. A local lymphedema therapist diagnosed me and gave me some tips, and when I was in Houston for radiation I saw the PTs at MD Anderson almost every day of my treatment for massage and teaching. I also got a compression sleeve and gauntlet to wear on my right arm, though the PTs there didn’t think I needed to wear them all the time, just whenever I seemed to need them.

As time went on, I still had problems and so I went to see a lymphedema specialist here in Austin. She told me to wear the sleeve and gauntlet every day, which I now do, and it helps. I was starting to feel like I needed to wear it at night, too, so she taught me how to wrap my right arm in short-stretch bandages every night before bed. It makes me look like the Michelin Mom, but I feel better when I do it, so I do it. I also have a lymphatic drainage massage that I am supposed to do at least twice every day, and a set of arm-flapping exercises, also twice a day, and as long as I do all these things and don’t do too much repetitive motion or heavy lifting my arm is okay. The sleeve/gauntlet thing is not attractive, and even though it’s supposed to be discreet because it’s flesh-colored it generally causes people to ask questions or to be afraid to shake my hand lest they hurt me. So it’s a little intrusive and it’s high-maintenance but it’s not so bad.

Meanwhile, though, the right side of my chest and the area under my arm on the right side has been achy, puffy, tender, and all that jazz. Well, guess what? you can get lymphedema there too, though this fact is not uniformly recognized by the medical community. It’s called truncal lymphedema, and learning how to deal with it has become somewhat all-consuming for me over the past three months. One of the complications of lymphedema (or side effects of this side effect, if you will) is that it decreases your body’s ability to fight off infections…. because my lymph nodes are gone and my lymphatic system is damaged, there’s a tendency for lymph to stagnate, basically, and infections love stuff like that. At first, we were hoping the massage/exercise routine would be enough to keep the truncal lymphedema under control, but then I got an infection in my right axilla (armpit) and chest wall that put me in the hospital for two weeks and we realized we were going to have to step it up to keep things under control.

So now I’m on long-term antibiotics, and I have a relationship with a professional “fitter” who works at a medical supply boutique and sells people like me stuff like this:

There is a bra-type thing that works for this but initially the fitter thought that the bra only provided the correct compression when used with prostheses. I was pretty irritated by the idea that I would have to wear a bra after all, and totally enraged that I would then “have” to wear prosthetic breasts –not because I wanted to, but because the therapeutic garment wouldn’t work properly without them– so I chose to go with a custom-made “vest” instead. Until the vest came, I went out and bought some stretchy “support” undergarments (also called “body shapers”) which actually helped a lot. Then the vest came in. It’s thick cotton beige material, with a huge zipper up the front (but first you have to fasten the hooks and eyes). It covers me from collar bone to hip bone, and from shoulder to shoulder. It makes me look like I just escaped from a sanitarium, and I cried for a couple of hours the night I first brought it home.

When I wear it, it helps a lot. More than anything else I’ve tried. But it’s hot (OMG IT IS SO HOT!) and I live in Texas. I literally have ONE SHIRT that I can wear that will actually cover the thing, and it is institutional in its ugliness (OMG IT IS SO UGLY!). And while I am grateful for the help I get from this thing, I am made acutely miserable by having to wear it.

Someone on one of my message boards pointed out that there are more garments available for people who “support” breast cancer (think pink!) than for people who have actually HAD breast cancer. I think this is shameful. I also recently read a study that showed that there is a much higher unemployment rate among cancer survivors than among the general public, especially among women, and especially among women who had had breast, uterine, or ovarian cancer. I think this is highly suspicious. My crazy brain is telling me that if elite athletes needed garments to provide compression someone would design something much more stylish than what has been designed for me, and I think that something needs to be done about that.

So that’s what’s been going on with me lately. I’m wearing my vest as much as I can stand to, coming up with alternatives for days when I can’t (say, because I’m taking my kid to an outdoor concert at SXSW or because I washed it and it takes more than a day to dry), and actively pursuing Plan B.

Because I am going to be dealing with this for the rest of my life. And there has got to be a better way.