This is a diary of my breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. I've been adding it in reverse order so the most recent information is at the top.

Thanks for the cards, e-mails and flowers. I do appreciate being in your thoughts and hearts and prayers.

Nancy

Nancy's Fundraising Page for Relay for Life 2007

July 9, 2007

I want to thank everyone from the bottom of my heart for your support for the Relay for Life that is coming up August 3rd. I now have my plane ticket to fly out to Colorado for the event. The response to my appeal for donations has been fabulous. I even had to increase my fund raising goal. There are several folks who mailed checks and I want to assure you they will be reflected in the on-line total soon. The person at ACS told me she has them but had not yet had the chance to update the web site.

Things are going pretty well. I am pleased to announce that I managed to not catch anything (cold, virus, strep) when we traveled to Illinois and Florida to visit the family. It was great to see so many people. In Streator, we got together with a whole roomful of the Yacko clan at Chippers restaurant. Had to have my requisite tenderloin sandwich. Thank you to Ron & Marta for setting that up! We stopped in Henry to visit with Aunt Veta and drove to Champaign where we met up with Ron, Todd, Dan, Susan, Bryan and his friend Heather, along with our friends Kristie, Kathy, Felix and Mary.

We drove back to Chicago to fly to Florida for Jonathan's parents' 50th wedding anniversary. We all spent the rest of the week staying on Captiva Island at the Tween Waters Inn, which is the first place the Sechrist's stayed in the islands back in the 70's. Jennifer, Phill, Jonathan & I took them out for dinner at the Mucky Duck where we ate ourselves silly and drank champagne and ate key lime pie.

Florida is pretty hot and humid this time of year. It was hard to be outside much of the time. I did manage to use the fitness center treadmill a couple of days. They had nice treadmills in the air conditioning and I walked 3 miles each time. While we were in Fort Meyers I was able to go to a New Balance store and get fitted for a better pair of shoes. All the time I spend barefoot in Hawaii and now my feet are wider - now a double-E.

What that means is I'm a bit behind on my marathon training. But I'm trying to catch up. Jonathan and I walked 5 miles Sunday morning on the Walua Road trail. The trail head is about 10 miles away from our house so we drove there and parked. It is an asphalt trail interspersed within a few residential roads that is mostly shaded and relatively flat. We walked north to south and that direction is a slight uphill the whole way with only one patch of a little bit steeper grade that got me huffing a bit. I bought a pedometer but the trail is also marked at some key places for distances. The whole thing dead-ends around 3.2 miles but we turned around at 2.5 and walked downhill back to the car (Ahh). Took us 1:55 round-trip. I'm a little sore today and plan to get in the pool to swim a bit today to help work the kinks out.

Relay for Life will be another opportunity to get some walking in. I'm not going for speed, but distance. I hope that a little speed improvement will come with time. If I can sustain a 20 minute mile (not there yet, I'm at about 22 minutes) then the marathon will be easier mentally.

I started talking L-glutamine and vitamin B6 again due to some neuropathy (nerve damage from chemo) in my right foot. It seems to be helping. I didn't take any while we were gone on our trip (I figured homeland security wouldn't be happy if I brought a white powder onto a plane) and the burning pain returned. So now that we are home, I'm back to taking that. I do think it helps. Hopefully, the nerves will heal some day.

My mother-in-law suggested a nail treatment called DermaNail that will hopefully help with my thin, fragile finger nails. I ordered some on-line and it should be here in a few days. My nails are ridged and very thin. They split and tear as soon as there is any white past the flesh. The hard-as-nails stuff from the drug store didn't help at all.

I had some x-rays taken of my hip & prosthesis a few weeks ago since I was having some pain in my thigh. My PCP thinks I got things inflamed when I walked Alii Drive for 4 miles the previous weekend. The pain killer he gave me made me literally sick so I stopped taking it. Advil plus the rest in Florida seemed to help but it still hurt some on the treadmill. It doesn't seem to be bothering me today after the 5-mile walk yesterday. We'll see what he has to say about the x-rays when I see him next in a few weeks. I'm assuming it wasn't bad since I didn't get a call to come see him sooner.

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