Kathryns Walk

  Okay, I’ve got cancer. Yes, I’m in treatment. It sucks. Enough of that. At week 5, It’s time for something completely different. All my life I’ve been an artist. I wouldn’t have said it, or said it out loud, until now. I might have wished “I wish I could be an artist.” Instead I lied to myself. “I can’t draw.” “I don’t have artistic talent.” “I wish I could make art.” We tell ourselves lies, then we go believe them.  And ironically we go about our day and make art. It may not be art using the medium that most people consider “ART,” but it is no less artistic. We talk to other people, we cook, we nurture, we go to the office or the field, and we make art. Some of it is better than others, we all have good moments and good days and the other ones where we’re just hanging in there. Sometimes art is throwing towels in the dryer on a bad day, pulling them out one by one, warm and soft and fuzzy, and hugging them. And then folding them and putting them back into the closet. This i...

My full week sleep cycle - week 1 of induction chemo We're now going on a full first month of induction chemotherapy. This phase is done in 4 week cycles, and we're told that there will be 4-8 cycles of this before we go for stem cell harvest at Swedish Hospital. The nurses at Kaiser Permanente Infusion have been great. Each week it's been a different nurse to administer the treatments, and I have had two favorites, and two who were merely good. When the worst you get is "merely good," give thanks children. We arrive, get blood taken, and go up to infusion to wait for the two chemicals to be mixed by the pharmacy. It usually takes at least an hour and a half for them to arrive at our clinic, where we've been sitting, talking and reading, and in my case, sketching and watercoloring. The nurse comes in and you lift your shirt and expose your unflattering 65-year-old tummy and they gently pinch some of the fat there and slowly, every so slowly, push an alarming l...

Most of us love rebels. The underdogs, fighting repression, sticking it to the man on behalf of the poor and weak. Sometimes rebels are heroes and sometimes not, and I suppose it has a lot to do with where you sit. As my wise father says, “it depends upon whose ox is getting gored.” When it comes to cancer, rebels aren’t so great. Cancer cells themselves are rebels - they seek to overthrow the orderly system of bodily health. Multiple Myeloma is a cancer where your bone marrow, the factory for your body’s blood cells and immune system, go rebel. Bone marrow begins to produce too many of one kind and not enough of another, and the cells that get overproduced are often abnormal and act wrong. They become corrosive, making proteins and other substances that want out of the bone marrow so badly that they begin to eat their way through the bone from the inside out. A Multiple Myeloma patient will often have lesions, places where the bone has become weakened or even holes eaten through, like...