How many calories do you need a day? How many do you really burn? Do you know?  For sure? Are those generic calculators on line, the ones with weight, height, age input, accurate?  How can they be for everyone?  Doesn’t activity level count?  Muscle mass? I am 5’3.6” and weigh 115 pounds.  The on-line calculators say:   And yet when I ate 1422 calories, I was so weak I thought perhaps my cancer returned! ...

Jay is in jail again. County jail this time. Looks like he will be there awhile.  He doesn’t have any money to get out, and the docket is full. I’m disappointed, angry, and yes, even hurt. So what happened? Wasn’t Jay doing well? Yes. At least on the outside, working, second year of college, but still on parole and drinking. Drinking is a direct parole violation. I asked if he was drinking the last time we talked. He said, “Just a few sis. I&rsqu...

  Today was deportation day. Not in a crackdown on illegal aliens, but a crackdown of another sort. Since my heart has shown “no improvement” over the last 4 months, I am officially off chemo. Done with importing un-desirables who suck up all the resources (and nine times out of ten leave the area worse off than they found it), that little super highway is shut down, obliterated, gone.  A fence is constructed and baby, it’s live fire.  No priso...

Whew. A couple articles ago I mentioned being pooped, tired, tuckered out.  http://lifehappens.joeuser.com/article/411794/Ejection_Fraction It is soooo much worse now. Turns out there is a medical reason for it (as opposed to a vacation and running around too much reason). With only 3 breast cancer treatments left, I had to stop.  My heart is down around 49% and has enlarged in an attempt to compensate. Heart Failure. I have to see a cardio...

I followed Bill Phillips’ Body For Life fitness program for years.  Recently though, I got bored with going to the gym and lifting “heavy” three times a week.  I understand muscle mass is important, that we start losing it around 30 if we don’t do something to stop it….but I’m tired of lifting heavy… One of the anti-estrogen/cancer fighting drugs I take causes severe joint pain, and lifting heavy isn’t really helping in that...

So I have a Nook Color.  (What?  You thought this was going to be about something else?) It’s fine as an e-reader.  However, I watched several youtube videos and discovered it could be so much more!!  Like an android tablet, minus the android price tag if I could just figure out what an android does and how to do something called “rooting.” I am woefully under-skilled and waaaaay behind in tech lingo.  Way.  I don’t own a smart pho...

Last night we toured my son’s high school.  It’s a big place, took over two hours.  It occurred to me as I heard yet another teacher explain why “we don’t teach that anymore” how much high school has changed.  I don’t just mean technology,  (that alone is a serious line of demarcation between then (before internet) and now), but the whole psychology of high school.  I went to high school in the 1980’s, back when the Breakf...

Once, when I was a child, I licked the end of a tv antenna while it was on. I don’t know why I did it, but I did. To this day I remember the way it tasted, the metallic bite on the back of the tongue, the acrid aftertaste. Radiation was like that. Acrid, metallic , exhausting . 33 treatments cooked my underarm and the last bit of energy I possessed. But, I’m done with it. D. O. N. E. Finished the cooking process the last week in June and then WHO...

Anthropologists at We Are So Smart University discover the next step in human evolution: Immortality. Cancer cells, dubbed unwittingly for decades “immortal cells” due to a refusal to die, transition human biology from mortal to immortal. Dr. Ben Gay of We Are So Smart University (WASSU) uncovered the true potential of these immortal cells last week after the culmination of a phase three clinical trial involving 5000 breast cancer patients worldwide over the last fi...

April. Wow. The journey from September to April?  It’s been painful, onerous, toilsome, tough, taxing, burdensome, exhausting; pick your adjective.  It has also been educational .  That’s right, I said it! At the risk of becoming one of those people who only ever talks about their latest physical malady, hang tuff, it won’t last long. I started chemotherapy in December; just finished.  (Except for a single agent I get intravenously until ...

My youngest has the best work ethic.  

Warning:  This is a bit of a ramble…doing it very fast….but if you can make it through, would love your feedback! I went to get my wig today. It’s a nice wig, looks just like my old hair, except a little longer. Insurance covers 80% of a “cranial prosthesis,” but once in a lifetime. I went to a Network provider (NP). A NP is someone who signs a contract with my insurance company agreeing to accept payment for whatever amount my insurance company deems w...

"According to the sheriff’s department, Patricia Maisch, who was in the back of the line waiting to get her photograph taken with Giffords on Saturday, rushed to grab the gunman’s magazine after he started shooting. That pause gave time for two others, Roger Salzgeber and Bill Badger, to tackle him to the ground. Then another bystander, Joseph Zamudio, who was leaving the local Walgreens at the time, jumped in to restrain the gunman’s legs... "This is one of the...

Merry Christmas JoeUsers!  Hope it is a wonderful holiday for each of you.  And the new year brings peace, love, and prosperity!! Much love, Tova

Yesterday. In the Chemo Chair next to mine. A child. My son’s age. His mother’s face, oh my god, his mother’s face.  Creases deep enough for an an entire fingertip. Inside. I shattered.  I was strong and steady up until then.  But something died inside me yesterday, shriveled black and stinking in the presence of the child’s pain. And his mother’s. And for the first time I thanked God for my breast cancer.  Thanked God it is me an...