Category Archives: Craft

Navy blue fingernails

11 Replies

Tracy_Sorensen_March_2014
As I type this today I can see, out of the corner of my eye, flashes of the navy blue fingernails on my left hand. The fingernails on the right hand are still bare, although I’m intending to get to them shortly. I’m not normally a wearer of any sort of nail polish but this whole cancer trip has blown “normally” out of the water, so what the hell. Yesterday, I went to a Look Good, Feel Better workshop at the Bathurst RSL Club* for women with cancer and the navy nail polish was in the showbag. As someone who can only be bothered with makeup in emergencies – weddings, job interviews – I hadn’t been hugely interested, but I signed up because I was worried about my eyebrows. Take all other hair, but leave me my characteristic thick black eyebrows! But noting that eyebrow loss is a common side effect of chemo, I thought I’d better learn how to draw them back on, if need be. As it turned out, I loved the whole workshop. We were lovingly tended by a team of volunteers in big red aprons, like Bunnings workers only kinder and gentler. I had a professional makeup artist, Kate, sit beside me to help dab, brush and smooth in. The light was dim in there, so we may have been a bit heavy-handed. Gradually, we were transformed from sickly, hairless beings to nightclub-ready party girls, all at 11am on a Wednesday morning. I tried on a blonde wig (instant glamour!) and a black wig (cartoonish) and a brown curly one that made me look exactly like Mum circa 1972. I sashayed out of there with brilliant red lips and a flowing turban. I popped in to the art gallery, saying hello to an acquaintance who smiled politely, clearly not recognising me. (Probably a good thing.) Anyway, now I know how to draw a pair of eyebrows.

I look good and feel better today but, just to balance things out, I looked wan and felt bad over the weekend and Monday. Once the steroids wore off after the last chemo session, I started getting searing pain in my joints and muscles, especially at the ankles, knees, hips and wrists. I could hardly sleep at night and during the day I lay around in pajamas. It was really vile. Dawn and Peter, up from Canberra, made meals and brought cups of tea. I’m so, so glad that I do bounce back after a few days. I’ve now gone into a frenzy – making hay while the sun shines – on my Waste to Art entry. I dragged a great swathe of clear plastic out of the shed, the stuff our new mattress had turned up in. I decided it looked like the “glistening membrane” of my cancerous peritoneum; I’d hang pieces of paper recycled from old journals on it; I’d stitch it to look like sutures, or maybe slice it to suggest surgery. My craft isn’t pretty but I’m never short of ideas.

*For my international reader (Jane), RSL = Returned Services League; their clubs have bars, bistros, poker machines and the Ode of Remembrance over the loudspeaker every day at 6pm. (My other international reader, Lisa, knows all about RSL Clubs!)

Photo of me looking good, feeling better by Steve Woodhall.

On baldness

7 Replies

I’ve boldly titled this post “On baldness” as though I am an expert, when in fact I’ve only had personal experience of it since Monday. What started as a trickle of hair soon became a waterfall. I was going around absentmindedly pulling out great hunks and then having nowhere to put them. I’d weave them into a circle and put them in my bag, or scan the horizon for the nearest public rubbish bin. Or, if it was just a little bit, I’d let it float to the ground, mentally noting that hair is biodegradable. When I got up to Wyong on Monday, with hair floating around my head but only some of it attached, Deb (sister) advised it was time to take preemptive action. She got out her buzzing clippers, and within a couple of minutes it was all on the laundry floor. My scalp was now a patchy landscape of bristles and interesting features normally hidden. On the side of my scalp above the ear, a fairly large V-shaped scar. We worked out this must have been from the time I was four years old and sailed through the windscreen of the family Volkswagen after Mum slammed on the brakes to avoid a taxi. I do remember it – not going through the windscreen, but sitting on the footpath afterwards, and a woman looking at me saying, “There’s blood all over her!” And moles. I have moles on my scalp. Deb had to buzz around them. She briskly swept up the hair and emptied it into the bin before I could explain that I might need it for … for …. something. All that hair. Going to waste. What about crochet? No, it’s in the swing-top bin. We’ve moved on. Then I was handed the reddish-brown Chrissie Amphlett wig, the one Deb was given during her own chemo for breast cancer. It wasn’t too bad. I didn’t look like me, but I looked like someone, and that person didn’t look bald, so it was all good.

Then we were off on the school run to pick up the two little nephews. I was standing near the gate, parents and children trooping up the path, when Max caught sight of me and announced, in ringing tones: “This is my aunt! She hasn’t got any hair! She’s wearing a wig!” A mother shot me an appraising glance and said, “It looks quite natural.” The other nephew didn’t notice.

When Steve finally saw me he was disappointed that I didn’t actually look like Chrissie Amphlett.

Since then, I’ve been wearing scarves or caps around the house, and the wig out. I was wondering whether to be a wig person or a turban person in public. So far the answer is wig. I think everyone is looking at me, thinking, “wig”. When they’re probably not. Or maybe they are. And then, in the privacy of my own bathroom, I make studies of myself in the mirror. Hairless. Apparently I was a bald baby for a long time, like about 18 months. I’ve come full circle.

I’ve still only had one chemo session. My second session was supposed to be last Monday, but my platelets, neutrophils and haemoglobin had not bounced back enough from the last blast. So I’ve been put off until next Tuesday. I’m enjoying the extended leave-pass from the effects of chemo, but I’d rather be moving on. I want things to go to plan. But I’m learning that things rarely go to plan with cancer treatment, so I’ve got to get used to rolling with it. (What the hell’s a neutrophil? It’s a “white blood cell”; made in the bone marrow; keeps your immunity up.) The good news is that my CA125 levels (“tumour markers”) plunged from 2800 on the 7th of February to 1500 on March 6th. This means the tumours took a bashing after the first chemo. Excellent.

Meanwhile, as promised, I have begun to fashion small intestines. I’m using a French knitting contraption from Spotlight. I enjoy sitting and mindlessly lengthening my intestines (as long as I don’t go over 7.1 metres, the average length of a female small intestine). I’ve discovered a whole world of anatomical craft out there on the Internet. Some of it is truly stunning. Take a look at this, for example.

And I’ve got all excited about this year’s Waste to Art exhibition (see entry in last year’s exhibition, here). I have a stack of exercise books full of moaning and self-absorption that I want to get rid of. I’ve been burning them, page by satisfying page, but I’ve also started pulping them in the blender and making recycled paper. The combination of red and blue biro in them is giving rise to a lovely light lavender shade. I’ll stitch the pages together and write on them, or draw pictures on them, and that’ll be my entry. (Note: I’m keeping the odd bits of brilliance to be found in those diaries, but most of it really is mental junk-mail.)

And I’m glad the Sydney Biennale cut ties with Transfield. Yup, it’s a big bugger for a lot of artists and art-lovers, but if we’re a society that chooses to have a billion-dollar detention centre on Manus Island, we have to expect a bit of fall out. It might be uncomfortable, possibly misdirected, expensive and unfair … but then, that’s Manus Island all over.

The details

8 Replies

This Thursday I’m happy to report that I’m feeling fabulous. In fact I’m feeling better than I have for months or maybe even a year. The poke-your-eye-out tiredness has lifted; I’m perky upon waking in the mornings. So maybe the big bad brothers in the smoked-glass limousine – aka Carboplatin and Paclitaxol – have already given my tumours a good dressing-down. Yes! I can just see those tumours shrinking and cowering, lifting their stranglehold on my internal organs.

In my first blog post about my diagnosis I said I couldn’t bear to hear any details about the size or shape of my tumours. The fact that I had them at all, and their approximate positions, was more than enough information. For a long while I even stayed off Dr Google. Fear trumped curiosity for weeks. But all that’s changed. I’m now able to read the radiologist’s report that Dawn read out to Steve while I blocked my ears. I’ve been reading the results of Google searches (“primary peritoneal cancer prognosis”) without having to peer through the fingers covering my eyes. In other words, I’m getting to know the size and shape and capabilities of my disease.

So, here are some of the details I couldn’t even whisper a while ago. The radiologist’s report says this: “Lying between the left lobe of the liver and the stomach and compressing and displacing the stomach there is a complex cyst like lesion which measure about 110mm in greatest diameter. There is partial extension into the inferior aspect of the left lobe of the liver. There appears to be very slight enhancement of the edges.” After the choppy waters of those three sentences, there’s a bit of smooth sailing: “The liver, gallbladder, pancreas, spleen, adrenals and kidneys all otherwise appear normal.” Normal! What a blessed word! But then we plunge back into the storm: “In the right side of the pelvis in the pouch of Douglas there is a mass about 50mm in diameter.” The radiologist goes on to explain how this is squashing things around in my lower abdomen but mercifully adds that there is “no evidence of intra abdominal or pelvic lymphadenopathy.” Okay, back to Google. The Pouch of Douglas is just a bit of a space down there; lymphadenopathy is all about swollen lymph nodes. As for prognosis, there are some scary stories, but there are some inspiring ones, too.

I’ve been reading about the peritoneum itself – what it is and what it does when it’s working properly. I’m learning all the time, but this is how I visualise it: Imagine a plastic shopping bag full of oranges. Tie it off at the top and put that bag inside another shopping bag. The inner bag is wrapped around the abdominal organs (oranges); the outer bag is the abdominal wall. Both bags, together, make up the peritoneum. Another word for the inner bag is the viscera, as in visceral reaction – feeling something right in the guts. The space between the two bags – actually no real space at all – is called a potential space, because most of the time the inner and outer bits of the peritoneum are rubbing right up against each other, moistened by a tiny amount of fluid so you don’t feel it. The peritoneum, quietly doing its stuff in the background while the more charismatic organs hog the limelight, actually holds the whole shebang together.

I want to get to know more about my threatened peritoneum and the organs it holds. I’m going to do some craft. I’m going round to my friend Karen’s place on Saturday to make a start on a peritoneum (crocheted? knitted? made out of sheer fabric?) and a set of organs (maybe made out of felt). I’ve been inspired by the anatomical craft on Etsy, like this crocheted plush spleen.

Now that I feel better and I’ve had time to assimilate the details, my goal is to get my “R Rating” (a term coined by a friend on Facebook) by Spring. R as in Remission! With my friends Carbo and Taxol and some nice sharp surgeons’ knives, not to mention waves of love and support from family and friends, I think I can get there. Oh, and Medicare. I’ll talk about Medicare next time.