Salty Zebra

  Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts .  I've spent the last three months' worth of Mondays sharing with you all about how I came to do radiation therapy for my brain tumor and how I've been preparing for it. My hope is that these posts can serve as insight, advice, or even just commiseration for others that are facing brain radiation, as I struggled to find a resource out there like this one. If you have found value in these posts, I would greatly appreciate it if you'd let me know in the comments and/or share this series with anyone in your sphere that might be able to benefit from them. The Monday that this post is published marks the final week of my treatment. As I mentioned in this post , the literature suggest...

  Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts .    Whether because of an accident, serious illness, or natural aging, we will all face the end of our lives. If you're breathing, this pertains to you. Most of us don't want to think about dying though, I know I didn't, and so we put off conversations and avoid thinking about our preferences when it comes to end of life care. Sadly, that can result in our loved ones being put in a difficult position of not knowing what we would want and having to make choices on our behalf, choices that can be difficult or even traumatizing, and may not be what we would prefer at all. How can we avoid that burden being put on those closest to us? By thinking ahead a little and recording our prefere...

  Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts .    When we found out that I was going to have to do radiation therapy, my husband started dreaming of a lounge. Initially it was called the "Rest Room", but when we talked about it, it sounded a lot like restroom, and that's just a strange place to hang out with people 😂, so my kids renamed it the "Lounge." Always with taking care of me front-of-mind, he wanted to make sure he'd be able to keep an eye on me and be available if I needed him while I recuperated from radiation. In February, my son moved into his own home and vacated the room across the hall from my husband's office, creating the perfect space. That way, my husband could work and still feel like ...

 Radiation is a big deal. My husband keeps reminding me of that. Everything I've read on the subject tells me that I will be wiped out. My brain will not function. I will not be able to maintain the complicated systems that I've put in place for our life and finances. So, today I simplify.  For the last year, I've really enjoyed using the Door Dash and Instacart benefits on several of the credit cards I've opened. In fact, I've gotten up to $40 in free groceries from DoorDash and $60 in free groceries from Instacart every month! This is really handy, and fun if I'm being honest, but it takes time, effort, and a lot of thought. I have to pick my moment, ordering from Door Dash when DashMart has a good sale, ordering $12 here and $22 there from Instacart. You see, in order to receive these benefits, each card has to be used on a different order. This came out to as many as nine different orders per month. And these orders had to be carefully curated to come in as ...

   Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts .  After my first radiation treatment, I was excited to come home and write this post and tell you about all the wonderful and crazy things that had taken place, but there's so much more life going on right now than I have bandwidth for, and writing a post fell to the bottom of the list. That worked out well, though, because each day added on a little more insight as well as intrigue, and I think this post will have benefitted from waiting until the end of the week to be written. Come along with me and find out about what I learned in my first five days of radiation therapy!  As expected, my husband had us up before the crack of dawn on the first day of treatment. He actually set his ala...

  Bring us back to yourself, O LORD, so that we may return to you; renew our life as in days before. Lamentations 5:21  Do you ever think back to the “Good Old Days?” Times when things were easier, happier? When your children lived at home, or when they were little? Before some major health or job crisis? Do you ever long for that joy to be restored? Jeremiah did. This book I’ve read through over the last week, Lamentations, catalogs the hurt and degradation of his people. This was all well-deserved, as he often mentions, because of how the people had turned away from God, but that doesn’t make it good. Jeremiah knew what life could be like, and he wanted it back.   The title of this book, Lamentations, means, “Expression of sorrow; cries of grief; the act of bewailing.”* This is not sadness. It is not a mild depression or feeling down. This is a desperate, gut-wrenching expression of distress. Jeremiah’s whole world had been turned upside-down, as indeed it had for h...

  Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts .  Today I head into the City for my first radiation treatment. I'll write a post for next Monday to tell you all about it, but I don't know yet what that's going to look like, so today I'm going to write to you about Zora. I would super  appreciate your prayers as I head into treatment though!  When you're going through something hard, it's nice to have a buddy, a friend, someone who will be with you through thick and thin, someone who can even come into the room with you during a radiation treatment, in other words, a stuffy. My husband first suggested it shortly after we found out that my treatment was being moved up . We've taken a small stuffed animal with us on ...

Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation. I'm hoping these can help someone else, as I struggled to find a conversational source like this that dealt with the subject. For more information on my brain tumor, check out these posts .  I don't know why, but with me, there's always a catch. Before my brain surgery, I ended up with a horrifically painful sinus infection that blew out the back wall of my sinus, leaving tiny pieces of bone floating in my head, and preventing me from getting the surgery that was critical to my survival. Turns out, it's not a good idea to perform brain surgery on someone with an active head infection 😬. That delayed my brain surgery for a full month, and it weighed heavily on my mind as I approached radiation therapy and, yet another, bizarre, unexplained complication arose.  I've struggled with scalp issues for months, I don't know why. Perhaps it came from reverting to comme...