January 25th — I don’t like my life right now. Even with Xanax, I’m pretty unhappy. I’m generally upbeat, so I suspect this malaise will pass, but I’m allowing myself to feel sorry for myself today. I had cancer after all at a fairly young age and have 37 more days of radiation ahead of me. I have blue marker dots and Xs all over my chest and abdomen (to mark my held breaths during radiation). Of course, the parts of my life that don’t involve cancer treatment are pretty wonderful — I just took a fun weekend ski trip with my adorable husband, I have two children who are funny and loving and bright, I have interesting and caring friends and a new thriving business. But right now, all I see is the cancer treatment looming large on my life horizon. How can one aspect of my life eclipse these other parts? Snap out of it, Amy. Perhaps it’s because the radiation oncologists like my tumors less than my medical oncologist did. That’s not exactly phrased right, because none of these docs like my cancer. It’s just my regular oncologist talks to me about the hormones and chemicals and drugs affecting my particular cancer while the radiation docs talk about the physical location and properties of my cancer. I’m discovering that those are two different things. To my medical oncologist, the triple positive breast cancer tumors have a wide variety of treatments to prevent it from returning. The well-tested trifecta of adromyacin, cyclotoxin and taxol (ACT), the magic wonder drug Herceptin, the 10 years of hormone-binding pills like Tamoxifen. The radiation oncologists are more concerned because they worry about the location of my tumors and my lymph system and trajectory angles and hitting my lungs and avoiding my heart with the nuclear beams. It’s downright scary. On a funny note, the cotton hospital gown I wore to undergo my radiation treatment went into a used gown laundry bin that wasn’t just marked with the sign for medical waste. It had the funky nuclear atom sign on it. So, do my hospital gowns get buried in some mountain in Nevada along with spent plutonium waste from Three Mile Island?