Getting published and back in shape

June 13, 2009

Dear Family and Friends,

I am at week 3 following my last chemotherapy treatment and I’m feeling pretty well. I started exercising again five days ago and I can now walk a mile and half in 30 minutes. That is a far cry from the three miles in 30 minutes I was jogging every morning in January before the cancer but nevertheless it is progress.

On Tuesday I went to our health club to work with a trainer. What was I thinking? I guess I was thinking I need some organized structure to get me back to the shape I was in before treatment. I have no stamina, I have lost much of my muscle tone and I’m just lacking the motivation right now.

I met the trainer and told him I was two weeks post chemotherapy and was hoping to lose the pounds I had gained and get my strength back. I do not think he understood. He tested me for strength and stamina and checked my BMI. He then said, “Well, you know you might gain weight working out?” Here I go with the self-talk again…what are these trainers thinking? What woman wants to hear that she might gain more weight when she has just confessed to gaining weight and has stood on a scale in front of a complete stranger to prove it! I don’t want to gain any more weight! I am sure that he was just being realistic but I have decided I am not going back to this trainer. If I do go back to the club at all, I’m going for aerobic training not muscle development. The next session is Tuesday and I will have to figure out something by then. Somehow I need to motivate myself ~ maybe I can get Paul and Anne to help me here at home.

On to bigger and better things ~ just when I’m spending any extra energy I have focusing on my last chemotherapy treatment and preparing myself (mentally and physically) for radiation, something has happened in my life outside of ‘self’ that makes me stop to think about something else besides my cancer.

You know me so you know that I have spent many years counseling cancer patients, many years as a hospital administrator and many years working in research, usually doing all three activities simultaneously. A year ago I worked at Michigan State University with two scientists, Barbara and Bill Given. Among my other responsibilities, I worked on a research project that studied how the medical community could help cancer patients be more adherent with their oral chemotherapy regimen (it is hard to imagine that a cancer patient would skip a dose or doses of their oral chemotherapy but it happens all the time).

The year was so great! I spent my nights staying with our daughter-in-law Dima who lived in East Lansing attending MSU at the time and my days learning how to pull a clinical trial together from an ‘idea’ to completion. My prior research experience was all about establishing a hospital program to conduct clinical trials, creating an infrastructure that included hiring staff and assuring oversight and most importantly inspiring a hospital to believe they could be a real cancer center.

My year at MSU was much more subdued as I learned the methodology of a single clinical trial. Our little team (the Givens, a few graduate students and two statisticians) conducted a pilot study prior to the larger study sponsored by Oncology Nursing Society. We wrote up the results of the pilot study and that write-up was just accepted for publication in Cancer Nursing: An International Journal for Cancer Care. How great is that?

We sent the article in months ago with the first revision due during chemotherapy treatment number one (talk about bad timing) and the second and final revision due during treatment number four. If you recall how foggy I got after chemotherapy, you can appreciate trying to ‘clear’ the brain long enough to get the document revised and resubmitted. Fortunately I had plenty of assistance throughout the compilation of data and editing. My administrative assistant, Julie, was a tremendous help in pulling everything together for me. Thankfully, despite the terrible timing and the chemo brain, everything worked and the document was accepted. This was a huge encouragement to me and just what I needed in the midst of the occasional pity parties I endure with myself. I’ll let you know when we get an actual publication date.

That is the news for now. I have the “trial run” for radiation this week. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Love,

Veronica