What Do You See?

Everything is moving along just as normal as can be, which for me is a very good thing.  I am finally starting to feel better as each day passes that I might have a future life.  I have such a great family support team and feel that with them I can do anything.  It's been a difficult time for me, but I have tried to stay positive.  Sometimes it can be hard especially when my sight is not working right.  Since I have only one eye that has good vision I rely on that eye all the time.  The vision in my right eye has not returned since the radiation treatment and it probably never will.  All I can see is a big blur and some distorted shapes and colors.  My left eye gets tired a lot from the strain of doing all of the work.  It's a little hard to do normal things like driving and walking around.  I lose my balance sometimes and have to hold on to walls and railings.  I actually fell down some stairs the other day because I've been wearing sunglasses indoors to protect my eye from the light and didn't see the last few steps and slid down on my back. It was pretty embarrassing, but I got over it quickly.  I am truly grateful to at least have one working eye and continuing to eat plant-based foods and exercising as much as I can.

One thing I love to do is write poetry and for a while there I completely stopped writing.  When I found out that I had cancer in my eye I think all of the life drained out of me.  It's been 2 months now and with radiation treatment and my amazing Dr. Michael Seider giving me the best care I can begin to feel like there's something to look forward to.  I will be returning to work in a few days after being out for 2 months.  This will be a big adjustment for me because I haven't really talked about what has been going on in my life.  I wrote a poem yesterday that resonates with what I am going through.  It's not long, but it makes a statement and it can actually be continued if I feel like adding more.


Melanoma Eye

I used to love to look at my eyes
I'd see brown and green and
a wonderful spark of gold
I held my eyes dearly because
I have my father's eyes
and his same introverted soul.
Now all I see
when I look in the mirror
is the monster
that I have become
a dark chasm of swelling
wrought with malignant blackness
deeply scarred with pain

September 6, 2018, Kim Buckley

I'm Still Here

Today is September 1^st and I can't believe it, time feels like it has disappeared in a fog somewhere. I wonder if I will ever eventually get those days back or maybe I'm just better off not remembering them at all. July and August were a whirlwind for me because I found out in early July that I had eye cancer. According to my incredible and amazing ocular oncologist Dr. Michael Seider, we were going to set a fast pace for my treatment. I was immediately set up with a massive amount of tests which included blood panels, x-rays, mammogram, C/T scan and MRI's. All of these tests were all done to check to see if cancer had spread from my eye to anywhere else in my body. I remember when I was waiting for the test results, I was so scared I could barely even breathe. I had no idea what the results would be. I remember one morning while I was waiting I was praying so hard and thinking please God don't let it be anywhere else in my body. I just don't think I could handle that, I'm begging you. I will do anything I will spend the rest of my life helping others if only you let me live.

Awaiting my radiation plague surgery, awful and desperate feelings kept me away from everyone and everything that I love. I holed up in my room and sat in the dark for days. I felt like the entire world had just collapsed on me. Dr. Seider contacted me as soon as he received the results from the tests and told me that the cancer had not spread anywhere else. I thought I would fall down and cry I was so relieved. I think I remember screaming out loud OMG! Although I will still need to be checked every 6 months to be sure, I was feeling a lot better about everything.

I also had to meet with my radiologist to get ready for my brachytherapy treatment and that in itself was an extremely stressful meeting. He told me that I would have to be sequestered for an entire week and no one was going to be able to get near me because I was going to have a gold plaque with 21 seeds of radiation sewn on to the back of my eye. Sounds a little fancy and neat don't you think?

Well, all in all, the brachytherapy was definitely a very painful experience. I was told right before the insertion of the plaque that physicists created my plaque just for me and that they surveyed the C/T scans and made it fit just the right size of the tumor and added lots of radiation power. Wow! Was all I could say to my doctor when he told me that. 

Today I'm still dealing with a lot of residual pain and still quite a bit of swelling. My eye looks a lot like one that a zombie might be rambling around with on the Walking Dead, but I can deal with that since it keeps getting better little by little. I'm scheduled to go back to work in a week and I'm looking forward to it.

I wonder a lot about what kinds of comments I will get when people see my eye? With all of the surgical treatment that I went through, it's too bad they couldn't have given me some kind of superpowers like x-ray vision or the ability to shoot laser beams out of my eye. I know that is silly, but it's just my way of trying to be humorous and deal with all of my pain.  

I have also filled a lot of my time lately trying out many different plant-based recipes.  I have found an excellent e-cookbook on Amazon Kindle called The Super Easy Vegan Slow-Cooker Cookbook.  I highly recommend this book and can say that some of my favorites I've made so far are the Split-Pea Soup and the Lentil Chili.  I also just started a Pinterest board called It's Easy Being Vegan where I am going to pin my favorite plant-based recipes. Being vegan helps me to feel better about life and going forward and how I'm going to take better care of myself and my family.

Until next time,

KB

Contemplating Today

What can I say?  Today was an ok day.  I am moving along fairly well as can be expected.  I am recovering from three eye surgeries, 18 rounds of chemo injected in my eye, and unfortunately the loss of my right eye. The first was radiation plaque that was sewn to the back of my eye for one week straight which wasn't too bad if you don't mind looking like you have a Frankenstein eyeball. The second was the removal of the plaque and let me tell you, by this point I was angrier than a hornet. I just wanted to get that thing that felt like a hot pop rock out of my eye. This was probably the most painful experience I've ever had and I have had two children, one natural and one C-section and this out ranked both by far.

Ok, so maybe I should fill you in a little bit why I had to go through all of that. Three years ago I was told by my eye doctor that I had a tumor on my right eye and that it was cancerous. He used the word Melanoma to be exact. There's something about that word that brings to mind blackness and death, it's a very ominous and destructive word you never want to hear. I can't even described to you the shock and dismay that I went through my entire body when he told me the news. It was like all of the air was sucked out of the room and my world just stopped. I was looking at his face and his mouth was moving and I swear I couldn't barely hear anything he was saying after I heard the word Melanoma. My doctor told me that I had Uveal Melanoma and it is fairly uncommon only about 5% of people are diagnosed with it in the world.  That's about 2,500 people per year.

I had the weirdest most surreal feeling and then I heard my doctor say "in order to save your life and save your eye we will either have to remove the eye or you can undergo a procedure call brachytherapy, which involves placing a radioactive plaque on the tumor for one week." All I can say is I think I stopped breathing at that moment in time.  Remove my eye? There was no way that I was going to do that. Strangely enough, I don't think that I cried in that office, I think I was too devastated to cry. 

Luckily my husband and mom were there in the room to support me. At that moment the doctor, my mom and husband and I all became a team. This fateful day changed my life forever and as I sit here and write this I can tell you that I had to make a decision to either live or lose my eye. 

I opted to try and save my eye. I've been asking this question a lot to my family and I ask you too, which option do you think that you would do?

 

The good news is that about two weeks before I found out about my eye I had decided to start eating only plant based foods.  I'm not even sure why I decided to do this major overhaul in my life, but I can tell you that today I am so very grateful that something popped into my head and told me that it was time for me to start on a plant-based diet. I also have to tell you that I have been too scared to do much more research on this because I was fearful of finding out more horrible news.  I just listen to my doctor and he continues to deliver me good news.

I think that's about enough for today, but I will be back very soon.