Size 7

Last year around this time a bunch of my friends had suggestive Facebook statuses: "I like it on the kitchen table," "I like it on the floor," etc.

It was one of those breast cancer awareness "campaigns," where you were supposed to write where you keep your purse as your status.  Those out of the loop were supposed to be scratching their heads at how saucy these people were while the rest of us giggled.

I was pretty upset.

My mom had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and here were a bunch of (probably) well-intentioned people making light of it, trivializing it, turning it into something that they could use to become attention-whores or part of an "in" crowd.

I don't know about you, but I haven't run across anyone who looks at me, startled and amazed and says, "Oh wow, cancer in the BREAST?  I had no idea you could get cancer there!" when I mention that my mom passed away.  I think most people are pretty aware.

So this year there's a new "campaign."  Write your shoe size.  Yeah yeah yeah, it's supposed to be "secret," and "fun."  But again this year I'm pretty annoyed and what I think of is the phrase, "Act your age, not your shoe size."  How many people will giggle and write "size 8!" and then...that's it?  I guess I just don't see how it actually does anything to help cancer patients.  This is the third year in a row that I've seen these statuses around: write the color of your bra, write where you like to put your purse, write your shoe size.

"Black - but that's only because I still have both my breasts."

"I like it on the kitchen counter, but I'd really rather be able to hear my mom complain about me leaving my stuff out all the time just once  more."

"7.5, but I wish I could go shoe shopping with my mom again."

Done and done and I feel good, and cool, and part of the in-crowd and I never have to actually do anything to help anyone.

So please, instead of throwing up a status that you'll forget you wrote next week, be creative.  There are lots of things you can do.

1.  Donate to a cause.  You all know of one (:ahem:), and even if you can only contribute $20, or $10, or $5, or $1 it will make a difference and be appreciated.

2.  Participate in a walk or fundraiser yourself.

3.  Volunteer at a hospital or other treatment center.  AND A WORD ABOUT THIS.  When my mom was in the hospital two volunteers came by and asked if they could do anything for her.  She said, "Yes.  I haven't had my Starbucks for a week.  Do you think you could find me some coffee?"  They went out and got her the first coffee she'd had in what, for her, was practically an eternity.  It took them about 3 minutes to find the coffee at the nurse's station, bring it to her, and make her day.  When the nurse came back and asked her if she needed more pain meds, my mom smiled, held up her little styrofoam cup, and said, "No, I've got my coffee!"  It didn't cost the volunteers anything but TIME, and they gave her about 30 minutes of delight in the middle of a mind-blowingly painful (physically and emotionally) time.

4.  If you knit or crochet, you can make chemo-caps and donate them.

5.  Make meals for the families of hospice patients.

6.  Donate crossword, sudoku, puzzle books, or other kinds of quiet entertainment to a cancer ward.

I know I'll see about a million status updates that say, "Size 9!"  But my sister's Bocce Ball fundraiser has only 9 people signed up to attend (out of more than 400 invited).  The cost is less than taking 2 people to the movies, and it'll be a lot of fun.  

If money is your hang-up, first remember that even if you can't afford to donate much (believe me, I KNOW this feeling), even the cost of a frappucino helps...and then if you still don't want to donate money, then you can volunteer your time.  It's free to you and makes a world of difference to the people you help.

And now I'm going to climb down off of my soapbox and go to work in my size 7 shoes.

The Point of Release

I have a lot of time to think on my training walks now that I've hit the six milers.  At my pace that's about an hour and forty five minutes of think time.  I also have a fairly limited area where I am able to walk.  Sidewalks are scarce, and towns with a population of, say, 1500 or so don't exactly have sprawling urban areas where I can people watch or otherwise distract myself.  So I do some repeated loops.

I used MapMyWalk to chart out the distances in increments of 1, 2, 3, and 4 miles.  An entire circuit of the main streets in my subdivision give me a whopping 3 miles.  A somewhat dangerous training tip from the Susan G. Komen website was that my training miles do NOT have to all be logged at once.  For my six mile walk, for instance, I could do three miles in the morning and three in the afternoon.  Or two miles in the morning, two mid-day, and two after dinner.  Oh, the temptation to cut a walk short and finish it later...

I did try this a couple of weeks ago.  I wasted it on a three mile walk.  I did two in the morning and had all great intentions of walking a mile in the evening and then going for a swim.  Well, I did the swimming part, but it was just so...hot outside that I skipped the walking part.

No more.

Which is not to say that the temptation isn't there.  For my six mile walk, for instance, I do the initial 4 mile loop, pass right by the house, and then complete the two mile loop.  The individual parts of the loop have temptations in and of themselves.  The four miler is very similar to the three miler, with only taking a couple of side streets to differentiate them.  The difference between the one and two mile loops is a matter of turning either left or right at a certain intersection.  During a six mile training walk there are at least four intersections where I need to make a decision either to take the longer route or the shorter.

But after the last decision point, it's done.  No matter whether I'm tired or hot or cranky or don't feel like continuing for any number of reasons, in order to get home I'll need to complete the mileage.  That is a great feeling.  It's hard to describe, and I feel kind of silly writing it out, but it's as though just not having a choice in the matter of whether I'll finish the day's training or not makes it easier to walk.  Or like I'm already finished with the training even with a mile of walking ahead of me.  It's a point of release.

And then at the same time I feel like such a jerk for complaining inside my head about the training.

I just finished reading Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy.  Grealy was diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma at age 9, underwent radiation and chemotherapy, had half of her jaw removed, and dealt with reconstructive surgery for the rest of her life (she passed away at age 39 not from the cancer, but from an accidental overdose of pain medication).  This was her memoir.

The part where she described the chemotherapy was excruciating.  She described trying to give herself pneumonia as a child in order to get out of going for her treatment, she described the daily nausea, and the brutal anticipation of her weekly appointment where it would all start again just as she was beginning to feel as though she could keep down food.  She described radiation burns inside her mouth that made it impossible to eat anything but the blandest of foods.  She recounted that this treatment continued for two and a half years.

I get to walk.  I might not look forward to aching legs, or the sun, or quite frankly the boredom.  But every time I go out there and train I get stronger.  Each time I go it gets easier.  And why am I training?  To try to raise money for cancer research.  Each time someone gets a dose of chemotherapy or radiation, it does NOT get easier.  It gets harder to endure physically, mentally, emotionally.

So I can deal with my trivial frustrations, the weight of deciding whether or not to fully train.  I get to have those decisions.  Now it's time to make them matter-of-fact and just release them, make the whole walk that point of release.

3 Mile Training

Tuesday was my last 3 mile training walk for a while.  After this it gets a little, um, intense.  Especially for someone who loves her couch as much as I do.

So to celebrate I brought my camera with me to show you a little bit of my neighborhood.

Here's a blurry glimpse of the view from about 500 feet away from my front door.  I used to think that this was looking out toward the Central Valley but as it turns out we're looking straight down toward the southern end of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Heading up toward and around the top of the street we get a view of the canyon.  When it snows you can sometimes catch a glimpse of the tops of mountains in the high country.

See that road snaking up through the middle of the picture?  I walk up that road.  It's steep.  Did I mention how much I love my couch?

Of course, before you walk up a steep road you need to go down one first.

Back over to the canyon...wouldn't you just love to have that view right off your deck?  Or, heck, why not have a second deck as well.  It's good to have choices.

It was about 80 degrees already by the time I started my walk (8:30 AM).  Depending on my mood on a given walk day this sign is either cruel irony, or a delicious reminder that cooler days lay ahead.

I think this is my favorite part of the walk.  By this point I've been walking downhill for about a mile, much of it in the shade.  Here there's a short bridge and a water trap.  Yes I live in a golf resort community.  Shush.  It's still half as expensive as Santa Cruz.

And here's the final leg of my journey: 0.6 miles uphill.  Look, do you see all that shade?  Me neither.

Joking aside, I love walking through this little neighborhood.  As long as I can start my walk early enough the weather is pleasant, the views great, the houses beautiful, and the people friendly.  When I started walking in May it was a bit of a pain to do even twenty minutes.  Now I'm up to five mile jaunts and am able to look at the 3 milers as my "easy" days.  It's amazing what 4 walks per week can do in such a short amount of time.

Three Days, Sixty Miles

Three days.  Sixty miles.

Yesterday I blogged about the last time I saw my mom (relatively) healthy and just out of surgery where she and the surgeon were optimistic about her recovery from breast cancer.  Two months later she was gone.

It happened the day after Thanksgiving.  By that time we knew it was coming soon.  She had spent most of her last two months in the hospital, and by the Sunday before Thanksgiving rolled around we were discussing options for hospice care.  The shock and disbelief that it was happening and then suddenly had happened was incomprehensible for all of us.

We wandered around my parents' house, the one that they had only bought 3 years earlier with intentions of making it a retirement villa, a mecca for out-of-town children and their families to stay during holidays, a mini farm where they could raise their own produce, where my mom could finally get in shape and walk to the humane society to get her puppy fix - an admittedly impractical house for everyday living.  We wandered through the halls, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, now cleaning and primping for funeral visitors instead of grandchildren coming for Christmas.  Wondering what to do with all those fucking flowers and GOD don't they stink, and I know the next door neighbor is a really nice guy but do I have to run into him at Vons and get the sympathetic shoulder squeeze and doleful condolence face every time?

We were looking for some way to do something with our grief.  Something besides mope and be angry and deal with the I'm So Sorries.  So just before she passed, my sisters decided: the Susan G. Komen 3 Day For the Cure.  The four of us signed up for the November 2011 walk in San Diego.  It's 60 miles over 3 days; twenty miles each day.

If you're interested in donating to the team, you can click on my widget.  $2300 is my goal, and any help would be amazing.

OK, so that's it for today for donation pleas.  Seeya tomorrow!