travels, races, and other musings

Home and Final Thoughts We gave ourselves plenty of time on disembarkation morning. It always feels like we are rushing. We ate breakfast at Arendell, said goodbye to our servers (they were quite good) and headed off the ship. We were some of the first to board and some of the last to leave!   I was feeling okay at breakfast, but I forgot to mention that the night before at Arendell, I was feeling pretty melancholy. The cruise went by really quickly and leaving it somehow felt like going back, not only to regular life, but really an irregular life. Not the life I want. A life still full of grief and upcoming cancer treatment. The reality of my situation felt somehow magnified against the backdrop of our wonderful vacation. People say to me, “Summer, you are so strong,” or “you are so positive.” I am not always. Sometimes I’m frustrated, angry, and sad. I’m not scared really, I just don’t want to deal with all of this. But, I also look forward to our next cruise in July when I ...

Castaway Cay (but again, staying on board)  Roger’s plan was to run the Castaway Cay 5k so he got up at 7:15 to eat a light breakfast before disembarking at 8:30. I slept in until 7:30 and then hit the gym again. I would have preferred to run on deck, but as I mentioned before, that isn’t really an option on the Wish. So instead I hopped on a spin bike and did a quick ride.  When I came back to the room, Roger was getting changed to head off the ship and told me that it was really windy, like cups were blowing away during breakfast outside. I didn’t have a good feeling about our Parasailing chances. I got Emmaline up so we could eat breakfast just in case our Parasailing excursion was on. As we were about to leave the room for breakfast, we got a message through the DCL app that parasailing was canceled. Sigh. It was canceled on us in July as well. I’ve been before (with my mom) but Emmaline hasn’t and she’s now been cancelled on twice. We plan to go to Aulani next year so we’...

Nassau (well, we saw Nassau, that is) I woke up at 7 AM and went to the gym. Before we left, I downloaded a couple of workouts in my Les Mills+ app to do offline, but it wouldn’t load. I had studied the new BODYPUMP I needed to learn on the bus on the way to the port so I decided to test my memory and find a little corner and grab some dumbbells and do a modified Pump. I actually did pretty well remembering things. Except Core. Core was a hot mess. I walked out of the gym door onto deck 5 (yes, there’s a door out on deck - this ship is odd) and then went up to deck 6 forward (again, odd layout) and watched us coming into Nassau.  I was back in the room at 8:15 AM and roused the others and we went up to Marceline Market (I almost said Cabana’s again) for breakfast. Once again, I apologize to the people of ship who had to deal with me after a workout in my sweaty gym clothes. We went back to the room and I showered and we got ourselves ready for a day of activities on the ship. ...

Embarkation We had to get up early so that we could have our luggage ready for pickup by 7 AM. The bellman came to the door at 6:50 and we weren't quite ready. I asked him to wait 10 minutes and at exactly 7 AM, we were ready to hand over the luggage. After that, we relaxed in the room for a few minutes before walking over to Jamba House to get breakfast at The Mara at 7:30 so that we would be ready for our meetup at 8:15 and departure at 8:45.  By 8:45 we were on the road and had one more pickup at All Star Sports before we made the one hour fifteen minute drive to the port on a very full bus. We arrived at the port at around 10:15 AM and went in to check in. The terminal was practically empty and there was no line for Platinum check in so then we had to sit and wait forever.  I know a lot of people really like the early resort pickup because they get on the ship early. As for me, I think it's too early. We waited around until they started boarding at 11:45. I would have rath...

Intro/Travel to Orlando We went on another cruise. (You may have noticed that we like cruising.) We had originally booked Disney's newest ship, the Disney Wish, for the third sailing, which was to be in June of 2022. But then the ship was delayed, our sailing was cancelled and we rebooked on the Dream instead . At first I was really bummed, but then they gave us 50% off any cruise we wanted to be used by the end of 2023, so we've booked France, Iceland, and Norway for July 2023. But we still wanted to try the Wish so we rebooked for January thinking it might be nice to get away from cold, cedar allergies, and whatever else.  Whatever else turned out to be kind of a lot. I lost my mom in September, then my step-mom in October (and this is after losing my dad the previous year) and then I was diagnosed with breast cancer a couple of days after Christmas. So a little getaway before my surgery and treatment was definitely in order.  Thankfully, our flight on Thursday late morning ...

I've had a couple of appointments the last couple of days. First I met with my new medical oncologist. Her name is Dr. Shrikhande and I really liked her. She went into a deeper dive into my pathology report with me, did a physical examination, and provided a roadmap for what's ahead. This is a nerdy medical details sort of post so if this doesn't interest you, you can easily skip it and the tldr; is that I have surgery on Feb 1, radiation 5 days a week (M-F) starting 2-4 weeks after that and lasting about a month. And then I have to take an estrogen blocker after that. If you'd like a deeper dive, read on.  This is my pathology report from my biopsy. First up is the histologic grade. How aggressive is this cancer on a scale of 1-3? It's a 1 so that's good. Less aggressive. In the additional findings there was some more ADH in there so this likely developed from some ADH cells which means it's good that we got rid of that ADH on the left side in 2019. Then we...

I've been a fan of Aimee Mann for a number of years and so I was pleased to be able to download and begin listening to her Words + Music podcast this morning on Audible. It came out Friday and I just happened to finish what I was listening to today and the next book in my "to-listen" list comes out tomorrow so it's the perfect in between clocking in at an hour and a half. I haven't finished it yet, but the theme of the piece is how trauma informs art and it's called "Straw into Gold." It fits really well into my unfortunate run of events in my life lately. One thing that she was talking about early on in the podcast really resonated with me. She was examining the cliche, "everything happens for a reason." She said she really doesn't think everything happens for a reason, instead, she says, "things might just happen and then we make the reason, either out of want or necessity." If I may expand on that, I think that we look back...

Just by happenstance the squat track I'm teaching right now in BODYPUMP is "I Am Here" by P!nk. It's become a perfect embodiment of where I am with my classes right now. That is to say, I am triumphantly in each and every single moment with my classes since my diagnosis. Not that I wasn't before, really, but there's definitely a new awareness of each moment that I get to share my passion with my people. Each of those moments is a moment that I am present and alive and taking absolutely nothing for granted. And while most of my participants don't know what's going on, I've really been pressing upon them the importance of being present for their workout as well. For being here  in the moment and really embracing what their bodies are capable of. It's an incredible privilege that I have to be able to move my body in the way that I do now and to be able to share that with other people. And I know I'm going to miss it when I will need to step ba...

"It's cancer." My heart dropped into my stomach. She reassured me that it's very treatable and was caught super early. She said, "I can't even believe the radiologist found it, it's that small." I was scheduled to follow up with her the next day. On December 30 I went into to see her. My friend Andrea went with me to help me take notes and ask questions maybe I hadn't thought of (regrettably, Andrea has too much experience with other people's cancer and she was a great person to have along). Stage 1a Invasive Ductal Carcinoma is the official diagnosis.  Dr. Thomas again made sure to impress upon me that we caught it very early and it's very treatable. The next step would be genetic testing and an appointment was made for the following day to get that done. I'll have results in about two weeks which will dictate the course of action. If I come back positive for a mutation in either of the BRCA genes, her recommendation would be double ...

When I turned 40 I didn't get a mammogram right away. It was about 6 months later in January 2017 so I was still pretty close. I got called back in for a followup. So a week later I was back in there for additional imaging including an ultrasound which felt like it took FOREVER with the tech measuring things on the screen and pressing the button and digging that thing into me. The diagnosis? Dense breast tissue/fibrocystic breasts. So everything was fine. I heard this was actually pretty common for a first time.  In 2018 I had a normal mammogram. Actually, I think that was the only year that everything was normal. Yay!  In 2019 is when things started going south. I went in for my mammogram in March, then I got called back for additional imaging. No big deal, I'd done this before. I really didn't even think much of it. I did the additional pictures and then I ended up getting dressed and waiting in a room while the radiologist reviewed them. Then the tech came back and said,...