It has been almost seven years since I wrote on this blog. My, how things have changed! I have changed teaching positions twice since I last wrote, I met the love of my life, I battled and beat cancer, I got married, and I had a baby. Now we are in the midst of a pandemic and it seemed like the right time to get back to where I left off.
I still teach in the same general vicinity as I did when I first started this blog, but I am actually more rural now. The school I teach at got regular electricity for the first time ever a couple of years ago when I first started there. I teach four grade levels in one classroom but am lucky to have a nice small group of students. There is only one other teacher at my school and we share a principal with two other schools which range from 45 minutes to over an hour away from us. Our school is at the end of a 20 mile stretch of a one lane highway. We are about as far off the beaten path as you can get, and hopefully that means we are all fairly safe from the Covid-19. It has reached our county but there have not been very many cases and most have now recovered.
I am not really sure where to start with this blogging process again, but I feel like the most interesting thing to have happened over the last 7 years was my battle with cancer and recovery from it. I was a few weeks away from 30 when I first found the lump under my chin. It felt like a marble but I wasn't very concerned. I mean, I was only 29 and healthy after all. Cancer was the last thing on my mind. Someone said it could be a clogged salivary gland and that sounded reasonable to me. I figured it would be a simple fix and no big deal in the end. Luckily, I did go to the doctor right away to get it checked out. She started me out on antibiotics which did absolutely nothing, and the lump continued to grow. When I went back to see her, I was still thinking it couldn't be anything serious. I was planning a 30th birthday party and a weekend trip with my best friends to the coast, it just seemed like a silly thing to worry about.
The next step was to visit an Ear, Nose, and Throat Specialist. I don't even remember my first visit to him but it resulted in me going in for a biopsy of the lump. I was still under the impression that it wasn't a big deal so I went alone to the biopsy and while in there getting poked with a massive needle and watching it enter the mass on the ultrasound machine, I started to get a bad feeling. I left the hospital and went and cried in the car. I remember texting my two best friends saying that I should not go to these appointments on my own anymore.
Still, I didn't think that it could possibly be anything that serious. I felt fine! I grew up with hippie parents who fed us healthy food and had an active lifestyle. I hadn't been as healthy as an adult, but I still tried to eat organic, avoid GMOs, and stay fairly active. Luckily, I took my long term boyfriend with me to the follow up with the Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor. I just remember feeling bad for the doctor having to break the news to me, practically a stranger who he had no relationship with, that I had Large B Cell Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. I didn't know what that meant and he had to clarify that it was cancer but that he really didn't know any more than that. I had to go see an oncologist next to find out more.
My boyfriend and I had plans to get tires rotated, get groceries, and do some other errands while in town after my appointment. We lived two hours away so trips to town needed to be made the most of. I went through the rest of the day in a blur. My boyfriend did his best to keep me distracted and not dwelling on this sudden shock and fear. It wasn't until we were on our way home that I messaged my closest friends who I had been keeping updated on this medical mystery and called my parents. They were all shocked, of course, but did not break down while I talked to them. I am so thankful for that because I was barely holding it together myself and would not have been able to handle it. That was on October 9th, 2017. It was a Monday and I went back to school the next day because I thought it would be a good distraction and I didn't want to waste my sick days because I knew I was going to need them down the road. Several coworkers of mine knew I'd been getting the lump checked out the day before and asked me how it went while I was at the copy machine. I told them I didn't want to talk about it but was clearly just barely holding it together. Before the students came, one of our school staff came in to clean my room. She is a woman who I had known since I was a child so kind of a motherly figure to me. I was standing in my room, facing away from her looking out the window and trying not to cry. She saw that I was upset and asked what was wrong. (I am crying just remembering this moment now.) I fell apart and told her the news I'd been given and how terrified I was. She wrapped me in her arms and held me as I cried. I don't know if I ever told her how much it meant to me having her there in that moment, but that comfort and feeling of love she gave me then will last in my heart forever.
The next month and a half were a blur. The doctors wanted me to start treatment as soon as possible since my cancer was a fast growing one. It was also a cancer typically found in older people so there was very little research on how the treatment would affect someone of my age. One of my largest concerns was would I be able to have children afterwards. Both my boyfriend and I wanted kids and had hoped to start a family soon. I saw several oncologists in my own small town and also got a second opinion at the Stanford Cancer Center. They all agreed on a treatment plan and fortunately I was only in Stage 2, so we had caught the cancer early. We consulted with some fertility doctors about preserving eggs but it would have taken too long to wait for the correct time to harvest them, so we took our chances on a shot that would basically put me into menopause during the chemo and radiation treatment. This way my ovaries would be less active and in turn, the chemo which goes to the most active areas in your body, would hopefully leave them alone.
I started chemo the day before Thanksgiving that year and taught up until a couple days before that. It was a hard conversation to have with my students about why I was leaving. I didn't use the C word, although I did tell their parents in case they wanted to get more specific about it. I just told the kids that I was sick and was going to be gone for a little while to get treatment. I told them I would come back as soon as I was better.
I spent the next few months undergoing treatment, which I really won't get into all the details of other than to say it was extremely difficult but I was also extremely fortunate to have an immediate positive response. Literally within days, the lump on my neck was shrinking. I finished treatment mid-February and took another month and a half off of work for recovery. Looking back, I wish I would have just taken the rest of the year off. I didn't go straight back into the classroom and instead had a leadership position working with staff on bettering our school district programs and plans. Despite this, I still pushed myself too hard and took on more than I was physically and mentally ready for. I did okay, and made it through but looking back I think I would have been better off if I had just taken that time to rest and recover more. I just remember feeling guilty for even taking as long as I did before going back. I'd finished treatment, shouldn't I have gone back immediately? The doctors said I was in remission, so shouldn't I be able to work again? These were the questions I asked myself and what made me feel guilty about not going back right away.
Looking back, I realize that I was still suffering pretty severely from chemo brain. My short term memory was almost non-existent. I would have conversations with people and then have zero recollection of our conversation later on. I coped by writing things down as much as I could, but it would have been better for me to not put so much pressure on myself yet. Shortly before returning to work, my boyfriend proposed so I was also trying to plan a wedding during this time. Thankfully, my mother was extremely helpful in that process. We got married in September of 2018 and it was the MOST beautiful wedding I could have ever imagined.
I had started at a new school in August of 2018, which is another thing I wish I had done differently. I feel like I told my students that I would be back when I was better, but then I never came back. We live in a small community and many of them are family so they knew I was okay and I saw them at community functions, but I regret not coming back as their teacher for another year to provide a healthier closure. If I could go back, I would return to that school to provide my students with the reassurance that their teacher survived and that cancer is not a death sentence. That you can heal and come back as healthy as you were before.
Shortly after my wedding in 2018, my husband and I found out we were expecting our first baby. We had just really started trying and it happened! Again, I am tearing up just thinking about what a miracle it is that after everything, I was able to get pregnant so quickly. In June of 2019, we had a beautiful baby girl who is absolutely perfect in every way. She has been the easiest baby, after delivery anyway... that experience is a whole different story though!
And now, here we are in April of 2020, sheltering in place, teaching from home, and getting to stay home with my baby girl every day. This quarantine has been a blessing for me. I was really struggling this year with being away from my daughter every day, not having the time to give to my students or my family, feeling like I was failing, getting burnt out. I am so thankful for this time at home to work on my own well-being. I live in such in isolated area, that it does not feel that abnormal to not see anyone or go anywhere (other than work). We got internet at our house a couple days before this all started which has actually made me feel even more connected to all my family and friends than I did before.
Anyway.... That kind of sums up the biggest parts of the last 7 years. All is well and I look forward to sharing more soon.
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