Admission:  I’ve been in therapy since last October, working through some of the stuff that goes along with being a cancer patient.  And I’ve learned a lot, including accessing chapters-worth of healthy coping skills that were somehow missing from my user’s manual.

I’ve put all of them to use over the past two weeks or so, as I approached my first PET scan since the transplant.  Visualizing Dr. Spira giving me the good news.  Keeping busy.  Exercising.  Minimizing googling “post-transplant relapse”.   But yesterday, the day before my appointment, I just didn’t feel like using coping skills.  I just wanted to freak out.  Because I’m 35 years old with two tiny kids and a joyful life and a circle of warm, fun friends and a husband I adore and lots of ideas about a rich and engaged future and I have had two bouts with cancer and been through such crap and done 9 rounds of serious, serious chemo and 28 days of radiation and a f’ing stem cell transplant and lost my hair twice and crapped myself in pain and already am pretty sure I’ll end up with some sort of secondary cancer induced by all of this poisonous treatment in 10 or 20 years, best case, and called in every favor I’ve ever been owed and relied on the kindness and generosity of my friends to get through it and am just starting to give back and I have this nagging cough that won’t go away and I know I’ve fired my two anti-cancer torpedoes and if I relapse now there’s not a lot of hope for a cure and I’ll just spend the rest of my life in some sort of treatment and it is just not fair.

So yesterday I let the crazies win.

My options were to go an a major bender, to Xanex myself into oblivion, to devour mountains of food, to pick up a pack of Marlboro Lights and go for it, or to indulge in some seriously compulsive behavior.  I went with the compulsive behavior, went to the store for 20 pounds of bread flour, and started making sourdough breads.

Right now my countertops are groaning under the weight of loaves rising, starters multiplying, soakers soaking.  Vermont sourdough.  French country boule.  Sweet potato walnut batards.  Whole wheat polenta loaves.  Sesame semolina.  Something with figs….still working on that one.  Rye.  All wild-yeast raised!   There’s a thin coat of flour on every flat surface of the first floor.    It’s nutty.  But seriously, if you have issues, knead some dough.  It works.

Anyhow.  Crazies have won.  I showed up for my scan at 8 am this morning (having fed the starter and taken 4 loaves out of the fridge, where they’ve been retarding overnight), waited for an hour, and then learned that the scan camera was down.  So I’m home, waiting for a call from the radiology practice, twitching like a meth addict, and getting ready to bake.

Anyone want some bread?

–Jen