Teal Warrior

I had my first post treatment exam at the beginning of August with the gynecologic oncologist. At that appointment she prescribed my estrogen patches and also explained to me that I needed to use a dilator to keep from getting scar tissue build up so my vaginal tract doesn't close up.  I didn't really realize that could happen, but it can. She said everything looked good and I would see her in about three months. 


In September I was scheduled for my first post treatment pet scan. My anxiety was kicked up in high gear. I was later told that it's called scanxiety. Almost every person that has gone through cancer gets it. That was scheduled September 6, and my doctors appointment wasn't scheduled for the results until the 19th so I had to wait a few weeks to get them.  Dr. Gay actually called me the week before I went to see him and Dr. Wagner to let me know that things looked good! I was pretty happy. He didn't give to many details but gave me a little piece of mind…

I did my best to enjoy the rest of the summer after I was done with treatment. Josh and I did our usual of going to his dads house for the 4th of July. I usually like to spend the day at the beach, but I wasn't feeling up to even wearing shorts.  I was still bloated from all the treatment and didn't really feel all that great about myself.  Also that weekend, his cousin was having a bachelor/bachelorette party that we went to.


Later in July I went to the Oregon Coast with my family. We stayed in a house with my dad, step mom, step sister and her boys, my brother, and my oldest cousin and his family.  It was a nice enough house. It had a lot of steps, which normally wouldn't bother me at all. I enjoy that kind of exercise. But this time, I wasn't fully recovered from treatment so the steps were kinda hard for me. They were also small steps. And I mean that by the steps themselves were only about as big as my feet and I have small feet.  I told myself to be careful, I j…

I had taken a leave of absence from work the last 4 weeks of treatment and one extra week after my last treatment. I am still incredibly grateful for the company I work for. When I was first diagnosed, I didn't tell a lot of people what was going on. I am pretty introverted, and I also didn't want to be treated any different.  After learning all I would have to go through, I knew there was going to be a time when I would need to take time off work.  Not just because I thought I wasn't going to feel good, but because with the schedule I had to do my treatment. I had Chemo on Mondays, external radiation Monday through Friday. And then in week 4 I had brachytherapy on Fridays. So it made it difficult to work full time.


I wasn't sure how I was going to manage taking time off to get through all this. I started looking into what kind of financial help I could get. There wasn't much for living in Idaho. If I had lived in Washington, there were quite a few.  Then the most …

I want to go into more details about brachytherapy.  The first one I had, I got to go under anesthesia and while that took a long time to get through, I didn't feel any pain.  The four I had after that, I had to take a anti anxiety pill a half hour before I got to my appointment, and once I was there when I got called back, they set me up with an IV and gave me some morphine for the pain. And it was a lot more painful that I had expected. Even having the lorazepam and the morphine, it was probably the most painful thing I've gone through so far in my life. I'm not sure what to compare the pain to, but it was like this sharp, stabbing pain when the doctor would insert the rods.

I'm not sure what the rods looked like, I didn't want to look. I have it in my head that if I see it, it will hurt more. I never look anytime I'm getting blood drawn or an Iv put in.  I'm not going to put a picture of the brachytherapy in this post as anytime I've googled it, its …