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"Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go.    Acceptance is a small, quiet room."   - Cheryl Strayed, Author of  Wild At this point, most of you have probably seen the latest update on Paul circulating through your Facebook news feeds. For everyone else, here's the scoop: In my last post, I mentioned that we were spending Easter with Paul's family in Wisconsin. But as our two-week visit approached its end, it became more and more evident that Paul wouldn't be making our return flight back to Buffalo. So the three of us are staying in Paul�s parents' home in Oshkosh, Wisconsin where he has entered Hospice care. We had always considered making Paul�s childhood home in Oshkosh his final resting place on this Earth. After witnessing his almost immediate "release" when the decision was final, I ca...

A few weeks ago, Paul wiped out on our front walkway. We had just gotten home after spending 8+ hours in the hospital. I was holding Ingrid who was asleep in my arms, and I didn�t react fast enough to grab him before he fell. Which is weird because every time I replay this scene in my head, Paul is falling in excruciating slow motion. He didn�t even slip on ice or uneven pavement or one of the three small steps that lead up to our house. He is just that weak . Weak to the point where he can hardly walk without assistance anymore. He just fell backwards, like a thin broomstick unable to hold itself upright without a prop. When I heard his head thwack the sidewalk, I winced and (gently) tossed a now-awake Ingrid onto the lawn to rush to his side. Thankfully, there was a gentleman walking past our house at that exact moment. He secured his dog to a nearby lamppost and helped me hoist Paul to his feet. Angels among us. By now, the scrapes on his scalp have healed, but my nerves have not ye...

After she took my vitals the other day, my radiation nurse popped her head back into the examining room. �Hey, I meant to ask - how�s your husband doing?� �Oh, he�s ok. Well. No. Actually�� I paused, not sure how to finish that sentence. I mean - how do you casually insert the fact that your husband is dying into a quick conversation? I stumbled through the key points:  He stopped taking the chemo pill he was on.  He may not pursue additional treatment.  He�s focusing on enjoying what time he has left.  See? It�s like dropping a bomb on people.  It�s also been a major reason for the gaps between my evasive blog posts lately. It hurts too much to think those thoughts. It hurts even worse to give them shape. We had a great Christmas. Absolutely, we did. It was very special. But. Everything has taken on this weird blend of light and dark, happy and sad, gratitude and grief. About a month ago, Paul went into the clinic for routine bloodwork. It was the usual state o...

I originally wrote this piece a couple of months back, while recovering from my first mastectomy . Then I got crummy news  about my cancer, and this post seemed totally irrelevant so I never published it. I've been saving it for the right time. Which is now because the writer-y part of my brain is kaput, and I am so overwhelmingly TIRED.  "Be kind. For everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about." Yes. I did  just open this post with an authorless quote that sounds like it was swiped from the Pinterest board of a delusionally optimistic sorority girl. And yet. Read it again. Because it's actually kind of important. When people see me in a bandana trying to wrangle a Hershey bar out of my toddler's death grip, they already know my battle . It's visibly obvious I've been through chemo. Either that or my fashion sense is tragically rubbish. But most people (I hope) assume the former. This does have its benefits. Strangers are ever so nice to...

This space could use a little jolt of happy, wouldn�t you agree? I had my first post-op appointment with my surgical oncologist yesterday. Remind me to stop scheduling things in the afternoon. Waiting around all day turns me into a strung out lunatic. By the time we were ready to leave, my stress level had surpassed its breaking point. Paul drove. I cried. Perched on the examining room chair, I fidget with the ties of my pink cover-up. My doctor pokes his head in the door, smiling. Smiling is a good sign. I like smiling. We talk about how I�m feeling. He takes a look at my incision. He decides it�s time to remove the sutures. �I�ll be right back. I�m just going to run and grab a suture removal kit, ok?� Ok. But um, like -- do I still have cancer? I love my doctor. He�s the best. He�s brilliant. And sometimes brilliant people are�slightly scatterbrained? Or eccentric. So I forgive him for not launching into my pathology results the moment he walked in the door.  As he�s pulling...

September 26th is Mesothelioma Awareness Day , so I�d like to turn the mic over to my dear husband, Paul.  �Enough with the Liz chronicles. We want Paul!� said everyone, everywhere.  I hear ya, I do. Let�s talk about meso. If you�re asking Google (like I did 5 years ago when Paul was diagnosed) you�ll mostly just find lawyer ads and a lot of bleak statistics. Like these numbers are not going to make you feel good.  And I am not exaggerating about the sue-happy law firm sites. I just typed �Mesothelioma Awareness� into Google and FOUR ads promising �just retribution for a cruel disease� popped up on my browser. So...where�s my money guys? Huh? HUH? There�s a lot of unhelpful information about mesothelioma floating around on the Internet. So it was by divine intervention, I think, that I was able to find the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation while desperately searching for financial assistance a few years ago. This organization is the real deal. They are:  �th...

I�m a little late to the party, but a fellow breast cancer blogger, Nancy Stordahl , whom I admire greatly, proposed a summer blogging challenge last month. Though the grocery stores here in Western New York are stocked with Oktoberfest, and our temps are hovering right above sweater weather, the calendar agrees with me: it's still technically summer. I got Paul�s answers for these, too. And they�re good. 1. Share anything you want about your cancer diagnosis (or your loved one�s). Share your age, cancer type, stage, when you were diagnosed, family history (if any), your reaction, how you learned the news, or whatever you�re comfortable sharing. Liz: I was diagnosed with Invasive Ductal Carcinoma, stage IIIb, in February 2017. The cancer was in my right breast and had spread to my underarm lymph nodes. I was 30. No family history, really. Just one cousin on my dad�s side who was also diagnosed fairly recently. Because a lot of people ask: I found a lump so I went to the Doctor. P...

Some days, I'm a bad cancer patient. Some days I can't stomach the thought of doing, erm, anything. Unless it involves eating ice cream in bed. With someone else bringing it to me. Some days I can't be bothered to put the laundry away. Or to force my strong-willed toddler to eat spaghetti with a fork instead of her hands. Or to read a book, even. I just want to lay on the couch and let myself feel tired and cranky because, um, hello? I have cancer. So let me. I'm not supposed to say these things. What I'm supposed to do is throw back some organic plant-based fuel, strap on my running shoes, and parrot a litany of positive platitudes. With cancer patients, it's always: fight, fight, fight! Stay positive! Get dressed every morning, even when you don't feel like it! Go for a walk! Get pumped, eat leafy greens, be a survivor dammit! There is all this, let's face it, useless rhetoric swirling around cancer patients, pressuring them to beat their...

Leave it to me to put off blogging until I'm practically finished with my chemo regimen. But do you hear that, friends?? It's true: we are reaching the end of phase 1 for Liz! Just two more weeks of Taxol (the friendlier of chemo chums) and I am done! When I scheduled my last two infusions, the receptionist asked if I would be throwing a party. To which I, in a benedryl/zofran/steroid/chemo haze, most enthusiastically replied, "ALL OF JULY is going to be one enormous party!!!" It's true, to a point. As my neurotic super-organized planner reveals, next month is filled to the rafters with celebratory good times. "For life is short, but sweet for certain." (it's already been said: I'm the 90's biggest fan.) I feel a little bit braggy when people ask me how I'm feeling. Most of the time, I feel good. So much so, that I literally forget I'm sick. I'm still working (very part-time), and I still do normal mom things. Like forget to take...

There's a thing that happens when you get diagnosed with cancer. Or maybe I'm a total nutter and it's just me. Not sure, but it seems the further along I get in my treatment, the less actual hoots I give about what people think.  Wow.  That sounded horribly smug and self-righteous coming out...what I mean to say is - I've developed a (slightly) thicker skin about certain things.  Like this blog, for instance. Under normal circumstances, I would NEVER have started a blog. Mostly because I'd fret incessantly over the possibility of coming across as snobbish. Or self-absorbed. Or insecure. I'd worry that my posts would trigger collective eye-rolls and Facebook friends unfollowing me en masse.  I do care about people, they're lovely. I just don't have the energy to waste on worrying what they think about my false eyebrows. Or, more to the point, what they think about my ideas, my writing, or this silly blogging shtick.  Which, hooray for me because I alwa...

One more post should just about bring Paul's treatment up-to-date. Frankly, I'm itching to get on with things. So I'll be editing ruthlessly here. The thing about Meso is - it's incurable. We all hate that word. It signifies defeat. It suggests someone is going to die by the end of the story. It's something that, if I'm going to be perfectly honest here, took me some time to wrap my head around.  I definitely didn't process that fact when Paul was first diagnosed. We'll be kind and call it innocence instead of ignorance, but at 25 I still thought everything was fixable. We have science, people! Haven't we made enough advances in medicine to make my otherwise healthy husband tumor-free? But. We haven't. By the fall of 2015, his tumors had diminished slightly in size, but they were still there. They will likely always be there. So, unless we wanted to drive ourselves mad with worry, we had to adopt a new approach to Paul's cancer. Instead of l...