#cornmouse

Have you started scouting colleges yet?

Our Troubles Will Be Out Of Sight by cornmouse | Steve/Darcy | WIP

Darcy meets a handsome stranger in a Manhattan bar on Christmas Eve and takes him home with her.

cornmouse replied to your post:

You and I are experiencing the exact same weather right now (humidity and all) and I’m dying too. I’m assuming you don’t have AC either? Damn our mild climates getting hit with this agony!! ;_;

crowaii said: As a recent Californian expat it’s only now beginning to feel like summer, tbh

aenariasbookshelf said: ….yeah, that shit ain’t right. It’s only 77F here in NYC right now (which I think is 28C? At least google tells me so). At least it’s still humid af. At least something is right with the world.

cornmouse replied to your post: “faith no more”:

Oh my god I don’t know how this happened, but I am so glad it did. AMAZING. I want to live in this headcanon forever. God, what would it be like to HUG one of them? CACKLING just thinking about it. <3<3

cornmouse replied to your post: “There is now a Dunkin’ Donuts at the Leicester services. I was nearly…”:

Dude, DD is in the UK? That seems wrong somehow. Certain brands should not leave their homes: Timmy’s, DD, Chick Fil A, In N Out, Stumptown, etc. They never taste right elsewhere.

It was wrong, on a number of levels. Some things are okay. Krispy Kreme are pretty damn close to the original, though really we only ever go for the novelty. And the closest one where they actually make the things is in Selfridges in Birmingham (we are quite devout watchers of How It's Made so watching things be made is best).

So I’ve been reinspired to write fanfiction lately. This is based in cornmouse‘s “Fortune Favors the Blind” universe, where Steve and Darcy are dating. That isn’t required reading, but is awesome and you should read it anyway. This is just a preview, but I have to head out for a bit and I wanted to at least post what I’d roughed out so far.

Welcome to a personal post about cancer.  I will preface this story with a sneak preview of the ending:  I am almost all better.  And look, hair growing back and my eyelashes have returned!  Hot damn!

So last summer, my back started to hurt.  It hurt enough that I actually went to see a doctor (nearly unheard of for me) and we took an x-ray.  Nothing showed up, but we decided that I had a muscle spasm, as back pain is fairly common in women my age.  My age being 35.  Well, throughout the summer, my back kept hurting.   I went to Urgent Care and the ER.  I got increasingly heavy pain meds.  I started physical therapy.  Nothing helped.  Other strange things happened:  I began to lose my appetite.  I began to lose my taste for sugar!  The horror!  And then one day I was doing my PT exercises and I felt like an elephant stood on my chest.  I went to the ER again, and they took a new x-ray.  Well.  Things showed up.  Over the course of that night and the next day I got an ultrasound, a CT scan, and my first ever MRI.  The doctor came in to see me and I got the shock of my life:  I had a tumor on my spine and lesions throughout my body.

My eventual diagnosis was for a poorly differentiated neuro endocrine tumor.  I had Stage 4 cancer.  It was very aggressive.  A note on the stages of cancer -- Stage 4 does not mean “you have a month to live,” it means that the cancer is very prevalent.  My cancer was in my bones, mainly, but also in my lungs and liver.  So... everywhere.  But I had two big things in my favor:  I was so young, and I was fat.  My oncologist is the first doctor who has ever looked at me and said I looked perfect, and he didn’t want me to lose a single pound.

Well, fast forward seven months, ten days of radiation, six rounds of chemo, and multiple other tests (PET scans, MRI, CT scan, colonoscopy, 24 hour urine dump, and more blood tests than I can count) and I am now clear of cancer in my lungs and liver.  I have one more test to do to see how my lesions are doing in my bones.  My oncologist thinks it must be a very small amount, if anything’s still there, due to my awesome blood test results.  Yay!

I did wind up losing ninety pounds (the silver lining, honestly) and four inches of height.  I’m now 4′11″ and weigh less than 150 pounds for the first time since high school.  I don’t have much of an appetite and I can’t sleep for longer than two hours at a time.  I’m just starting a new pill (woo hoo, more pills!) to help w/ both of those things.  I’m weaning myself off my pain pills (oxycontin and oxycodone), and taking calcium citrate and a very heavy dose of Vitamin D.  I got two tattoos (radiation dots) and am probably going through early onset menopause.  I got closer to my mother, who moved in and lived w/ us from September to February, but I also had entire months where I couldn’t dress myself, get into a car by myself, lift the water jug to pour my own drink, get up from a chair by myself.  My boss was amazing and let me work from home the entire time, so I continued to accrue sick time and get paid my usual rate.  I don’t know a lot of workplaces that would have been as kind (though in my defense, I was still able to move my fingers across a keyboard and get a lot of work done).  So some good things, a lot of bad things, but I’m alive and getting better!

I’ll close w/ a word of advice:  if you think there’s something wrong w/ your body, keep digging until you get to the bottom of it.  If you have a chronic symptom, it’s not going to go away on its own.  You are the expert of how your body should feel!  For example, after every chemo session, I needed a platelet transfusion.  My oncologist said I should be out of the woods by nine days after the chemo round ended.  He was wrong.  My body didn’t work like that.  Thirteen days out, I needed to go to the hospital.  Every time.  It sucked.  And I knew it, each time.  B/c there are guidelines, and then there are actual bodies, and I knew my body.  (Damn, I hate going to the ER!!!)

Cancer really sucks.  I hope from the bottom of my heart that none of you have to go through it.  I’m still in a lot of pain (two fractures in my spine, ugh, thanks tumor).  But you CAN get through it.  I am continually blown away by how generous and wonderful my family and friends were through this whole ordeal.  I still have thousands of dollars left in medical bills (and I have GOOD insurance), but thanks to them, I don’t feel like I’m drowning.