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 .  There's lots to do before I start radiation in 35 days, and I have to prioritize. When looking at my list, one of the hardest things was cutting my hair. Three years ago, I had three brain surgeries which resulted in a shaved head at the end. That was a tough decision at first, but when I found that I would have several strange, shaved patches, and I had spent two weeks in the neuro ICU not being able to wash or care for my hair properly, it got a little easier. After surgery, I very much wanted to grow my hair back out. There's something about my body and brain that tell me I need to put my hair in a ponytail. If I can't, I just don't feel right. One year later (exactly one y...

  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 . So... Crazy week. I wrote my first post in this series last week under the impression that I had four and a half months until I would be starting radiation and I had a lot of things I wanted to do to get ready. I already have ten other posts in this series started in my drafts folder - so much to do. So much I want to take care of. And this week, well that timeline shrunk significantly. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's what happened.  Last weekend I had an amazing time with my family. We talked a lot about radiation, and I thought more and more about it. To say I started questioning myself would be an understatement. You see, the determination to begin treatment was made based...

Over the next few months, I'll be sharing regular posts about how I'm preparing for radiation in the fall. 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 .    Last weekend, my family came together to celebrate my husband's 50th birthday. The timing of this was pretty special as I'd just received confirmation from my medical team that my brain tumor had officially entered progression (at least 20% growth) just a couple of days before, which I explained in my post last week . One of the hardest parts of this process has been having to communicate, at each step, what's going on to my family, especially my children. Don't get me wrong, they've been amazing about it! But I hate seeing the burden of knowledge weighing heavily on them.  Each of my kids have reacted differently to news of my tumor at different stages in thi...