Combining my two Blog

This will be my last post on Carver's Sight or is that Site? for the foreseeable future. After I publish this post all new posts, following this one, will be on my other blog. You can click here for that blog, Carver's Photographic Journey. I started blogging here in August of 2006 as a way of dealing with Stage III melanoma, the interminable follow up appointments and scans, as well as the physical problems I've had since the groin lymph node dissection. I stayed on edge because I ended up with ongoing and at times debilitating health problems.

When I first started blogging, I used photographs to serve as breathing spaces in between the flow of words. I also used this blog as a way to house links to research, clinical trials, and information about advanced melanoma.

As time went on, I became more interested in photography and less interested in discussing my health issues. When I first started my other blog, I called it Carver Cards and my idea was to have each post on that blog be one large format photograph. Carver Cards was the name I used in the 1990s when I made stationary cards with my flower photography on the front. 

I wanted two blogs because my original idea was that I would continue to write about what was on my mind on this blog while keeping the other blog free of health whines.

As time went on, I didn't want to continue talking about myself (other than in terms of nature or other interests) on either one of my blogs and they have both gradually ended up being places where I post photographs and participate in online group themes (Photohunters, Nature Notes and Today's Flowers on this blog and Our World, ABC Wednesday, SkyWatch and the Weekend in Black and White on my other blog).

I will probably continue to participate fairly regularly in the same group themes but there isn't any reason not to do that on the same blog. I decided that Carver's Photographic Journey was a better choice for that purpose. I changed the name of Carver Cards a while back because that blog had become a photographic journey of sorts.

I have a superstitious side which has made me afraid that if I close this blog I'll have a cancer recurrence.  The lymph nodes in the basin where my nodular melanoma spread to were removed in March of 2005. I started out with a poor prognosis because my primary was so deep and the melanoma had spread to a lymph node. However, after so many years it is highly unlikely that my melanoma will have spread to an organ or other nodes and even in the unlikely event that it does, I doubt I'll want to talk about it.

I still see a number of medical specialists although I've started streamlining how many I see. I've found that limiting the number of doctors I see is good for my health overall.

I had to give up on most of my exercise efforts and attempts to get back to where I was physically, prior to when all of my health issues began, but I'm starting to walk again regularly which helps me mentally.

I think I'll end it here and continue with my photographic meme posts on Carver's Photographic Journey. However, first I'll digress. I've never understood the word meme. When I first saw meme, I thought it looked like ME ME but found out it's an umbrella word for organized participatory blog themes. I googled meme and found this definition on wikipedia: a meme is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." There is a long article going into the origins and expanded meaning of the word meme which was first used in a book published in 1976 called The Selfish Gene. 

When I googled blog memes I found this, also on wikipedia: an internet meme is an idea, style or action which spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via the Internet, as with imitating the concept. I have to say that I think there should be a better word for the participatory activities on the Internet. It's not imitation when each person is taking a theme and showing their world through photographs, essays, etc. 

Also, what I like about the memes I participate in is that I learn more about people from different parts of the world as seen through the eyes of their camera or poetry or essays. Even if I wanted to imitate blogs I visit, that wouldn't be an option because people are sharing their neck of the woods so to speak and we all live in different places, visit different places and have different camera equipment, creative and technical skills. I lied before, I didn't end there, I'm ending here.

Spring and relief

It was so odd how within the space of a week we went from snow and cold to warmth and spring. There was some damage to early flowers and buds on trees but so much is blooming again that it's hard to even notice the damage. We may still return to the cold and more damage but at the moment, I'm enjoying spring in full force.
The wildlife are certainly enjoying the warmer weather and becoming increasingly abundant. I enjoy listening to the bird calls and wish I was better at recognizing the individual voices.It was a huge relief to get past my March doctor's appointments and four year PET/CT scan. The fact that I've gone four years now without a melanoma recurrence is making me increasingly optimistic. I remember after my three year scan, I decided that I was done with melanoma. I felt like I had to reach a point where I put it behind me. To a large extent that worked. I have worried less, talked about it less, in general moved on with the rest of my life.
The problem is I am still followed by oncologists, a dermatologist, a pain specialist, blah, blah, blah, and I still get annual full body scans. Sometimes I think to put it behind me I need to drop all of the doctors, although that's not possible in terms of pain management. That has been the hardest part, dealing with the physical "issues" I've had following my lymph node dissection. The issues have made it hard for me to listen to my body. As a matter of fact I've had to learn to stop listening to my body. I've blogged enough about all of that in past years and at this point I like to focus on relief. The relief of being one of the lucky ones who are diagnosed with a deep melanoma primary and a positive node but don't have a recurrence.
It's even possible that some of my physical problems are part of why I've done so well with the cancer. My body may have mounted its own autoimmune response which have resulted in irritating pain but are part of why the cancer hasn't recurred. The fact that my C reactive protein has been high every time my rheumatologist tested it is at least one indication that my body has had an autoimmune response of some kind.
I didn't intend for this post to start veering into the whine territory so I'm going to end with relief. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming, and my four years tests and appointments are done with and turned out well.

March begins and doctor photo shoots

We got the lion of March on Monday and I enjoyed it for the most part. It was a nice fluffy snow and by late afternoon the sun started to come out. Tuesday was very cold but sunny, so the roads were fine for me to go to my regular pain doc follow up appointment. For the contrast between Monday and Tuesday, the first two shots are of the same tree although shot from a different angle. I got the background trees in the first Monday shot and the sky in the Tuesday shot.
I took my camera with me to my doctor's appointment yesterday. As I've mentioned before, I try to have a photo session after or before most of my doctor's appointments. That way I can pretend that I'm going to a fun outing to take pictures and ignore the irritating doctor stuff. The shot above is of the Arena at the fairgrounds which I pass when I go to my pain specialist.
An unexpected shot I got was of seagulls on the snow covered roof of one of the fairgrounds buildings. I photographed the birds at home too but that was expected as I was putting out food for them. You may have to click inside the photo below to see the Carolina Chickadee above my deck.
I'll have to take my camera with me tomorrow when I go to UNC for my annual full body PET/CT scan and oncology check up. I enjoy taking pictures when I'm in Chapel Hill for doctor's appointments although I'll probably be eager to get home after I'm done there.
The hard part is I can't have anything but water from midnight until after the scan. Because they scheduled the check up to be right after the scan, I probably won't be able to eat or have coffee unless I do it in the examining room. I'm going to take some emergency caffeine drinks and crackers in case I have to run from the hospital scanner across the street to the oncology center where my check up is.Can you tell I'm getting tense? So this is where I start thinking, I'm going to Chapel Hill for a photo shoot tomorrow. The new part of the hospital has a wonderful reflective surface where I've captured reflections of clouds and even a helicopter. If it's warm enough and if I get sufficiently coffeed up after my appointment, I may go the the NC Botanical garden which is across the street from where I enter and exit for my UNC appointments.It has worked out well some years when I have my fall appointments because the garden has an art in the garden show each fall. In 2008 that was streamlined because of construction on the new garden educational center, but maybe it will be back in the fall of 2009 when I have that appointment in Chapel Hill. I got some good fall garden shots when I had my 2008 fall appointment and was able to photograph the full garden art show when I had my 2007 fall appointment.

Spring Fever

I have a bad case of spring fever. It's still quite cold at night but by mid day has been warming up. The down side is although early spring flowers are beginning to bloom, they are getting freezer burned at night by the cold.
I shot the flower above which is one of the blooms on my neighbors camelia bushes and by the next day it had black spots from the hard freeze at night. If it wasn't for the damage to the early flowers, this is my favorite type of weather. I love to wake up to a bracing cold morning and then have the sun start working it's warming magic during the day.
I'm taking advantage of spring fever to finally start on the fall clean up in my garden. Better late than never. I have to be careful not to overdo it as gardening can create more physical issues if I do too much of the heavier, strenuous type of work.
I have my six month check up with my pain specialist next Tuesday and on Thursday of next week, I have my annual full body PET/CT scan. I also have an oncology checkup right after the scan. I guess if I hurt myself with spring fever, I'll have the advantage of getting help from the pain doc in short order. I'm being facetious. It's not really like there is any magic bullet to deal with any of it.
One thing I have learned to do is wait until after I'm doing something strenuous to take my pain medications. I don't want to mask issues and do too much because I just took a pain pill. If I wait until after gardening to take my pain meds, I do less and am less likely to hurt myself.I will be glad to have next week over with. I'm trying not to get too antsy. I don't expect any problems. I expect that I will officially be four years out from my stage III melanoma diagnosis without recurrence when I get my scan results. Perhaps my feeling antsy is just spring fever and it's coincidental that I'm coming up on the doc stuff.

Two Down - the bridge is a bench - and a long bridge

I knocked out my second doctor of the month today so two down, two to go. The fifth of too many doctors had to reschedule so at least it's only four of my routine follow up docs in one month. Today was pain doc and I didn't really knock him out, I guess I should explain that was a figure of speech. The appointment went well and I did make a quick run to check on the bridge that was a mystery which I had posted during the bridge challenge. The bridge/bench is at the museum park art walk, and because of how I shot it before; I couldn't tell when looking through photos for the bridge challenge that is was a bench.
The shot I took last time I was there was from the bottom of the path and I shot it sideways so you couldn't see the bench. In Day 3 of the bridge challenge I posted the sideways shot as the second photo in that post. I pondered why they would bridge the gap and then close it off. Well today I solved the mystery. It's not a bridge but a platform for a bench.
The bridge in the rest of this post was shot by me while Bill drove us to the arboretum on Sunday. I wanted to feature this pedestrian bridge in the Bridging the Gap challenge but I needed someone else to drive in order to show how it goes across the beltline. The name of this bridge is the Reedy Creek Bridge. On completion it has allowed walkers and people on bikes to go from the capital greenways on one side of town across the highway to the House Creek Greenway and NC Museum of Art's Art Park. I guess this post is mostly an addition to the bridging the gap challenge photos I did week before last.

Scanxiety and other ramblings

I only have to wait two more days until my annual full body PET/CT scan which is part of my routine follow up for stage III melanoma. The photograph above is from the CD images of a prior scan. That's as close to naked pictures as I'm likely to come on my blog unless I take photographs in a museum. Bright and early Friday morning I will be scanned from head to toe and after that I hope that I will be able to officially proclaim myself 3 years clear of cancer. I will probably leave the hospital with the CDs from the scan because I need them for my March appointment at another hospital. I started getting scans last year at a cancer center close to home which is much better than driving an hour in rush hour traffic to the cancer center where my melanoma specialist (surgical oncologist) is. After I started being followed by a medical oncologist in my home town, I was given the option of getting the scans done here.
I probably won't hear the results until next week and at that point I'll pick up the radiologist report to take with me to my appointment in early March. Let me just say that if they do give me the CDs when I leave on Friday, I will try not to look at them on my computer. They are less than meaningless to me. I see all sorts of thing because we have all sorts of organs. That's a good thing. I wouldn't know the difference between a prayer cap and a brain. I think the top of my head, in the image I began this post with, looks like the prayer caps children used to wear to chapel at the Episcopal elementary school I attended as a child. That prayer cap is my brain, I think.
There is much debate amongst melanoma clinics as to the best follow up and they all do it a little differently. Some centers don't have any asymptomatic scans thinking that the tension from scans and false positives, out weight the benefits of catching a recurrence before it becomes symptomatic. My main melanoma doctor has an annual scan as part of his protocol, although this is the first time I've gone a year before getting a scan. The issues I've had since my lymph node dissection make it hard for me to know if I'm symptomatic. I have a new name for my issues. I was looking at my last sheet from my pain doc and noticed the diagnosis was unspecified hereditary and idiopathic peripheral neuropathy and unspecified myalgia and myositis. Odd that hereditary would be used for something that started after my LND and for something that no one in my family has. I'm sure there is something I'm missing. It could be as simple as coding for insurance companies. Since some people have the problems I have after the surgery I had, I'm not sure why they can't just say the issues are following surgery. I've read that some doctors think the percentage of patients who have ongoing side effects following the groin LND are higher than previously reported. I wonder how many others, like me, with ongoing side effects aren't included in the stats for future reports. I signed the forms to be included in a data base of patients my surgical ONC is following but I have no way of knowing if my issues get chalked up to chance or to the surgery. My surgical ONC acknowledged that a percentage of patients do end up with chronic pain after that surgery. However, during appointments with NP in his group, she has been quick to say my problems aren't related to the surgery. Never have figured out what's up with that.Back to the scanning issue, I went through a cycle of three month repeats on scans because I had an imaged mass which eventually went away. The assumption is that mass was connected with my dissection and was a benign thingie, for want of a better word. The scan I had a year ago was the first one which was clear and therefore, I didn't need a repeat for a year. Because this is the longest I've gone without a scan, that may account for my increasing nervousness. The problem for me is that I have had to stop listening to my body. While a cancer patient should be alert to changes and let their doctor know of new symptoms, I have had too many symptoms and they change. I have to tune out pain and I have to have pain management. Much of the past year, I have been telling myself to get on with my life and ignore the issues I have to learn to live with. When something new happens I try to ignore it. I tell myself, you had a clear scan in March of 2007 and everything is fine. I did ask to go ahead and get my 2008 scan sooner rather than later which is why it's scheduled for February 1. Hopefully this scan will be clear and I can start trying to put this all behind me.

Photo ops continue to take the medical taste out of my mouth

Part One (Monday)

I woke up Monday morning in a bad mood because all of the sudden that feeling of being almost done with the docs shifted. September was my big follow up month. Nothing bad. Just routine appointments with rheumatologist, gynecologist, dermatologist and surgical oncologist. Still, the way those appointments stacked up, one per week, was something of a drag. My surgical oncology appointment was redeemed by a great photo op at the hospital which I've already posted about, followed by an extended photo session on the way home at the botanical garden's art show. So Monday when I woke up grouchy about going to my local hospital for pre-admit stuff prior to a routine colonoscopy next month, I took my camera, hoping I'd get something good out of the visit.The first two pictures in the post were taken in the hospital while I waited to be called back for the interview with the nurse and anesthesiologist. I have no idea what the top howling creature symbolizes but the tree is called the tree of life with leaves having inscriptions for donors to the hospital, some are memorial donations. I thought it was rather pretty. I love the howling dog or wolf in the entranceway and to me he symbolized my irritation at going to the hospital. The colonoscopy was originally going to be this Friday but my insurance wouldn't approve payment until after my 50th birthday so it was bumped to the end of November. That suits me. They still went ahead with the pre-admit stuff today and it wasn't so bad. As a matter of fact the waiting room time was completely filled up with my photo shoot.I didn't even rush out when it was over but snapped some pictures of the plants around the hospital. There were some comical moments during the interview. The hospital admittance person put a hospital band on my arm and said that I could remove it when I got home and they'd have a new one for me when I came for the actual colonoscopy. I said, that's nice to know because this would get pretty grimy over the next 6 weeks. She looked startled and then looked at my chart and said, oh, I see that your test date has been changed. After getting all the information about my melanoma history the nurse asked if I had any problems with my skin. I couldn't resist saying, no, unless you include skin cancer.I realized that since we'd been discussing the melanoma in the context of the lymph node dissection, it didn't have to have started in the skin. Some people have melanoma of unknown primary that is found initially in the nodes and some have a melanoma primary in ocular and mucosal sites and rarely in neural sheaths. However, cutaneous melanoma is far more common, and mine did originate in the skin and subsequently spread to one node. The photograph above of the clouds was taken at a stop light on the way home. Not sure if you will be able to make out the structure in the bottom of the photo on the right, without clicking inside of the picture for an enlargement. I think it looks like an umbrella but it's actually the roof for a KFC/Taco Bell. The metal part that looks like it's sticking out of an umbrella is the car antenna which got into the shot. Kind of hard to compose a shot from the car when you are the driver and are stopped at a stop light.

Part Two (Tuesday)

I woke up this morning, very grouchy and thought, ok, don't you dare forget to take your camera. Today was my routine follow-up with my pain specialist. I've been calling him Dr. Pain on my blog as an abbreviation but I have a new one, PPD. That stands for Pleasant Pain Doc. Poor guy, if I had to see people dealing with pain all day, I'd probably run out the door screaming. Therefore, at this point, I'm ready to give him the benefit of the doubt because beyond our initial consultation, he's been reasonably pleasant. He has a hard job and does his best, I'm sure.
The photographs starting under the Part Two header are from the art walk at the NC Art Museum which I did on my way home from PPD today. I pass the art museum on my way home from PPD and neurology appointments and in my new spirit of taking the medical taste out of my mouth with photo ops, I planned on a quick visit to the outdoor art walk. It was hot and I figured I'd mostly focus on the art in front of the museum as well as the plantings there but that didn't work out. A major expansion of the museum is underway and below is what the front looks like.
Alrighty then, artwalk it was. Sort of seemed like fate that I couldn't shoot the front of the museum because it was a big pile of dirt. Instead, I did the main loop which provided me with a pleasant walk and the cloud cover kept the sun down to a reasonable affect. The first picture from my art walk is of Thomas Sayre's Gyre which was made in 1999 and consists of three ellipses made from concrete, colored with iron oxide, reinforced with steel, and mottled with pebble residue from the earth casting. The second picture is Collapse by Ledelle Moe in 2000 and is made of concrete and steel. The picture below is a wider view of Collapse.
I'm sure I'll post more pictures from my art walk in others posts but for now I'm going to wrap this up because it's a pretty long post. My appointment with PPD went fine. He does his best and I do my best and when all is said and done, my issues are manageable. I wish it were possible for me to get fixed in some way which would mean I could be more active and wouldn't need medications to manage the aftermath of my melanoma dx and groin lymph node dissection. However, when all is said and done, I haven't had a recurrence and I'm able to live an independent life. That's huge.