Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

The Spring Fix and Clean

May 29, 2009 erikhom@aol.com Leave a comment

April is a promise that May is bound to keep. ~Hal Borland

The other day I received a nice thank your from the representatives of Phil & Amy Mickelson’s Foundation in response to my letter about dealing with breast cancer in a family with young children. It really did put a little spring in my step.

I was spurred to write that note to one of my favorite golfers when I read about the hard time that he was having dealing with the thought that his wife was suffering at home and he was in a sport where he was traveling away from his family. He was tormented and reacting on instinct. I just thought he needed to know about some of the resources available to husbands of breast cancer sufferers and I’m glad I reached out.

Phil is one of those husbands who give men a good name. When it comes to breast cancer, let’s face it, men just have a rotten name. It isn’t that they don’t deserve it. Some men have just not “done the right thing” by not being understanding, leaving their wives at a hard time, or just running from it al . And those few men have made it hard for men to be understood. The emotions flow and rage enters the picture. I totally understand and empathize with these women and also with their husbands at the same time. I guess that is because I know where both sides are coming from. These women think their husbands might be insensitive or not understanding, but there really is some “reasoning” for some of the behavior.

Recently I got into a discussion with some women online after a woman’s husband was insensitive. At first I read about it and thought, “here we go again, another man ruining the name of husband”. Then I said to myself…wait, I’m not much better. That could very well have been my own wife complaining about me.

Cancer is a tough ordeal. For a man who has to watch his wife suffer with breast cancer, there is no greater feeling of helplessness. We’re men. We like to fix things and there is nothing more that we want to fix is the broken pieces of the only woman in our lives that means more to us than our own mother. For me, the drains, the blood and the visits to the doctors (things I was not comfortable with) were just part of the healing process. Most men don’t want to talk about their fears and especially with their own wives who don’t need to hear from their husband about how scared they are when right now they might need a rock or a sounding board and not a whimpering husband. Heck, they’ve got cancer, not us! When we aren’t that rock or sounding board though, then we get that bad rep. Quite frankly I think my wife got tired of all that smothering. She didn’t want to be thought of as sick and my fawning all over her just reminded her of her illness.

The monthly doctor appointments are continuing shots and side effects of her cancer trial drugs have become a normal part of life that get acknowledged quickly before we go to bed at night.

“How did it go?”

“Okay, I only waited for 45 minutes. The shot was easier this time.”

“Great. Good night.’

It really has become casual in conversation because of her desire to ease my burden and not have my attention focused on her. Similarly I have to pay extra special attention to let her know that I do know she isn’t out of the woods. She needs to know that if she wants that attention, I will give it to her.

So back to the discussion, the husband was asked by a wife about what her thought of her recent construction. The husband was pretty dismissive and understandably the wife was a bit upset. At first I wanted to jump on that bandwagon of saying what a jerk the husband was. Now I love my wife and “not just her breasts”. They has always been an asset for her before cancer and she’s been always conscientious about their appearance, but I do find myself trying to remind her that I don’t mind her focusing on them health-wise, but it is heremotional well-being that I care about more. So in my case when asked about her scars and if the neckline on her dress is too low and her scars show, I do want to tell her she looks beautiful, but a woman knows her husband and what he feels just by looking in his eyes. She knows that I know they look and feel different. A woman after reconstruction knows that a husband might not look at her bare breasts the same way (better or worse in appearance), but I know for me it was her eyes, her mind, and other parts of her which remained untouched…or maybe untouched by human hands but they are still the same ones that were part of her when we got married. I will at some point look at her reconstruction as part of her and without hesitation.

Just like your scars, it takes time to heal and feel comfortable again for you to discuss them with your husband. Actually, while I don’t mind discussing with my wife about the cancer, I just don’t want her to focus on the appearance of her new breasts. I do want her to be happy with them, but I don’t want to obsess about them. My wife would rather me tell her how beautiful she looks in her new dress without prompting than to have a 20 minute discussion on if her scars are fading, if I see rippling, or other imperfections. I’ve had those discussions and while productive, the conversation did not seem natural (no pun intended).

The reconstruction part of cancer recovery really does belong in the domain of the woman. I didn’t want to look like one of those husbands who “shaped his wife’s looks”. In the end I took my wife “for better or for worse”. My wife chose her option and I am happy with it as long as she is happy with it. As I look at it, as husbands we have no choice in what your original breasts looked like, we have no choice in marrying women who were stricken with breast cancer, and we should not be a major contributor in deciding what your new body should look like. What we do have a choice in is being sensitive to our wife’s emotional feelings and we do have a choice to love them unconditionally.

I mentioned that human hands did not touch my wife’s eyes, mind and spirit, but they have changed through cancer too. She is more proud and confident of where she is because of what she has been through. I find her strength to be the biggest turn on. It makes her more beautiful than ever.

Last weekend was the unofficialbeginning of Summer with MemorialDay and we took that time for the whole family to clean the house and continue with our post-cancer journey. We threw out the old cancer information pamphlets, the left over get well cards, the sample drain pump and the tons of bedside reading material that was accumulated. We’re all moving on. We’re cleaning those cupboards. We’re fixing our lives and coming on stronger than ever.

Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

Thinking in Rare Air

May 21, 2009 erikhom@aol.com 3 Comments

: Sunset @ 30,000 feet

More thoughts from 30,000 feet. Rare air makes you think. It makes you appreciate. It helps you to understand.

I write these thoughts from the air somewhere along the Pacific Coast after having spent a beautiful day in Los Angeles on business. The weather there is always debon “air” as Herb Caen once wrote I think. There was just enough of a breeze to keep the smog at bay. I always feel a bit younger when traveling down there on business maybe because I am hanging out in the hip area of LA in Hollywood. At the same time I find myself feeling quite antiquated for not recognizing the newest starlet as she just pranced by me in front of Le Petit Four…”that was LC, don’t you know?”. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have recognized her.

The past week has been the fun part of my job at a music conference where we talked about the ever changing landscape of the music industry and listened to fantastic music of yet to be discovered artists such as Meiko and Matt Morris (@mattmorrisfeed). I’m probably a relative novice in the world of music, but in terms of talking about the industry, its preservation, and its future, it is a great topic. Working in an industry that is in turmoil keeps your job interesting much like my regular life.

The future has been on my mind quite a bit. Why? Because I find it really great to be optimistic about things and the future is something you can dictate yourself. For example, my wife has been lamenting about not having been to Hawaii in a few years. So rather than worrying about it, we booked flights for 9 months from now to our favorite hotel. Sure lots will happen between now and then, but I sure can’t wait for Spring Break 2010. We aren’t even sure yet what we are doing this summer or this holiday season. The message though is that my wife was thinking about doing something fun and going to somplace that made her happy and I was more than happy to want to see that happen.

Its always been a great part of my relationship with my wife that I treasure. I like to dream and my wife likes to laugh at me as if I were the little kids who is telling her that when I grow up that I want to be “an astronaut and meet aliens” (that’s what I told my mother when I was 9). That was about 4 months before I met Farrah Fawcett’s manager and I decided that I wanted to grow up to be a manager of a beautiful starlet and earn 10% of everything she made. I know my wife thinks I’m nuts sometimes when I show her photos of beautiful places and say “we’re going there”.

My wife has always been that rock, that voice of reason. The one who tells me that we should think before we act and to wait a few days and think about it first. I’ve always been the one to do quick analytics and go with my gut instinct based upon those calculations. I believe that this battle with cancer has made her not only appreciate me more, but the attitude of not waiting. When I used to ask her thoughts, she used to say, “I don’t know” or “what does it matter?” as if these were just my musings for me and not for her. Now she realizes they are for all of us. My wife has been right to analyze things for sure, but I think when it comes to matters of the heart and mind, sometimes it is good to go with your instincts.

Most of all I think we are all beginning to learn how to live “with” cancer and not let cancer lead our lives. This morning I saw the article about golfer Phil Mickelson’s wife having breast cancer. My children saw it as well and while I thought to myself that it’s always interesting how nobody really seems to pay attention about it until a celebrity is afflicted : Christina Applegate, Lance Armstrong, Patrick Sayze, Steve Jobs, etc., my son looked at the article and said, “She’ll be okay, right? They have kids our ages. Sounds like what mom had. I guess Tiger is going to win a lot of money while Phil is out.” That statement hit me hard, not by the words, but by his casualness. First it showed me that my son hadn’t found the experience of the last 9 months to be all that traumatic, second that he seemed to think of cancer as something that yoursurvive and not something that kills, and last that he felt if a celebrity and their family had cancer, it must be something somewhat normal. I spent all day thinking about whether all of those outcomes were good. I don’t want my son to be terrified and I do want him to erealize this can hit anyone and I am happy that he wasn’t faced with the emotional issues.

My thoughts do go out to Phil and his wife Amy as well as all those who are suffering from breast cancer right now. I am happy to be exiting that long dark tunnel with my wife’s hand in mine and really look forward to seeing that daylight at the end. Sometimes that daylight still looks like 4 years away, but at least its bright and we have a lot of good hopes ahead.

Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

Midlife Re-birth: 8 months post-surgery

May 13, 2009 erikhom@aol.com 2 Comments

We don’t understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it. – Jules Renard

This weekend marked 8 months post-surgery for my wife. She has since had reconstruction, a follow up surgery, 6 months of shots,6 months of a test bisphosphonate, and Tamoxifen. She has finally started to take another drug to lessen the effects of her side-effects of the drugs. I really don’t know how she does it. All these distractions and she continues her duties as class parent, team mom, family glue, top chef, businesswoman, and loving wife. It’s all become par for the course. Just yesterday she sent me a text at work to tell me that she had another follow-up procedure scheduled for the end of the summer. It just seems like such a casual thing now for her to write me and say that she is going to have more surgery, but this is just a stage in our life, not a WAY of life. We are going to move past this chapter.

In truth as we’ve come to realize her skin-sparing mastectomy is still a relatively new thing in the world of breast cancer surgery. While it does save your skin and is less traumatic for the survivor than we ever imagined, there is still quite a bit different from the traditional “Hollywood boob job”. Skin-sparing mastectomy with immediate reconstruction has become popular with patients because, compared with delayed reconstruction, it improves the cosmetic result, reduces cost and anesthetic risk, and in one sitting completes most of the surgical treatment that the patient will ever require for treatment of her breast cancer. Provided that the breast skin is not involved with or close to the tumor, physicians prefer to perform the mastectomy with optional removal of the nipple-areolar complex (total skin sparing) and the tumor biopsy scar. The mastectomy is otherwise the same as a standard modified radical mastectomy with removal of all breast tissue and an axillary node dissection. The part that is difficult for most patients is that so much tissue is removed that the breast becomea basically a large water balloon that holds a big bag of silicone, saline or whatever. Because the skin is now so much thinner, it is hard to prevent wrinkling and rippling. With so little tissue left, the breast can look a little misshapen at times. That said, the results do look pretty good and like life small adjust ments will be needed. Yes, this is the procedure that you hear for celebrities like Christina Applegate.

I know many women don’t want to talk about this too publicly. I mean, how can you complain when you think about the alternatives? These women are so thankful yet feel so close to what they can see is the final visual end to their suffering. All of this though is a change. A change from what past generations had. Not only was life extended but the quality of that life has been improved.

It is with that frame of mind while sick the past couple of weeks it come to my mind that suddenly we were so accepting of all these new changes in our life. We’ve reached that mid point in our life. They talk about midlife and the word crisis is always used to describe it. I don’t think so. Sure we’ve come across some bumps in the road. I told my wife that rather than a mid-life crisis, this is half-time for us. In the world of sports, this is the time to make adjustments and a time to assess where we are, where we’ve come from and where we want to go.

Such is mid-life for us I guess. After taking 10 days off from running because of a nagging cold I found my rested body was now better suited to tackle my nightly runs again. I told my wife how my body was responding and she reminded me I’m not getting any younger although I may feel young. Either way, the rest gave me renewed energy and a new energy and perspective that allowed me to set new personal bests three days in a row. The 10 days of mental relief reminded me of how lucky we are and how blessed our life is. It isn’t about fate or faith, but about the sense of being.

We took our time to plan that second half, revise our targets and think about how we want to live our life. It is not about settling. It is about making choices and pursuing what we believe to be important to both of us. The one thing we agreed upon is that this is a shared goal and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

A Very Special Mother’s Day

May 10, 2009 erikhom@aol.com Leave a comment

A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories. ~Honoré de Balzac

Today is obviously a more special Mother’s Day than any other for me. Even though I am so happy that I get to celebrate Mother’s Day with my own mother, I am even more grateful that my children get to spend it this year with their mother and for many years to come. Although they probably didn’t the magnitude of how special it was and how we were staring straight into the possibility that this Mother’s Day could have been one without a mom or one with a bit more urgency than we had today, it was not lost on me.

As we got up at 6 am this morning to get breakfast and flowers while their mother slept in, it was nice to spend some time with the kids and ask them what they appreciated about their mother. Here is a lst from a 7 and a 9 year old in no particular order:

She’s a good cook
She smells nice
She drives us wherever we want to go
She plays games with us
She let’s us have play dates
She’s smart
She’s nice
She’s pretty
She let’s me paint my toenails (daughter)
She helps us with our homework
She kisses us and tucks us in for bed

They didn’t say it directly, but I knew what they were thinking. They said that it would be sad though for some schoolmates who did lose their mother to breast cancer this year. After they said that, there was silence in the car and when we got back home they each made an additional card for their mother before she woke up. The hugs around the breakfast table seemed more meaningful and sincere that the daily ones and for that I am so appreciative of the moments we still have together.

Last night we had a rare chance for one of our date nights. Dinner and a movie seems so simple but I can’t remember the last time we held hands all movie long. Dinner was filled with pleasant conversation especially over the relief that our son had played a decent baseball game. She had hugged our son, wished him good luck and accidentally told him to get some hits for mommy before his Little League game. As soon as she said that she looked at me with the horror of putting pressure on her son. Fortunately he came through and had a couple of hits on his best day ever in baseball. He was so excited to come home and tell his mother that he got two hits. The smile on his dirt covered face not only made her laugh but was a big relief. Some day he’ll probably tell us it was no big deal, but we were hoping he wouldn’t put any pressure on himself.

Tonight we’ll spend part of another Mother’s Day with my mother. Although the appreciation of still spending that extra time with her had somewhat dissipated each year beyond her battle with cancer, this year it has been renewed. Since my father’s passing she has visibly taken on much of his persona as well. She’s adopted his adventuresome attitude and more than anything become not just a loving mother that she already was, but a thoughtful icon for me and my siblings to come to in times when we aren’t quite sure about what is right or wrong and reminds us of what our father would want us to do. I can see in her latter years that she more than anything wants her children to spend more time together and makes a strong effort to make that happen on a daily basis.

Mother’s Day has become more than that Hallmark Holiday. It is also now a call to awareness to the plight of mothers and their battle with Breast Cancer. I am glad that even baseball has really taken the time to appreciate mothers and use Mother’s Day to bring awareness to Breast Cancer Research. Watching major league baseball players use pink bats and wear pink wristbands tells you that it isn’t just the days of playing catch between a father and son that forms the foundation of future baseball players but also those mothers who drive their sons and daughters from field to field three days a week.

While my wife and daughter celebrated with a spa day, I took my son to play 9 holes of golf and were paired up with a 30ish son and his dad. You never know why people are out at a golf course on Mother’s Day without their moms on Mother’s Day. The two men played in silence, but idle chit chat revelaed that they were native San Franciscans and were all aums of the same high school. As it turns out they had recently lost their mom/wife to breast cancer. It was a tough day for them and they were honoring her memory on this day. My son did not hear the conversation, but it really cast more light on the specialness of the day.

I smile as I look back at this entry because all I’d want for Father’s Day is a nice round of golf myself ….. At the same time, I want to say how much I appreciate all those moms out there for how much they do for their children whther they are 4 or 40. And for those who have lost their moms or have moms or relatives who are sick, please enjoy what you have and savor it.

Breast Cancer - A Loving Fight, Route 53 - Life is A Highway

Out of the Fog

May 6, 2009 erikhom@aol.com Leave a comment

San Francisco is the longest lasting love affair of my life. Her beauty inspires me anew each day and I am very thankful to be able to live here on the edge of the continent in what I feel is the heart of the world. ~Nicole ,sfheart.com

The last couple of weeks have been a bit nutty from me. I think it all started with my annual check -up ( I got a clean bill of health by the way) but as soon as it was over, I got sick. I had a rash, a hacking cough, a fever….no it wasn’t “swine flu” although I had just taken a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco where I was about the only person not returning from Spring Break in Mexico. In the end I think it was just the winding down from all the stress of making sure that I was healthy for my check-up that my body just relaxed and broke down. The stress had been hitting me hard and now it was just taking over my body in its weakened state.

Today, after two weeks, I felt like something came over me. I wasn’t sure. My wife went in for her 5 month appt for her study and was given the approval for more medication to lessen some of the side effects. A relief for her too I guess. She still wants to revisit her physician and see if he can make a few more corrections. These days, these decisions I leave to her. She wants to remove me from the clinical aspects of our marriage. In her view it is like my not telling her what hue of lipstick or what pair of shoes to wear. We then proceeded to make summer plans and take care of the millions of little things that have been bothering us. The Comcast cable issue, summer camps for kids, and all those little things we’ve been meaning to coordinate around the house, but just haven’t asked each other to help.

Then despite working late, skipping lunch, having a late dinner, and barely getting home in time to tuck my kids into bed, I had that burst of energy. I still have been coughing and I just knew I had to get out and run. I needed to have a healing run. In fact I had a major coughing fit just as I put on my shoes. I was dreading this run. While recuperating from this cold I joked with my wife that we really were getting old. I now had more medications on my bathroom counter than I can remember ever having. I joked with my wife that i need one of those daily pill boxes that my mom has.

It was a beautiful foggy night that San Francisco is so well known for. The damp mist on my face was so refreshing. I ran further than I had on any run this year and I set personal bests this year for the mile, 3k and 5k distances. It was truly amazing that despite my sickened state that my body could perform so well. It had to be that home-cooked weather. The damp streets from the fog, along with the blurry street lights created a dreamlike feel as I ran up and down the hills. It felt so good and all my thoughts raced in and out of my head. By the time I completed my circle back home I could have gone longer but it was already midnight. I felt stronger at the end of the run that I did at the beginning. My cough is suddenly gone and I don’t feel any shortness of breath.

It is amazing how much I needed this run. Not just for the energy, but mostly for my mindset. I think the San Francisco weather is like that comfort food for me. It’s healing effects on this native son are like my fountain of youth! I felt like Tony Bennett was singing to me as I glided through the streets, window shopping and gathering in the view of the fingers of fog as they reached under the Golden Gate Bridge and curled their way across the bay. It was like a lullaby that your mom sings to you when you can’t sleep. Sometimes it is the power of the soul to heal. The power of the mind helps rejuvenate your passion and your spirit. Those comfortable surroundings which lessen our worries are better than all the medicines that can be prescribed.

Speaking of sleep, I better get some. Long day tomorrow.

Route 53 - Life is A Highway

Dads? What about us?

May 3, 2009 erikhom@aol.com Leave a comment

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it. – Harry Truman

These days I’ve been spending a lot of time on new types of social media both out of personal interest as well as for my company business as I’ve somewhat become their social media community manager. An interesting time to be attacking such a topic. It has both permeated my personal as well as my work life. It does intrigue me that there has been so much talk about moms. In fact not just a little but way too much. Don’t get me wrong, moms are an intriguing and wonderful group of people who have many different interests as well as power both in the online and online world. On Twitter there are Twittermoms and Momlogic, there are websites such as iVillage, powerful female influencers like Oprah,etc. I’ve been asked constantly what I’m going to do to penetrate the world of moms! I laugh becuase I argue about my cousins who are the dads who stay at home while the moms work. I also think dads need more help than moms. More importantly I think these women are struggling to get away from the identity as “just moms” .

It has me scratching my head as a marketer who has always been told that the most powerful and fluential groups are the male 18-34 consumers as well as the always moving group of Baby Boomers. Maybe it’s that dads don;t just view themselves as dads. Yeah, we’re dads, but we’re more than that. I just hope people don’t target me as a dad and only as a dad. We’re husbands, we’re lawyers, we’re doctors, we’re sons, we’re grandsons, etc.

Okay, well as a dad and husband, I’ve been through so much this year. I guess I want to spend more time enjoying those other things. My week ended though on a tough note as a dad. I’ve been having a beef with my son’s music teacher. You know the kind of music teacher that thinks the arts is the most important thing in a man’s life? Also the kind of choir master, and more importantly teacher, who believes that it is his duty to tell parents how to raise their children. This guy had the gall to tell me that I needed to sign a contract for my son to sing in his volunteer choir. I told him that in the future that the only contract I will have with my son is the unwritten one between a father and a son. He then threatened me by saying that if I didn’t sign his silly contract that he could possibly decide not to give my son his little “pin” at the end of the year. What? My son’s baseball team doesn’t require this. My son’s cub scout master doesn’t require this. What ever happened to scouts honor?

In the end this teacher drags me into this with our school asst. principal. This is the same school I attended and the one that I volunteer many countless hours in front of phones and stuffing bags of goodies for fundraisers. What has this world come to that they need a parent to sign a contract to say that they will be responsible for making sure that their son will be committed to their elective activity?

I did take this as an opportunity to educate my son and daughter about the importance of commitments, the importance of making the right decisions, and how to deal with conflict. It is not a conversation one wants to have to have on such a serious note with a 9 and a 7 year old, but with cancer, death and other life situations that our children have been through, I am so lucky that I have two kids who can digest such serious matters yet enjoy life thoroughly as kids. I came away so impressed with my children. More importantly as a dad I found I have a son who knows good reason, understands how people and friends are more important than small material things like a “music pin”. Maybe its the innocence of youth, but I couldn’t be happier with how my son and daughter listened, giggled and asked questions during our little talk. They may never know how proud I am of them, but I am.

These days as parents we work so hard to make a good life for our children and shelter them from the harsh realities of life such the little girl who was killed in Tracy, CA, the wars in the Middle East, the downfall of our banking and auto making industries and the sicknesses and illnesses around the world. Targeting these individuals for retail and financial reward is one thing, but giving them the resources they need to handle all the things they need to be a good parent is another. In the end though, it is up to the parents to make the difficult choices for their children when they aren’t old enough to make it themselves, and help them learn how to do it on their own in other cases.

There are lots of great resources for both sexes of parents. For me, one of the best is Common Sense Media (www.commonsensemedia.org) , but here are a few others: www.parentsoup.com, www.loveathome.com, www.more4kids.info, www.more4kids.com, and www.ultimateparenting.com