I didn't do chemo on Thursday, as my WBC was even lower than it was on Monday prior. They scared me on Friday morning—I got a call from the lab at 800am and they asked me to come back in and give them some more blood, as the sample they had drawn on Thursday AM had hemolyzed and the red cells wouldn't precipitate out. I'm still trying to figure out what that really means.

J and I talked at lunch on Friday and she hooked me up with the name of something that will support the immune system (the lymph and white blood cells) MGN3 that is made out of rice bran and Japanese mushrooms (Shitake among them). The studies seem well done, and it has been used to treat cancer in Japan, too. I'm willing to give anything a whirl at this point.

I need to stop living in my head. It's getting to be a boring place.

I had an interesting encounter with a guy on Thursday. I went to mail a box, and the clerk asked me very nicely if I was a survivor. I told him not yet, as I had two chemos left to go. He allowed as how attitude was more than half the battle, and that he wished me luck and hoped to see me at the run for the cure in September. It's not like I try to hide it very much, as I have no eyebrows and no eyelashes to speak of left. I'm almost getting used to the shaved scalp, too. I don't scare myself in the mirror in the mornings anymore.

That end of life crisis is getting worse. The more I read the worse it gets, and I can't decide if this is good, or bad. I've made it my lifes' goal to not live in fear, but I may have met my match. You know they don't actually cure ovarian cancer—they treat it as a chronic disease. The question is not what can I use to treat this with, but what can I treat it with that isn't going to prevent me from being able to treat the reoccurrence of the disease. They only measure success in the amount of time before the reoccurrence. Everything they use to treat the disease into the first remission has to be reconsidered when the next set of tumors comes up because of their toxicity. The cells that survive the most toxic chemicals platinum (carboplatin) and Taxol are resistant to those drugs for about a year, year and half. The good news is the longer in between relapses the better they can treat the disease.

So. The 64$ question is, can I overcome the fear of living with this so that what I have left isn't completely overshadowed? Is that even possible? Am I left with being virtually ruled by the fact that every opportunity passed on is probably passed on permanently? I don’t like the sound of that very much.

An idea has been percolating in my head, and I'm trying to decide if this is something that I can pull off or not. After I read Lance Armstrong's book I thought that Central Arkansas would be a great place for a bike race. Lots of things for the tourists, interesting terrain for the cyclists, and I see a lot of cyclists around, though mainly casual amateurs. At any rate, I'll probably go volunteer for the foot race in September, depending on when it is. So much is up in the air I feel paralyzed whenever I try to accomplish anything. It's all decided for me by circumstances outside my control.