Busy Weekends

After working a couple more weeks I am definitely capable of working 3 days in the office and 2 days at home with lots of organization to keep me on task. The days at home are crucial for keeping me rested and allowing for relaxation so I am not feeling over stressed.
Other than working, I have been keeping busy on the weekends. The weekend of Jan 31st and Feb 1st I spent time with family playing games, attending a baby shower and watching the Super Bowl. I actually didn't suck at Scrabble like I thought I would and held up with my cousin Mark, who usually wins. This was also my first baby shower, which really is not my thing, but still nice to see the family. On Sunday I woke up feeling tired but figured I would enjoy watching the game with my cousins. Overall the weekend was a bit too much activity but lots of fun.
Then on February 4th Amoret and Rettke flew in and we drove up to Houghton for Michigan Tech's Winter Carnival, a 9 hr drive we started at 9 pm. That was a true test on me, but we did it in one night and arrived in Houghton at 6 am. Both Rettke and Amoret drove and took naps with me staying awake navigating and talking the whole way up. We had a lot of fun all weekend walking around seeing statues, going out to eat, watching hockey, and going to the bars. The bars were rough, since I am no longer drinking and people kept saying go get a drink. I saw a lot of people I knew and had a rough time telling them that I had cancer and even got to the point that I didn't want to tell some of them. Their reactions were surprising, most of them didn't believe it and then commented on how strong I was and I would fight through this. Just hearing the confidence in people's reaction reminded me of how strong I can be and need to be through this.
The best part of the weekend with Amoret, Rettke, Kelly, Jen and Cory was the time I was able to spend with my close friends and hear their thoughts on what I am going through and their faith in me to get through all this. It was nice to be able to talk with them one on one like when we lived together. They really refreshed me and got me ready to fight through radiation. I also realized that it is important to keep in touch with my close friends and see them as much as I can. I also got a chance to finally break down about having cancer with the people around that I needed to help me pull right out of it.
This past weekend, February 14 and 15, I spent out at my Aunt Janice's and Uncle Tom's house keeping busy. Uncle Tom picked me up and installed a shelf for me, prior to taking me out to his house. We spent Saturday afternoon preparing for the card making gathering my Aunt Janice had put together for Sunday with family. Saturday evening we stayed up late talking about the family and what I had in front of me with treatment. On Sunday we got all prepped for the party, baking cookies and getting lunch together. Family showed up and the party didn't stop until 6 pm, when I was exhausted and ready to head home. Sunday night I noticed I had pushed myself too hard for too long and felt a cold coming on, mostly likely from being worn out so I am taking it easy this week.
I am fortunate to have a very loving, supportive family that wants to help me in any way they can and are working with me to help me. I am very grateful for all the supportive people I have around these days. I am noticing just how much a positive attitude and desire to be helpful lifts my spirit and keeps me positive. I believe that surrounding myself with happy, supportive, helpful, positive people that I can talk to is keeping me strong to fight through my cancer.

Back to Work

I finally went back to work this week after 2 months off. It is odd to be excited about going back to work, but work is a step towards going back to normal life. I am easing my way back into it, working in the office 2 or 3 days a week and then form home the rest of the week. Initially it was weird to go back to work since there was so much I felt I had missed. However, I quickly learned that not much had really happened thanks to the slow economy. Catching up actually went really quickly and I was able to take back my old daily work. I ended up feeling really exhausted after 7 hours at work, but still pushed on for the 8th hour. Going back to work caused me to go to bed earlier, but I would wake up the next morning and have another full day at my apartment. Thus far I don't think work has wiped me out and am wondering what going into the office two days in a row would do to me.
Along with starting work this week I am continuing to organize and clean my apartment. Which is helping me to feel more settled and more like myself. I am starting to realize just how unsettled I was for the last year here.
Overall though I have had a good week and am ready for the next two and am counting down the days until Winter Carnival at MTU and seeing Rettke and Amoret.

Diagnosis and Surgery Nov 2008

I am Beth Blumhardt an active 26 year old Engineer, M.S. Metallurgist. I am a busy girl having so many activities to do, mountain biking, snowboarding, skiing, volleyball, ultimate Frisbee, Frisbee golf, rock climbing and trying anything new. I am the type of person who is busy all day and happy with projects to do during the day, not the type who sits in front of the TV. However, during grad school I starting feeling more tired and noticed a decline in energy, but thought it was just aging and the stress of getting a masters degree. I finished my degree and started working in Dearborn as a Process Metallurgist at a steel mill. I enjoyed work but always felt tired at the end of the day.

Way back in September 2008 I had my first haze out, a moment where I dazed out (eye twitching) and couldn't speak. I didn't think much of it though, it lasted less than 30 seconds. I had a couple more haze outs in September and October 2008. In mid October 2008 I had a fender bender and couldn't remember how it happened, maybe another haze out. The next day I fainted at work, which meant I had to go to the doctor and get a full check up. I went to the doctors twice in the following month, and on the second visit a coworker had seen a couple of my haze outs and knew something wasn't right. She came with me and spoke to the doctor. They checked my heart and did a CT scan on November 14th, 2008. A half hour after leaving the CT scan the doctor called me telling me I needed to come back to her office as soon as possible. I got back to her office and she told me that they had found a large mass on the left frontal lobe and that I needed to go to ER at University of Michigan.

So my friend and her husband took me to U of M and I called my mom and sister and tell them about it. They packed up and head downstate to be with me. I had a second CT scan and an MRI at U of M and stayed the night in the Neuro ward at U of M. The next morning I was told I had a brain tumor in the left frontal lobe. I was released from the hospital since I was in good condition walking, talking and not have painful headaches. I never got to the point of having tremor siezures, just these haze out moments.

The left frontal lobe is located right behind the forehead and extends halfway back into the skull. The left frontal lobe section of the brain contributes to the bodily movement of the right side, speech, decision making, planning, reasoning, personality, creativity, mood and inhibithion. After learning about all that the frontal lobe contributes to, it really helped me in understanding how I have changed in recent years with exhaustion, being indecisive, not wanting to plan stuff till the last minute, moving and never fully settling into my new home, having my moods be more drastic, and not wanting to work on mosaics or knitting. I had noticed these things but thought it was just a change in my interests and nothing more.

On Tuesday Nov. 18th, 2008 my Nuerosurgeon called to say I would have surgery, a craniotomy, on November 26th, 2008, to resect as much of the tumor as possible. During the following week I had several doctors appointments to prepare me for the surgery, including a speech pathologist. The doctors had determined my tumor was ~5 cm in diameter and in the pre-op visit he determined he would remove ~60 -70%. The doctors were preparing us for the worst results possible from the surgery. They were saying I could have trouble speaking, sound different, or have issues with motor skills on the right side of my body.

My surgery was consider an awake craniotomy, since I was woken up during surgery to determine which section of the brain controlled speech and bodily movement. The surgeon was able to resect my tumor without disruption to these prortions of my brain. I was not awake when they opened my skull or performed any of the tumor resection. I was woken up, by dialing down my anestetic, to test my speech and recognition and then re-anestethised multiple times during surgery. I must say that you never want to be woken up during surgery, it was totally weird and even weirder to see your surgeon during surgery.

My surgery took 5 hours and the surgeon was able to remove over 90% and stated that the surgery went amazingly well leaving only fragments. The larger peice of tumor remaining would have severly effected my speech if it had been removed. I came out of surgery sounding like myself and had no issues with bodily movements. Since surgery I have had a few word misplacements, but nothing extreme, calling a calf a thigh or saying put mittens on mitts. I have also noticed my connection of movie titles to movie plots only seen once is slower and connecting names to faces of distant people is slower.

They performed pathology on my tumor and I was diagnosed with oligodendroglioma-astroctoma brain cancer. Which means I have two types of gliomas, brain tumors, growing. Sadly this type of brain tumor is considered reoccurring, which means they can not fully remove it because it grows into the brain in a dendritic formation. There good news though, my cancer was caught at level 2, lowest level for adults, which is really important in cancer. I will be going through radiation some time in the near future to fight the fragments and peice of tumor that they were not able to resect.

Following staple removal I was able to travel up north to Houghton to celebrate Christmas and New Years with my family.