Breast cancer awareness campaign hits Capitol

Breast cancer awareness campaign hits Capitol Hill

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The Kanzius Machine

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The Kanzius Machine

Pink October

By now I bet you all know that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I am so impressed with the many organizations that offer there support for the cause. Pink seems to be everywhere you look. I especially love seeing what the NFL is doing. Some players are wearing pink gloves, shoe laces and wrist bands, and stadium banners promote the importance of early detection.

While breast cancer awareness is good thing, sometimes hearing about cancer can bring back sad memories. With Tracy's diagnosis happening a year ago in October, we're still sensitive to the subject and probably always will be. Tracy recently stopped watching her favorite show, Brothers & Sisters, after Kitty was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She complained that now both of her favorite shows have main characters dealing with cancer (Izzy on Grey's Anatomy). She told me that she simply would have to quit watching "Brothers" since it was on late and broke her no cancer talk after eight o'clock rule. The funny part about all of this was that I was watching one of my favorite shows, The Family Guy, at the time. With perfect timing, Lois on Family Guy found a lump on her breast. That was the topper. I shut off the TV immediately!

In case you are wondering, I did watch the rest of The Family Guy later. Lois saw a doctor and she didn't have cancer. My response... get a second opinion.

Beaten by the Tracys

Well, that was interesting! Last Sunday's 10 K in Omaha wasn't what I expected it to be. Since circumstances had gotten in the way of actually training for it, I was led to believe that we would be walking most of the way. Piece of cake, right? Wrong.

We ran almost the entire way. Once we got out there, my wife's competitive juices got going and, well, so did we! I'm proud to say that I kept up. Tracy and I ran together the whole way. With Tracy's background running half marathons, she seemed to handle things pretty well. I'm in basketball shape, but distance running is a different thing altogether. After about four miles, parts of my body that I haven't heard from in years were starting to "talk back" to me in protest! But we kept going.

A ways ahead of us was Tracy's childhood friend, Tracy H., who also has run some half marathons before. Tracy H. ran without the benefit of training as well, but unlike my Tracy, Tracy H. is currently undergoing chemotherapy for her cancer. How hardcore is that? Running a 10K while going through chemo? Unreal. I doubt that many have accomplished that feat.

And by the way, both Tracys beat me Sunday. Guess after battling cancer, beating me was a piece of cake...

The 10 K

I ran five miles once. My brother and I challenged ourselves to run around the entire section. A county road section is normally a total of four miles, but the one that we ran was actually five. You could definitely say that we took it slow! But we made it. And I was pretty sore the next day.

I'm thinking back on that experience because early tomorrow morning, Tracy and I are going to do the Omaha 10 K. We signed up months ago figuring that this would be a good challenge for us as we celebrate a return to normal after the conclusion of Tracy's chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

Or so we thought.

We vastly underestimated the time that it would take Tracy to recover from her cancer treatment. Everybody's different, of course. But in Tracy's case, she has tried to get back to where she was before the diagnosis. She used to work out regularly. She's even run a couple half marathons. But Tracy experienced light-headedness during or after workouts. One night, her symptoms were so bad that we went to the emergency room. Given her history with herceptin and the way that it affected her heart, we were very concerned. We wound up spending the night in the hospital that night, but in the end we were relieved that the tests showed that her heart was fine. We found out that she had been having trouble with low potassium. Since then, she's been able to manage that problem, but we decided against training for the 10 K.

One thing that we learned from all of this is that, cancer treatment is not easy to come back from. It takes a long time for things to even start to feel normal again. But we will be there tomorrow and we will participate.

We will take it as a small victory.