Halfway through Chemo!

Halfway through Chemo!

by | Jun 27, 2024 | Cancer Journey, Thoughtful Thursdays

This week marks a milestone in my breast cancer treatment–I just completed the third chemo infusion on Monday, which puts me officially halfway through this part! Woot! After chemo I’ll still have surgery and radiation, so the WHOLE journey isn’t halfway done, but even so, I’m rejoicing at this part.

I knew that chemo wasn’t likely to be fun, and that has certainly proven to be the case. I was at first quite hopeful that Round 2 would prove easier than Round 1, when some of the symptoms I was experiencing by Thursday in the first round hadn’t hit…then came a UTI, along with a wee little fainting spell as a result of it that landed me in the emergency room for an afternoon. I got to have all sorts of tests run to rule out the passing out being caused by a heart problem, and everything they ran looked clear. Of course, they were still careful to say they couldn’t rule it out, but when they offered to let me stay in the hospital all weekend for more prolonged testing, I declined their gracious offer. 😉 My team in Morgantown agrees that the UTI and the dehydration it had caused was the most likely culprit, so unless there’s a new symptom to indicate heart issues, we can assume UTI is to blame for that one.

I had some heartburn that weekend, and then the following Friday and Saturday, I woke up both days feeling GREAT…then in the afternoons experienced my first bouts of nausea that resulted in throwing up. Not my favorite thing in the world, I gotta say! I had a few rough days of many trips to the bathroom, then a few days where I felt great and perfectly normal, aside from being tired. Happily, one of those fell on my sister’s birthday. =)

It was a wonderful day! David and I had gone out to dinner on our anniversary two days before, and that was nice too…but I still came home and had to run to the bathroom multiple times while we were watching a movie (Asteroid City. Did you see it? Did you like it? We were kinda left going “What in the world was that??” at the end. Definitely not going on my favorites list, though it didn’t quite rate the “Can I have my two hours back?” list, I guess).

On Wednesday, though, I felt like me as I went to coffee and brunch with my mom, my sister, and one of her best friends. We laughed and chatted and I enjoyed being a redhead with my “Ariel” wig. 😉

And I started writing my next book that Wednesday! No writing retreat word counts or anything, but I got over 7,000 words written by the end of last week, and am off to a great start this week too. It just feels so very me to have my head in a story and to be spending my mornings working on it. =)

On Friday, I took all my wigs with me to the wonderful woman who has been cutting my hair since I was, like, six. She shortened the Ariel for me (waist-length was just a bit unwieldly and tangled too much), shaped up the bangs on Sunny Blond and Sassy Purple, and made a real-human-hair brunette wig a client sent to me look modern and sleek instead of too-much-for-my-little-head. She agreed that the purple and red are her favorites for me! I had a great time laughing with her…before coming home to a second weekend of puking and intestinal distress. =/ Thankfully, once I started the 3-day course of steroids that surround each chemo infusion (so started on Sunday), I started feeling good again.

I didn’t try to write during the infusion on Monday, though I’d had it in mind as a possibility. One of the pre-meds they give me makes me really drowsy though, and between that and the wonderful nurses stopping in every half hour to change out this or that, I decided that writing didn’t make a lot of sense. So instead, I worked on a round of edits I’m doing for an upcoming WhiteCrown title, Christmas in the Castle Library, which I am THOROUGHLY enjoying! The author is Ann Swindell, who is well established as a non-fiction author, but this will be her debut novel. I don’t do a lot of editing these days, but I couldn’t turn down this one! When one of Ann’s beautiful non-fiction books on peace came out, she sent me a signed copy out of the blue, with a note saying how much she loved my novels, and how she wanted to give me her book in the hopes that it would resonate with me as my words do with her. I was so touched! It’s a gorgeous book, one of those gift-quality ones with blue ink and beautiful layout and design, and I really loved it. So when she submitted a royal Christmas story…well, I was excited that our team loved it so much and volunteered to take a round of edits.

So that’s how I passed my time during Infusion 3, quite happily. They got me in early this time, and I’m now on the short-as-it-can-be infusion with no big waits between things, since everything went well on the previous two rounds. We were out of there by 3 in the afternoon and actually home in time for dinner, for once!

I obviously don’t know how these next weeks will go yet–there could be more nausea, likely more trips to the bathroom. I’m all stocked up on the BRAT diet stuff if that hits–bananas, white rice, applesauce (homemade from Honeycrisp apples and so yummy!), and white bread for toast. Foods I’ve been largely avoiding lately thanks to the high carbs, but I’m firmly in the “eat what helps and tastes good” category just now. Also got some crackers and potatoes (which help absorb all the ickies in the belly) and am careful to stay better hydrated this time!

And I have big plans to wear the purple wig to church this coming Sunday. 😉 I had to skip last week because of too-frequent trips to the potty, but here’s hoping that won’t happen this week!

Let’s see, what else has been going on? The physical stuff, starting the new book…and lots of reading! I’m on track to hit my goal of 100 books this year, and I’m really enjoying it. Over the weekend I read the first two books in Gabrielle Meyer’s Timeless series and really loved them! I’m now reading the second Caraval novel, Legendary, and also a reread of The Secret Garden, which I haven’t read since I was ten, LOL. I wanted to have the characters in the novel I’ve just started writing talk about it, though, so needed a refresh. I buzzed through half of it on Tuesday evening and am remembering why I loved it so much as a kid! (And I totally paid $12 for this cute collector’s hardback instead of $6 for a little paperback, because how cute is this??*)

 I think that’s mostly it. My adorable stack of cards keeps growing, and I just have to say a big “Thank you, friends!!” yet again to everyone who has sent these notes of encouragement. I’m so touched at those friends who send a note each week, or for each infusion. I honestly expected it all to taper off after the first infusion, but instead I keep getting what I’m dubbing “encouragement bombs” around each treatment. Brings the happiest sort of tears to my eyes! I love the homemade gifts some of you have taken so much time to create for me, and the thoughtful gifts of tummy-easy candies, the books, the bath and body products, and just all the things that show you care and are remembering me in this time. It means the world! As do all the donations of money and restaurant gift cards and the like. They are making our life so much easier, with all the out of town trips and tired afternoons! (Here’s the link to the official Meal Train, which also has my mailing address for those of you who have asked for it, for sending a card.)

So…yeah. Thank you so much for all the continued prayers, the emails, the Facebook messages, the cards, the gifts, and the support in every possible way. I continue to feel so surrounded by the love of God through His precious children. I know, even when I’m hanging miserably over a toilet, that this the path toward healing and that I am so far from being alone.

I think one of the biggest blessings so far has been getting to talk to others walking this same path (or similar ones). A young woman about my age that I know from our old homeschool group but who I haven’t talked to in years saw my posts and reached out, having just had her own biopsy. She too has cancer, though they caught hers sooner, so she’s having surgery first. It’s been a blessing to get to talk to her and share what I’ve learned about our local system and just be able to answer her questions and walk alongside her–just as so many have been doing for me!

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Word of the Week – Picnic

Word of the Week – Picnic

by | Jun 24, 2024 | Word of the Week

Picnic. When we say the word, we have something definite in mind, right? To us, a picnic is an outdoor meal, often where we haul our food in with us from someplace else.

Turns out that meaning didn’t evolve until the mid-1800s. So what was it before?

Picnic was first used in 1748, but the event itself was rare before 1800, so far as historians can tell. And while always used to describe a certain type of meal, it was originally not meant in the way we think of now. You know what it was originally? A potluck! The earliest definitions of the word are for “a fashionable social affair, usually indoors, where every partaker brings something to contribute to the general table.”

Where did the word itself come from? That’s great question. Most etymologists agree we borrowed the word from French, but the root words are unclear. In fact, the Century Dictionary has this to say:

As in many other riming names, the elements are used without precision, but the lit. sense is appar. ‘a picking or nibbling of bits,’ a snatch, snack ….

Picnic basket dates from 1857, picnic table from 1858 for a folding table one would transport, and the metaphorical sense of something being easy is from 1886.

Do you enjoy picnics? Are you a blanket-on-the-group type, or a give-me-a-table-and-umbrella type?

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Faith Is a Verb

Faith Is a Verb

by | Jun 20, 2024 | Thoughtful Thursdays

When I consider the word faith, I have a major beef with the English language. In English, faith is just a noun. A thing we have.

In Greek, faith has a noun form…made from a VERB form.

Just pause and ponder that for a moment. I know I had to the first time I heard that. FAITH IS A VERB. Like love, like trust, like hope. All of those have both noun and verb forms in English…so why doesn’t faith??

We have believe, but that isn’t quite the same thing. I believe that we have politicians in Washington, but I sure don’t put my faith in them all the time, LOL. I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow (somewhere behind all the rain clouds), but I don’t put my faith in the sun. I believe that my children will do great things, but I don’t have faith that they can save me from my sins.

When we have love, we act in love.
When we have trust, we act in trust.
When we have hope, we act in hope.

And when we have faith, we act in faith.

We love, we trust, we hope…and we faith. There, I’m just going to start using it as a verb. 😉

Because it’s important, isn’t it? It’s important to realize that faith is not just something we hold in our hearts or our minds or our souls, wherever it rightly lives. Faith is something we act on. Faith is something we DO. When we “faith,” we love, trust, and hope in God (ideally, though plenty of people put their faith in other things, obviously). When we “faith,” we share that love, that trust, and that hope with others.

The Ancient Greek word here is πιστεύειν, which we have to translate into English as “I trust”…because there’s no other English word for it. In modern Greek, a form of that word is still used in legal cases for “a trust; a credit.” And those are pretty good synonyms, really.

I trust that God made the universe.
I trust that God sent His Son to earth out of love for me.
I trust that He is good.
I trust that has saved me through the blood of that Son.
I trust that seeking after Him, believing in Him, accepting that sacrifice will lead me to eternity with Him.
I trust that He has my good always in mind.
I trust that there is no valley, no shadow that is beyond His reach.
I trust that He is with me always, even to the end of the age.

I trust that, enough that I’d swear to it legally, enough that I store my treasure in it. I believe that. I faith that.

In English, when we take something “on faith,” we’re admitting that we have no solid, physical evidence, but we’ll act on it anyway. That kinda grates on me as a turn of phrase. Because when we “faith,” when we act on faith, it is not something rooted in our fancies. It’s something of substance. Because faith (the noun) IS the substance of things hoped for. Faith IS the evidence of things unseen.

And it IS those things largely because it DOES. It ACTS. It is a verb.

Which then puts a challenge to us, doesn’t it? Is our faith something we just have…which means we can put it on a shelf, ignore it, forget about it…or is faith something we do?

How are we hoping today? How are we trusting? How are we loving?

How are we faithing?

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Word of the Week – Anniversary

Word of the Week – Anniversary

by | Jun 17, 2024 | Word of the Week

Today, David and I are celebrating our 23rd wedding anniversary!

So, of course, I thought we’d take a look at the word anniversary. That ann- prefix gives us a good idea where it comes from, sharing a root as it does with annual, from the Latin annus, for year. Latin also has anniversarium, from which English directly borrowed the word.

Originally, though, this wasn’t a word used for wedding dates or even birthdays, despite it’s very literal definition of “annual return of a certain date of the year.” Originally, the word was reserved for the day of death, especially martyrdom, of saints!

Who knew?

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Poor Marmalade

Poor Marmalade

by | Jun 13, 2024 | Thoughtful Thursdays

Yesterday was my husband David’s birthday, Monday is our 23rd wedding anniversary, and so I thought it would be fun today to just share some of our silliness. These are a few of the inside jokes that we laugh endlessly over. And just something fun for the occasions. 😉

Poor Marmalade

If you’ve read the Ladies of the Manor Series, then you not only met Brook and Justin, Rowena and Brice, Ella and Cayton, you may also remember that Cayton had a wife who died, named Adelaide.

Well, the first time I wrote this series (seven years before I rewrote it into the form you now know), David read the book, realized that Cayton’s sickly first wife was destined to die, and took me to task for it. “Are you seriously creating a character just to kill her?” he said. “Poor Marmalade.”

Cue my laughter. “Marmalade?”

“You know. His wife.”

“Adelaide.”

“Like I said. Marmalade.”

That has, at this point, been sixteen or seventeen years ago. But every single time marmalade is mentioned in our house, David will say, “Poor Marmalade.” (I giggle even typing this.) Which is especially relevant now, because we’ve become a bit obsessed with ChocZero Orange Marmalade–sugar free, naturally sweetened, and DELICIOUS. One or the other of us has some on a slice of homemade bread pretty much daily, which has provided many opportunities for the “Poor Marmalade” joke.

It never gets old.

Polly’s Pub

If you’ve read the Shadows Over England series, then you know Pauly, the owner of the pub that the family frequents, who has always been like a father or uncle to Rosemary, Willa, Barclay, and the rest of the crew.

Well in our hometown, we had for a while a restaurant David and I loved, called Churchill’s Pub. It served traditional British fare and was just delightful.

One evening we were driving past it, while I was up to my eyeballs writing the Secrets of the Isles series and hence was working through what pirate lore I intended to weave into my current one.

Then David said something that I heard as, “If we ever have a pub, we should name it Polly’s.”

I looked at him in utter confusion. “Why? Would it be pirate themed?”

David looked back at me with equal confusion. “Why would it be pirate themed?”

“I don’t know. But if you want to name it after a pirate’s parrot–you know, ‘Polly wants a cracker’–I thought…”

Image of him blinking at me. Then blinking again. “Not Polly. Pauly. The pub owner. You know–Barclay and company’s Pauly?”

Cue the laughter. And now every time we drive past that building (the pub shut down during Covid and never reopened), I think of Pauly-Polly’s Pub.

Jerry!

David and I have been watching The Walking Dead since it was new, and one of our favorite things was actually watching Talking Dead afterward, hosted by the hilarious Chris Hardwick. There’s a season where we meet the people of “The Kingdom,” which is run by “The King.” The King had a trusty guard named Gerry–a huge fellow who looks Samoan (not sure if he is or not), who is also one of those people who is just a giant teddy bear, always happy and laughing. His character always called everybody “dude,” and he was so not a medieval knight, that it was just hilarious every time he sauntered onto the stage in the Kingdom.

The king, when he needed Gerry, would bellow out, “Gerry!” in a very dramatic way. Which Chris Hardwick would imitate in Talking Dead. He was big on recurring gags, so pretty much every time he said the character’s name in later years, he would bellow it like that. “Gerrrrrrryyyy!”

Well, last autumn David and I were talking about Revelation (I’d been reading a book called The Lamb’s Supper that explains Revelation through the liturgy, which made SO MUCH SENSE), and David asked why I thought the modern church was so preoccupied with End Times.

Now, I belong to a writers group in which Jerry B. Jenkins is also a member–and he is a funny, witty, intelligent man who has often said such clever things that I laugh out loud and have to report the witticism to David. Jerry also finds it so amusing that while in decades past he was very famous for his broke-all-records-in-the-publishing-word Left Behind Series, he’s now just known as “Dallas Jenkins’s dad.” But suffice it to say that Jerry Jenkins has come up in conversation plenty in our house over the years.

So when David asked that question about our preoccupation with the End Times, what was I to do but bellow out, “Jeeerrrryyyy!” as the King always bellowed “Gerry!”?

It’s a joke that seriously five people in the world might get. But also, according to my beloved husband, the single funniest, cleverest thing I’ve ever said in my life.

Speaking of Jerry’s…

Growing up, we had a Jerry’s Pizza in our mall. It’s no longer there. Frankly, there isn’t much left in our mall. We were discussing this a few weeks ago, and the restaurants we miss, and David said how Jerry’s had never been his favorite pizza.

“I wouldn’t say it was my favorite,” I said. “But I have really fond memories of it. I still remember going there for the first time with my best friend, not with my family. It was the first time I got to order a pizza, how I wanted it. My family always got pepperoni, and I would always pick it off. That was the first place I ever just got a cheese pizza for me.”

David made an “awww” sound. “Now I feel bad. You’re back to picking off pepperoni.”

“Well if you recall, we used to get two pizzas–a pepperoni for you and a cheese for me. But then those darn kids came along and started eating all my cheese pizza, so I had to go back to sharing yours!”

David laughed and said, “I’m going to tell them you said that!”

I beat him to it and told it to Rowyn, who just started cackling at “those darn kids.” They still steal all the cheese pizza, but that’s okay. I pick the pepperoni off and then eat them with the crust, which gives me both cheese pizza and a pepperoni roll. 😉

What Says Moo?

My darling husband was one of those who would do anything to make the kids belly-laugh when they were little (and he still does. Rowyn never disappoints). When they started learning their animal sounds, one of his favorite games was deliberately messing them up, which would inevitably bring hoots of laughter from the little ones, who knew very well that the dog didn’t say “meow” and the horse didn’t bark.

His favorite was to attribute “moo” to everything. Duck? Moo! Pig? Moo! Dinosaur? Moo!

(Don’t worry, the kids are quite proficient in actual animal sounds. They knew not to take Papa seriously. But they got years of laughter from it.)

But much like Chris Hardwick, David does not ever let a good gag go, and his commitment to a bit is unsurpassed. Our kids may now be 18 and 16, but he still calls cows “mooers” and greets pretty much any animal with “Moo!” His most famous is recent years is a little nonsense song he’ll break into a moment’s notice, which has lyrics of “Moo, moo, rhinoceroses moo-moo, moo moo moo. Rhinoceroses! Moo moo…” I keep telling him he needs to record it make some stupid little animation for it. It could totally be the next “Baby Shark”…

It’s a Beautiful Thing.

Another courtesy of The Walking Dead. There’s a part where one character does something utterly stupid, and when another character calls him on it, he pretty much admits that stupid is his calling card. She shakes her head and says, “Self awareness is a beautiful thing.”

We talk a lot about self-awareness in our house. It’s important, and it’s also something quite a lot of society seems to be lacking these days, so yeah. It comes up.

So now, anytime one of us is less-than-perfect but admits it, someone else will pipe up with, “Well, it’s a beautiful thing.”

After 23 years together, we have way more inside jokes than this, of course, but in the interest of not boring you to tears…I’ll leave it at that for now. Hope you got a chuckle. And I would love to hear some of YOUR family’s inside jokes!

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