Andalucia, Spain

I love Spain. After completing our river barge cruise and before sailing on the Mediterranean, we spent 4 nights in Seville.

Seville is a beautiful city. It has an awesome cathedral and the Royal Palace is drop-dead gorgeous. Even though it was built for Catholic monarchs, most of the craftsmen who built it were Arabs and, what we call, the Moorish style is everywhere. The cathedral has a bell tower that completely encloses an ancient minaret. It's called the Giralda and climbing it provided me views of the city of Seville and the wonderful architectural features of the church's Gothic architecture. I just love a good flying buttress!

While we were in Seville we took day trips to Cordova and Granada. The highway was bordered by miles and miles of olive groves. The trees were of different varieties and different stages of maturity. The mountains in the distance were the first-named Sierra Madres. How awesome to see the ones that are the originals! They are tall and steep, not terribly unlike their New World namesakes.

On our last night in Seville, we attended a Flamenco show. The power of the dancers, the costumes, their classic postures and expressions were memorable. They say that when the first northern Europeans landed in Spain there already was Flamenco. Whether it is a product of the aboriginal tribes of the Iberian Penninsula or the heritage of itinerant Gypsies, it's a wonderful thing to behold. It makes your heart race.

As a resident of the border between Texas and Mexico, I'm familiar with the Folkloric dancers of Mexico and I could see how some of the Flamenco of Spain migrated to the regional dances of Mexico. I love putting these kind of things together. I must have been an anthropologist in a previous life.

Tapas was something we tried to try. Unfortunately, tapas are served mostly in bars and in Spain, bars are filled with cigarette smoke. Neither of us was willing to inhale poison to taste them. We did sample some at the Flamenco place and we were not terribly impressed but we think they were "tourist tapas" and not the real deal.

Everyone eats late in Spain. Dinner isn't until 9 PM or later, so most restaurants don't open until 8 PM at the earliest. Between 4 PM or so and 8 PM it's siesta time and many businesses and most restaurants are closed.

One early evening after returning from a tour we found ourselves hungry. We knew of a pizza place a few blocks from our hotel so we went there only to find it closed for siesta. There was a bar about a block away that was opened and they had a menu on a chalkboard outside. We went in.

The host was a charming Spanish fellow with a wide grin. I drew a picture of a ham and cheese sandwich on the plain, white paper table cloth and wrote "jambon y queso y pan" under it hoping I communicated it properly. He returned with a platter filled with the famous (and expensive) thinly-sliced Andalusian ham and wedges of pungent local cheese. The "pan" was crackers wrapped in cellophane. We were too starved to care. We washed it down with some local çervesa (which was quite good) and payed the exhorbitant tab of €25, knowing full well that we'd been had but cherishing the experience as a souvenir of our travels.

Life Goes On - And It's Good

We sold the motor home in June of 2007. Lucky for us, it was before gasoline prices went through the roof and loans were tightened up. We got a good price. Being the thrifty little person that I am, I found ways to spend the proceeds of the RV on other travel

Being without an RV for the first time ever as a married couple was quite different, but we quickly learned to adapt to traveling like "normal" people. We took a 3 week cruise-tour to Australia and New Zealand with Royal Caribbean International Cruise Lines in October, 2007. It was fabulous! We had a perfectly awesome time and we met and kept the friendship of a delightful couple from the UK, John and Marlene. The best souvenirs are the people one meets on a journey.

During the early summer of 2008 we traveled to New Mexico and West Texas with friends we'd met during our RVing days . New Mexico was wonderful. We also rode the Chama and Toltec narrow gauge railroad. The scenery was edible and the trip was great, except for the constant kvetching of my husband, Barry. I'm used to it, but our dear, dear friends, who, thankfully, have not abandoned us over the experience, won't ever travel with us again. I don't blame them.

This past Fall I ambitiously planned a 7 week European tour. It began in London and Paris, had a river barge cruise from Budapest to Amsterdam in the middle and a Mediterranean cruise followed by a Trans-Atlantic cruise at the end. Unfortunately, Barry took ill on the Med cruise and we spent 5 horrid days in Palermo, Sicily where he was hospitalized, so we never made the trans-Atlantic trip. I did see all the ports on the Med cruise. Barry owes me Barcelona and if he thinks he's off the hook, he's wrong, wrong, wrong!

As I type this I am 2 1/2 years from cancer surgery which means I am half-way there to being cured. I currently have no evidence of disease but it takes 5 years to be considered "cured"

I wrote this over a year ago for an organization that supports people with head and neck cancer. It's a good update for the time missing between the last blog and early 2008

A little over a year ago I wished I was dead. Life was unbearable. My body had been violated. Parts of me were carved away. Parts of me were burnt. My mouth was filled with huge, yellow sores. Other parts were redirected and I had been turned inside-out. Each morning I silently railed at the Angel of Death for not coming to take me in yet another night spent at the edge of sleep, unable to dream because of the pain medication.

I’m Janet Wilder. I’m 61 years old, a small and feisty Jersey Girl now living in way-the-heck-south-Texas. I have always been healthy. I have always been a marathon talker, raconteur, seminar deliverer and a loud and tuneless singer.

In the summer of 2004 my tongue began to feel sore near the lower, left rear molar. I saw a dentist. He didn’t see anything wrong. I saw a doctor. He didn’t find anything wrong. Six months later the spot was still sore. I saw another dentist and asked that he file down my tooth. He didn’t find anything sharp. I went to another doctor. He didn’t find anything wrong. I tried yet a third dentist and all he wanted to do was charge me thousands of dollars to do work in other places of my mouth. I went back to the second dentist and the filing commenced. By May of 2006, I was wearing a temporary crown and my tongue really, really hurt.

While accompanying my husband to his doctor visit, he mentioned that I had been complaining about a sore on my tongue. He suggested I show it to the physician and “get some medicine” for it. The doctor looked into my mouth, turned pale and declared that there was no medicine for it. He immediately sent me to the ENT across the street. Because I was in pain the doctor took me in immediately. He donned a glove, felt my tongue, looked into my mouth with a flashlight and pronounced: “you have cancer”. Just like that. No dramatics like in the TV shows. No “lets take a biopsy and see what comes back”. Just those three dreaded words: “you have cancer.” The doctor felt it was small and localized and called it stage I squamous cell carcinoma.. He took a sample for a biopsy, gave me some pain killers and a prescription for lidocaine gel, set up a CT scan and told me that I would just need the surgery since it was small and early.

The scan was clean. I was unhappy about having part of my tongue carved away, but small and early are encouraging words. I went in for the surgery. When I awoke in the recovery room the ENT was at my side. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “The tumor was bigger than we expected. I had to take half of your tongue. You have had a hemi-glossectomy.” I managed a garbled “will I ever talk” and made myself cry. He assured me that my speech would improve when the swelling went down. The half tongue that was left felt like two tongues, it was so swollen.

At my first post-op visit the ENT suggested radiation and possibly chemotherapy. The size of my tumor had put it into the stage III category. Protocols must be observed. There was a possibility that a microscopic cancer cell was floating around in my body and it must be killed before it attacked me.

I visited the local medical oncologist, a prince of a man who agreed with my preference for quality of life not quantity of life. He didn’t think I needed chemo, but made me a second appointment to see him after I’d seen the radiation oncologist. I also got onto the internet and learned about the ravages of head and neck radiation. I was scared. I’m a hard-core claustrophobic and just the thought of wearing the mask terrified me. I was willing to take my chances with that microscopic cell but the family, meaning well, insisted I embark on the treatment. As anyone who has been through radiation knows, the cure can be worse than the disease.

I was not impressed with the radiation oncologist. Not that he wasn’t a good doctor but that it didn’t appear they had the resources to deal with the side effects. The nurse handed me a little booklet about side effects and told me to make an appointment to be fitted for the mask. I told my husband that I wasn’t going to get radiation. He wanted to hear what the medical oncologist had to say. We saw him and he agreed with me about head and neck radiation at the local facility. They are a good facility for breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, but if they see one head and neck cancer a year it’s a big deal. He made an appointment for me at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, one of the top three head and neck cancer centers in the country.

The medical oncologist at MDA was a little unhappy that my ENT had not done a neck dissection but he sent me to the radiation oncologist. I had a PET scan which was clear and I was scheduled for radiation therapy. They sent me to their dentist who x-rayed my teeth and declared I would be losing some of them.

We live five hours south of Houston and we needed a place to stay during the six weeks of radiation and the planning visits before it began. We had a motor home and found a campground close to the hospital that had special rates and a shuttle bus for campers. We brought our little dog with us and towed our Honda Civic behind the motorhome so we would have a daily driver.

The morning I was supposed to see the dentist to have an unknown number of teeth pulled, our little dog died. She was nine years old and had some heart problems for which she was medicated, but her death was unexpected. The dentist pulled three lower teeth. Two directly to the left of the front teeth and the next to the last molar on the right.

A few days later I saw the oncological dentist who made a stent for me to wear during radiation that would protect salivary glands and tissue that did not need to be radiated. He also made my fluoride trays and directed me to start using them as soon as I started radiation.

The radiation team knew of my claustrophobia and I was given Ativan before the mask making and simulation. I also took one before each treatment. Even with the drugs, I could barely tolerate the mask.

I went through the horrors of radiation. My mouth hurt, I could barely swallow, my neck was red, raw and weeping, but we drove the car home every weekend and I took great comfort in being there, even if it was just for a few days. I was holding my weight using Slim Fast so I cancelled the insertion of the feeding tube.

By the last two weeks I was heavily medicated with morphine and methadon in liquid form. The patch did not work and I was allergic to the adhesive. I had a variety of swishes and was religious about my baking soda rinses. Pain could be killed long enough for slow sipping of canned nutrition and water. My taste buds went away, but before they left they got weird and everything tasted vile. Everything that went into my mouth had to be room temperature.

Because I had no treatment on Labor Day, I was to double up on that Thursday. I had my treatment in the morning and then I was to see the radiation oncologist for my weekly clinic visit. I complained that my stomach hurt. I had a fever so they sent me to the emergency room where they sent me for an x-ray. A doctor came in and told me that my colon had ruptured and that I needed to have surgery immediately. This with only 4 more radiation treatments to go.

I awoke from the surgery with a colostomy. The surgeon called it a “double barrel” because both ends of the colon had been brought to the surface. The pain medication had slowed down my digestive system and there were large pieces of stuff stuck to the wall of my colon. Other stuff moved through the “normal” way (if you can call 8 Sennakot S a day “normal”)and while it was passing through it pushed the hard stuff right through the wall of my colon.

This was much more than I had bargained for. All of this to defeat a hypothetical microscopic cancer cell? I’m a fighter and there must have been a spark left somewhere within me because when my radiation oncologist appeared at my bedside a few days after surgery to encourage me to finish the last four treatments, I agreed. I finished them as an in-patient. After a week, they sent us home to our motorhome.

I spent one night there and was back in the hospital the next afternoon. My temperature had begun to rise. The emergency room doctor looked at my incision that stretched from navel to the bottom of my abdomen and decided that part of it was infected. He took out the staples and left a six inch long by three inch deep red, angry gash in my stomach. Then he showed me how to pack it with gauze dipped in saline solution and cover it with dry gauze. He assured me it would heal from the inside out. We didn’t believe him.

I was admitted to the hospital again for dehydration. By that time my mouth was so bad and my spirits so low that I was anorexic. I asked for the feeding tube. They looked at my shrinking abdomen with the huge appliance covering two pieces of colon and the enormous gaping wound and said: “where would we put it?” I spent another week in the hospital.

Don’t ask how I managed to survive. I just did. After two weeks we got permission to return home so we hitched up and left. I do not sleep when taking opiates. I doze and awaken in a series of very short naps, but no REM sleep. I was already off the morphine and had finished the tapering-down program on the methadon, but still not sleeping. I was depressed. I only wanted to die. When the last of the drugs left my system, I managed to sleep for a few hours at a time and that’s when I started to get better. I now recognize that I was sleep deprived.

Two and a half months after the colostomy, I convinced the gastric surgeon to reconnect me. The surgery was painful, leaving me with yet another open wound to care for. My body, though starting to make a comeback from the depths of hell, did not have the resources for a speedy recovery. It took me four months to recover.

It has been 18 months since my hemi-glossectomy and a little more than a year since the second gastric surgery. I have gained back some of the weight I lost, climbing from 98 pounds to 113. I’d like to give back 5. I have my old energy back and I have no evidence of cancer. I still have some issues with my bowels, but everything is under control and I will be starting to go to the gym soon. There are things I will never be able to eat again, but there are plenty of things I can enjoy. I’m not missing any tastes, though I still can’t tolerate hot or cold foods and only the first bite of ice cream tastes good. The rest only feels good. I have a partial denture and just got permission from my dental oncologist to get some veneers as long as no work goes below the gum line.

My ENT and my radiation therapist are astounded by how well my speech has recovered. My voice has power and range though I lisp. I’m very conscious of it, though others say they barely notice it. A few nights ago I went with my husband as moral support to an audition for our local community theater. I read for a part just to see if I could, even though the director was looking for “diction.” I got a part! My husband says it will give me confidence. I’m a little scared, but I’ve been scared worse.

It is mid-December as I write this and I am thinking that in this season of miracles, I am one.



I’ve been asked to update my story that was written in mid-December, 2007 for May, 2008 publication.

I was a great success in the community theater play. Everyone understood me and I gained the confidence I lacked in my own speech ability. Most people don’t even notice my speech imperfections. I don’t know if I’ll ever perform in another play, but I do recognize that I have overcome a problem that was more in my mind than in my mouth. All that I needed was someone else’s confidence in me.

I have started going to the gym 5 days a week. On Monday, Wednesday and Fridays I take classes in water aerobics, Body Pumping ® and Pilates ®. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I take a Yoga class and on Tuesday nights I am learning to belly dance, though I shall never, ever, do it publicly. I am working on restoring the physical strength that a year and a half of illness took from my body. I am even getting some strength back in the abdominal muscles that were carved up like a Jack-O-Lantern for the two gastric surgeries.

Before this is published, I will have participated in a local American Cancer Society Relay for Life. I’ll have walked not only for myself but for all the other cancer patients I’ve met either in person or through many of the support boards on the Internet.

I still have a little over three years before I can be “cured” but for right now, I’ll settle for being a chatterbox with no evidence of disease.

One More

Here's just one more. I can't help it, she's so cute!!

Another Pictuer

Here is Marcella with Mommy and Daddy

New Granddaughter

Somethings non-medical procedures help more with healing than the doctoring. Today, adter finishing my radiation treatment and my weekly visit with the doctor, we raved off to Houston Intenational Airport where my son and his wife were changing planes en route from Guatamals City to Newark Airport. They had their brand new (to us) baby daughter with them. Her name is Marcella Sandra Hisrchman and she will be five mohtns old tomorrow, August 31. We only had a few minutes to be together but we took pictures and took turns meeting our new grandgirl who has enchanted us.

The Healthy One Rants About Diabetes

The Healthy One

I don’t have Diabetes but I cook and eat as if I were one. The man in my life is a Diabetic. I love dancing with him and I want him to be able to dance for as long as possible.

After 25 years of mostly oral drugs my husband was recently been taken off of the oral medications and placed on insulin injections. He has a bad heart and a very tired pancreas that his doctors are trying to rest. The injections have been so effective in gaining good control that his doctor has just put him on a pump.

Throughout the years I have been by his side at Diabetes Education classes and at his office visits with his physicians. I have downloaded the USDA listings of calories and carbohydrates and printed it off. It’s kept in a loose leaf file for easy reference. I have a kitchen scale in my cabinet and it gets used at every meal I cook. I read labels at the grocery store. I subscribe to several Diabetes magazines, cookbooks and groups on the Internet to get information for him. He’s not very computer literate. His PhD is in Special Education.

We eat a low carbohydrate, low fat diet with plenty of fiber. Most of our carbohydrates come from vegetables, fruit and skimmed milk. Very few come from starches but some come from legumes. Since potatoes are his very favorite food, we do small amounts of red potatoes that have been chilled in the fridge after cooking. They are supposed to be less “carby” that way and he would rather have potato salad than sex. Our fats come from olive oil, nuts and avocados. Our proteins come from lean meats, fish and eggs. We don’t do fad diets which means that we have not gone low carb only to go high fat. High fat meals bring along their own special blood glucose control challenges for a Diabetic.
We do eat in restaurants. It’s not difficult to find grilled meat, chicken or fish. It’s easy to order double vegetables instead of a huge baked potato or even an extra salad. If I feel like a sugary treat, that’s when I’ll have it, but I don’t seem to crave sweets as much as I once did. When we travel on vacation we are most likely to do it in our motorhome where we can control what we are eating. We do enjoy cruising and I have enough knowledge of cooking techniques to decipher the menu for him to make his calculations. Since I’m the assertive one in the family, I will be the one who will ask the waiter to query the cook as to the ingredients of a dish.

I plan our meals. I calculate his carbs so that he can bolus. I look at his blood glucose records and I carry his meter in my purse. I carry the glucose tabs and a juice box of orange juice, too.

Rather than being resentful of not being able to cook or eat like a “normal” person, I am keeping my weight down as well as my cholesterol. I’m probably staving off a family tendency towards Type 2 Diabetes as well.

There are things about Diabetes that irk me. I hate reading a recipe in a magazine that is supposed to be “diabetic friendly” only to find that one teeny serving of a desert contains more carbs than he, or most Diabetics, can handle in an entire meal. I am also impatient with advertisements from Diabetes product providers who have a grossly overweight man as their spokesperson. If Wilfred Brimley tests so often, why the heck isn’t he thinner? What is he doing with his test results? Then there are the sugar-free foods like sugar-free pudding. It’s composed of corn starch. It’s made with milk. True it’s lower in carbs than it’s sugar-sweetened counterpart, but it’s not really good food for a Type 2 Diabetic who is trying to maintain good control. I detest it when a recipe claims to be good for a Diabetic just because it has replaced sugar with a non-caloric sweetener and lowered the fats. Don’t these people know about carbohydrates?!

The other thing that bugs me are the so-called professionals. The Family physicians who diagnose some senior citizen as a Diabetic, gives them a prescription for an oral drug, an incomprehensible “exchange” diet that was issued by the American Diabetes Association in the year one and tells them to come back in 3 months. What those people need more than anything is education. It’s available, but most newly diagnosed Diabetics don’t get it. I’ve met people who test their blood glucose but haven’t a clue why they do it or what it means.

Then there are the Dieticians in hospitals. The curriculum in their courses is in dire need of updating. They are prescribing carb-heavy meals for people who need, more than anything, to keep their blood glucose levels down so that their bodies can heal. No Diabetic is going to heal well after surgery when they are feeding him or her white bread, mashed potatoes, macaroni, milk and ice cream all at the same time. Whenever my husband has been hospitalized, I have asked to see the dietician. I present him or her with what my husband’s standard meal plan requirements are and ask that they be adhered to. I would rather be known as “the wife from hell” than the “little widow” If I annoy them, then they probably need to be annoyed.

Please do not think of me as one of those Atkins “Carb-Nazis” I am certainly not. I believe in good nutrition, not mumbo-jumbo nutrition. I have too many friends who found themselves at the wrong end of a serum cholesterol test after subscribing to such a high-fat diet. I am constantly searching for flavorful recipes and innovative foodstuffs that will work for my darling husband.

"What's In Your Mailbox?"

We’ve all seen the commercials for Capital One credit cards. They are, for the most part, quite original. Their sales methods, however, are not.

Somehow they got my name and address. For the past six weeks I’ve received at least one piece of junk mail inviting me to take out one of their cards per week. Some weeks I receive two. Today I called and asked that they remove me from their list. I was advised that it would take six to eight weeks to do so.

Six to eight weeks! What an outrage! I’m sure it took a second or two to find me and send me their unsolicited mail. I’m sure they’ve run a credit check on me. I’m sure they know more about me than my husband does. They could find all this out in a New York minute, but it will take close to two months to delete the information.

Retired Actress

It’s over. We’ve finished our run. Six performances and six different audiences. It amazed me that different audiences reacted in different ways to the same play. What was funny to the group on Friday night, wasn’t to the group on Sunday.

I messed up a little on Saturday night and on Sunday I forgot a prop and made a late entrance. It was only a few seconds off so the audience didn’t know, but it sure gave the actors on stage a scare! I found that the audience doesn’t know when the actors mess up as long as the play continues along.

I no longer have to put the hated curlers in my hair that were part of my costume so this afternoon I am finally getting a hair cut. I can’t wait.

My husband will probably try out for another play. I don’t think I shall. It takes quite a bit of dedication to tread the boards. A lot of time is required for rehearsals. A lot of time is required to memorize lines. I’m too jealous of my free time to give away that much of it again. It was a great experience and I will never regret it, but I don’t think I’ll do it again.

Here I Am

This is me on the stage. I'm the one in the middle. The local paper took the photo on the Monday before we opened on Friday night. Two performances down. Four more to go.

Last night was not as good as opening night, but the audience enjoyed itself and that's what really counts. They don't know if we've missed a line or two as long as the play is funny and understandable. One of our stars who has been in many other productions told me that the second night is usually the worst. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. He was worse the second night. I also think our first night audience appreciated the humor a little more.

We have to stand near the exits to shake hands with the theatergoers as they leave and some of the comments I've gotten are wonderful. One lady, upon seeing my other costume (no, I won't be posting a picture of that one)said that it took a lot of nerve to do the show. It does. Another woman smiled and said that she believed I had been rummaging in her closet.

Stars!

We opened last night to a packed house. We were blessed with a wonderful audience who helped us make the show a hit.

We had to be at the theater at 6 PM even though the curtain wasn’t until 8 PM. We used the time to put on our makeup and costumes, to do some voice exercises, get last minute directions from our wonderful director and to try and loosen up. Some of our friends called and left a message on the cell phone that I picked up about an hour before the curtain. They passed the phone around and wished us broken legs. It was wonderful! We were quite touched.

I was not very loose. I was, in fact, a very tight bundle of nerves. The only thing that was loose was my bladder. I had to pee every 5 minutes. I decided to only sip my water when my throat was so dry that I was choking. I used my costume change to pee and was able to make it until the end of the play. Thank goodness there is a toilet in the dressing room!

I had packed some Acetaminophen, Valium® (generic Diazepam), Immodium® and throat lozenges. I was ready for anything!

I make my first entry rather early in the play. I am in what we are calling the Flamingo costume. The local paper took my picture wearing it on Monday and it appeared in Friday’s paper. Here’s a URL http://www.valleymorningstar.com/articles/2006/01/27/rio_living/rio_living1.txt
If it’s not there when you look, I can send you a .pdf file I made of the website.

I was behind the curtains near where I had to stand just before my entrance. My heart was pounding so hard that I was certain the audience could hear it above their laughter. The two characters on stage were doing wonderfully, generating laughs and hitting their lines square on. I was happy, excited, anxious and very, very nervous. I thought about downing a Valium® but nixed the idea. Live or die; I was determined to do it without chemicals.

I made my entrance to laughter. I executed my lines with flair. I didn’t drop any lines and I managed to time the delivery with the audience laughter even though we hadn’t practiced it.

My next appearance is late in Act II and I am in a different costume. It’s a green jump and white print Spandex® suit with bell-bottoms and a halter top. It is tied so tightly that my breasts are pushed up and rounded. Does the word “floozy” bring a picture to your mind? Around my waste is a green sash that I need in a later scene where I enter with beer cans stuffed into the sash. Do the words “boozy floozy” bring a picture to your mind? My earrings are huge loopy things with lots of little, green discs hanging from various parts of them. Outrageous! My hair is still in blue curlers and tied with a piece of pink tulle. I am still wearing the socks with the ruffled tops and the big, pink slippers with the piggie faces that I wore in Act I. I look (and feel) as though I am about to pop out of the costume.

I entered in that costume to hilarity. I had to try really hard to ignore the audience and concentrate on my lines and the action in the play. I did. I said my monolog and it was very funny. No one else missed their lines and I was dead on with mine. By Act III I actually found myself so immersed in the role that I didn’t even have to think of the cues. I just reacted to the action and talk on the stage and my lines were perfect.

On stage, before a real audience, it all came together. The weeks of rehearsals, the changes in the script, the changes in blocking... it all happened and it looked good. We have five more performances and I hope we do as well.