It's the End, or maybe just the middle

Two quick announcemnets
 this summer we are participating in the CF climb challenge, if you will be in Colorado June 25th please consider joining our team

Also we are selling lemon shirts again as a fundraiser for our climb team, so if you missed it last time here is your chance to get one, or if you grew out of the last one! :P




As  I write this I am sitting in the practice rooms at GCU spending my last hours of the semester hanging with friends listening to music.  WOW!  I can't believe this year is almost over.  Between me and summer are a few hours of sleep, several sweaty trips to the storage unit and a 14 hour car ride home.  A year ago I would never have imagined my year would turn out like this.  It is amazing how different college was for me this time around, from being able to walk quickly to class, to actually talking to people and gaining the freshmen (can I still call it that?) 15....well....20.  If this is the only good year I get with these lungs, it was worth it.  I did so many awesome things and met a ton of really cool people.

Well as usual life got in the way of writing.  I am now home.  There were indeed many sweaty trips to the storage unit but the sleep thing was more of an ideal than a reality. 

This year was, dare I say it, the best year of my life so far.  It also was the hardest goodbye I have had yet.  I know I will see all these awesome people again soon but for now we have 115 days to get through.

Although the goodbye was hard, I am glad for it because a gloomy goodbye means we had an amazingly awesome time together.  Feeling blah about going home for the summer, means I have built roots and found a new home.  It means I have made the friends and connections I have always wanted.  It means I finally got the college experience I dreamed of and for that I am extremely thankful.  I dreamed days like these would be possible but was never completely certain they would be in the cards for me, yet here I am.  

This reminds me of a saying one of my transplant friends doctors told her "transplant is a bridge, some people get right across, some get stuck in traffic but at the end of the day, we all eventually make it across."  Well I think it is safe to say I have made it across the bridge.  Not just the bridge of transplant either but the bridge of anxiety as well.  

I don't think I have talked about it much here but I have struggled with depression and anxiety for most of my life since high school.  My biggest issue was social anxiety disorder, which is, simply put, an extreme fear of other people.  At my worst I refused to leave my dorm room to hang out with people and even mostly stopped eating because it was just too much to drag myself to the cafeteria to eat around, or possibly with other people.  I have gone through years of medication and many many hours of counseling to get me to the point I am at.  That was another bridge I didn't think could be crossed.  From my beginning perspective it looked like the bridge had fallen into the water.  However, it turned out the bridge took a few steps down but continued on and did indeed cross the river.  I know the bridge of anxiety is not over, I am nearing the end, I hope, but there are still situations that I feel the nerves well up inside and I being to shut down, but the fact that I have so many good friends that I feel mostly comfortable around shows the immense progress I have made.  Oh and did I mention I did all that without medication!

I think that all of life is a bridge really.  You never are completely over any one bridge.  The terrain may change, going form a sketchy, narrow hanging wooden bridge swinging in the wind above a 5000 foot drop, to a wide paved multi lane concrete bridge 20 feet above a slow moving river, but ultimately there will always be challenges to get across in life.  The good news is that we have people around us to travel with, and an awesome God leading the way.  That is a fact I can fix my eyes on as I go through the bridge of summer, and if this smooth bridge turns rocky again, which is inevitable, I have people and a God I can cling to!

Here is a quick summery of my year

2 year lungaversary dinner

Hiking with the roomie

Sebastian came to visit!

Volunteered with Jenna at our church's Halloween event

Yes I sometimes did homework!

Dorm event with most of my roommates

Wandering in the wilderness!  (we meant to go hiking but never found the trail)

Sunrise at the Grand Canyon!!!

Horseshoe bend

It wouldn't be college without late night food runs!

The guys photobombed this (does it count if we knew?)

College Group Selfie!

Watched The Common Thread perform at the fair!  check them out at here

Copycat pic shenanigans!

College Take 5

I have a feeling that those interested in reading my posts are going to be in luck this semester, since I would much rather write here and I have a lot of papers to put off!  As you may have gathered I am back in school!

Since my last post, I have quit my job, packed up my life and moved away.  I left beautiful cool Colorado for probably the closest thing to hell on earth (or at least in the United States), Phoenix Arizona.  I actually do like Phoenix quite a bit it is just rough for now as the summer finishes off, then I'll be down here swimming outside in December while my Colorado peeps are living in a slightly colder hell of their own.  This is my first time to experience the Phoenix heat and well yeah... its hot.  I am literally drenched when I go places more often than not and tend to stay inside most of the time. The necessity of trips to the store are questioned more and Pepper is adjusting to her new very limited (twice a day) access to the outdoors.  Other than that the heat isn't too bad and on occasion, after being thoroughly chilled by the lovely and necessary AC, I have been seen sitting at an outside table enjoying a fry or 2 (or 1000, freshmen 15 here I come!)

Pepper is settling in though I don't think she is a huge fan of school life.  I think she misses her freedom and her buddy, my parents dog, Walter.  However she is easily the most popular creature on this campus and would give even the most famous celebrity a run for their money.  I am simply the invisible and irrelevant person who holds the other end of the leash, plus I give her food.  Actually today I came home to discover I am not really needed for that either.  She had jumped up on my shelf, pulled down the bin that holds her food, pulled open the lid and helped herself to breakfast and then some!

The biggest shock of all to me is the amount of damage my brain seems to have had over the years.  It is just not what it used to be.  I can imagine this is how a person who goes back to school in late adulthood feels, only I'm 23 not 43.  I am hoping it improves as I get further and further out from chemo but I have heard that my anti-rejection medication has the same effect so I am guessing the memory loss is here to stay.

I have also found that I am pretty much done with school.  There is a reason why most people only go for four years.  The worst part is that I still have no idea what it is I really want to do after, at least job wise, and so I lack real motivation to get my schooling done and the idea of quitting seems kind of appealing.  Any job ideas?  Keep in mind I am immunocompromised, so things like pediatric ER doctor are kinda out.

School stuff aside my latest mission is to find myself some more friends and to expand my Arizonian social circle.  Of course finding a boy would not hurt either.  I am after all 23 and I have been single my entire life! Yes I know that is slightly shocking.  I am however currently taking applications in this department and decided to add to Pepper's skill set to run up to guys on command and lick them or something to initiate a conversation!  Ok all joking aside I really do need to make some more friends and am thinking about starting a gaming (board, cards, etc.) on campus.

Alright enough procrastination for one day.  I've got a paper to write (yes already!)

These two hooligans chillin' in a box while I unpack

My room

More of my room and Pepper's perch

Pepper's new favorite

Lesson from a transplant

Hi Guys!
Well first off I had yet another doctors appointment this past week.  I met with both the transplant docs and my cancer doc.  Both reports were pretty good.  It's funny because I have had such a change in how I view doctors appointments.  I used to dread going to the doctor, pretty much every doctors appointment meant another hospital stay.  Now I almost like going.  Don't get me wrong it's not that I enjoy spending hours siting in waiting rooms and wasting two days at the airport just to have a doctor look at me for five minutes, but going to the doctor has become an enjoyable experience.  It is a chance for me to see how much I have improved and to show the doctors how good I'm doing!  This visit in particular was met with raving reviews from my cancer doc and his student.  Much to my grandmother's delight, who was with us this trip, he called me the poster child for PTLD!  I also got to see my beautiful X-ray.  I unfortunately did not get a copy of it but let me just tell you it was so big and black!  Those lungs have really expanded and cleared out!  I have a couple more appointments to go before my doc month is over (I see all my docs every 3 months and they all seem to occur at the same time), this time these are here so much less time consuming!  After that I'm a free woman until September!

Few!  With that update out of the way we can get on to bigger and better things.  The real reason for this bolg.  Transplant is a very intense process and it is impossible for a person to go through it without having their life completely change and not just in the obvious ways.  Yes I have a huge scare across my chest and a few more along my neck and stomach but those are a small change in comparison to how it has change me as a person.  In fact their are so many changes that I am going to spare you the novel post and break it up into smaller chunks!  Thats right I'm back on the blog wagon!  Lets buckle up (are there seatbelts in wagons?  Maybe these days!) hold on and dive into our journey of LESSONS FROM A TRANSPLANT:


Lesson 1: Patience
How to Wait

I am no expert in this field, in fact I still kind of suck at waiting for some things.  However I have had a LOT of experience waiting for big things to happen.  Besides the obvious, waiting on the list for lungs, I have spent time waiting to get listed, waiting to go home, waiting to go back to school, waiting to feel better, waiting, waiting and more waiting.  I have spent the good part of the past two years simply waiting.

What I have learned is that waiting just happens.  It's one of the hardest and easiest things to do.  Like time the wait will pass whether you pay attention to it or not and that is the key, to not pay attention to it.  As anyone who has spent time in a waiting room, on a plane or on a car ride knows, the time passes faster when you have something to do, ideally something interesting or fun.  As a person who has spent long periods waiting (were talking months here)  I know that life doesn't stop when you wait and the time waiting is still time.  You can sit around miserable waiting for the time to pass or find something to do.

Definitely the hardest wait for me was the seemingly endless 19 days I waited on the list.  Now I know that sounds super short, and it was, but keep in mind I had already been waiting for about a month after we moved just to get listed.  I was not the greatest at this wait especially at first.  When the call came in that I was on the list I half expected to get lungs that night.  I even shoveled in my food (and by shovel I mean maybe eat at a barely normal speed, I was pre- transplant people I couldn't eat fast remember this X-Ray!  My esophagus was way over on my right there was no eating fast for this girl!), thinking I wouldn't have time to finish before the call came.  Well I did, as hours turned into days I realized the call wasn't coming anytime soon.  As I waited I began my first intense steps down the path for the waiting lesson.  These steps showed me to find something else to do.  I spent my days at rehab, napping, seeing friends and of course at our pitty dinners!  Pretty soon this chunk of the path was over and the next chunk began.

This is a path we all travel all life long but for the next two years my path would change from a fairly flat easy road to a steep mountain pass, covered in a jungle making it impossible to see the end.
As I climbed along I learned some tips along the way.

Another way I have learned to be content with waiting it to change the moment from being one you want to pass to one you want to remember and even possibly enjoy.  As I am currently waiting for my hair to grow back this lesson has been very clear.  My hair is super short and curly and although this is not a style I would have ever chosen on my own I am learning to enjoy it.  There are perks to short hair, its easy to deal with and never gets in the way.  I do have my moments when I really just want to pull it up in a ponytail or braid it but I have to remember that one day it will be long again and this period of short hair will be gone.

I still have a long way to go on this path, as I still struggle to wait for school to start, to be done with school and start my "adult" life, a relationship, my hair, but I have also come a long way!   

Kaelyn and I waiting for our appointments last week

Hello Again!

I'm back.  I can't believe it has been a month since I last posted.  EEK!!!  I really need to get better at posting.  I mostly put it off because I don't know what to write, so if you have an idea for me, comment below!

Anyway, things are going pretty well for me.  I got a job, my first ever!!!  It is going well.  I am working at a coffee shop, which is good, but a little overwhelming at times.  I am also taking a class this semester, my first time back in 2 years!  I have discovered that my chemo brain seems to be long lasting as I am having the hardest time remembering things at work and school.  I used to be so good at remembering things and now, well.....who am I?  Hopefully this improves as time goes on, but if not, well, I guess I'll just have to figure it out.

Pepper is doing well, though she is going through her terrible 2s faze.  She is being such a stinker lately.  I'll give her a command and she just looks at me like, nope I don't have to do that.

Currently I am sitting at Peet's coffee in Phoenix on the GCU campus!!!! (yes Dad they have Peet's here!) Before you get too excited, Nope I'm not back at school, well I am but not as a student.  I am here visiting Jenna!!!!!!!!!  It has been so fun and super good to see her.  I haven't seen her in like 9 months!!!!  She could have had a baby and I wouldn't have even known about it!  (No she didn't have a baby)  Its been so nice, its almost like I never left, well except that everything is different...and I can walk...but.... yeah, just the same!

Welp, good talk!  Keep on Keepin on!  I'll try to post more!  Ok bye now!

New Year at last!

As the new year approaches I am planning on making a few big changes!  I'm finally getting back to school!  Pepper and I will be ditching this chilly snow filled land for a more cactusy landscape!  

Things with her are going great.  She has begun to alert me!  Although she doesn't know the nudge signal attached to the alert yet,she gets my attention and promptly picks the correct hand.  So far she has done 3 alerts and all were correct!  Last night she even warned of an impending low early enough that I never had symptoms!  It's a good thing she's alerting too because, ironically, she chewed up the cord to my monitor(dex) and I haven't gotten a replacement yet.  I guess that was her way of telling me she is up for the task!  

I am very excited about this next year!  Let's hope it's a little less medicalie, and much more friendie and fun!

Until next time

Ttfn blogollowers!

My Fate

Today was the day.  I had a PET scan yesterday which revealed to the doctors the next chapter of the story brewing inside of me.  And today we were told the next bit of it.  Well folks it's beginning to look a lot like normal life.  My plan of no more hospital stays could become real because this kid has no signs of cancer!!!!  Yes you read that right, my cancer has indeed hit the road! It finally took the eviction notice seriously and booked it!  What's next in the story of Anna, hopefully some fluffy snuggles, a few late nights, warmer weather and lots of laughs.  I'll post more soon!  There are about to be a few big changes and this time for good things!