What a Sad, Crazy Day

As I've mentioned, my main "support group" is the YSC bulletin board. It's an amazing, wonderful, horrible place.

It's amazing and wonderful because the women there are so open, so giving, so knowledgeable, so strong, so honest, so funny...you get the idea. Any question you have, there's someone (usually several someones) there who can answer it. If you're having a bad day and need cheering up, someone will do that. If you're having a good day and want to share, you'll find lots of welcoming virtual ears. It's also wonderful because you see women on there with "late stage" BC (Stage IV, aka "mets") who are going strong (sometimes 7 years, 9 years or even further out), having fun, getting married (and, yes, dealing with the incurable version of this disease and the truly crude and harsh methods we have of treating it).

It's horrible because you also see the worst-case scenarios all the time. When I started chemo, the doctors told me about all the weird, rare possible side effects that "1 in 10,000" people get. Same thing with radiation. Same thing with surgery. Well, on the boards, it seems like there's always someone who gets that side effect (for example, one friend lost all sensation in her legs from the knees down after 2 doses of Taxol--a condition know as neuropathy--and had to stop treatment; she's currently wearing leg braces to walk and can't drive).

And it's really horrible when someone dies. Which happened yesterday. Melinda, 35 years old, first diagnosed in 2005, relapsed with mets in May this year. Too young and too fast. Too sad. Oh yeah. And she was an oncologist. Which, to me, makes it seem even more unfair.

Moment of silence for Melinda and her family.