Tag: health

creativity

New hair. New me. New beginnings.

Christa Avampato

New hair. New me. My hair has quite a backstory. I haven’t sat in a hair salon chair in 5.5 years. Chemo, hormone suppression therapy, and regrowth took a lot longer than I expected, and the fear of letting go of any of my hair didn’t help. But I faced up to that fear, and here are the results from my first professional haircut since December 2020.

I’m so grateful to Penelope Love at Happy Sunshine Hair (and my wonderful Jane Cooke who connected me to Penelope!) for teaching me how to love and take care of my chemo curls that are now here to stay. She used my existing products. No upsells. No criticism. Just her talents, teaching, and support. She’s an independent stylist who rents her chair at a hair collective meaning the fee for the cut goes entirely to her, not a big brand. Happy Sunshine is a collective of 10 stylists making their way together in the beauty industry in NYC, a fashion capital of the world. (I’ll put a link to their site and Penelope’s in the comments below if you want to check them out!)

For most people, chemo curls fade after a couple of years, but I’m one of the few who is now a permanent curly girl. Penelope showed me how to own that with pride instead of mourning my original hair.

This weekend also marked a big medical shift. About 99% of the letrozole is now out of my system. The lupron will be hanging around in my system for a few more months while the tamoxifen ramps up. We’ll see how that goes!

I’m already feeling a lot better: less chronic pain in my joints and muscles, more flexibility, less fatigue and insomnia, fewer hot flashes, and less depression.

Cheers to starting a new chapter. I’m excited to celebrate with a vacation in Canada starting Monday. Let’s go have an adventure. I’m ready!

creativity

Day 1: What these meds taught me

Christa Avampato
Photo of me after acupuncture this week

And here we go! This morning, I took my last pill of letrozole. This afternoon, I will see my oncologist, get the prescription for my new medication that will hopefully have fewer side effects and help me feel better, and start a cutting edge monitoring program that detects even a hint of recurrence at the cellular level. (More on that in a later post.) Happily, I will NOT have to get a lupron shot as part of my appointment; I’m done with those, too.

Just before I woke up this morning, I had a dream where I was standing at a podium, talking about what I learned from cancer. I woke up and wrote down as much as I could remember. Cancer taught me:

1.) to give myself grace and give myself a break

2.) I have the right to feel all my feelings

3.) to be tough and more empathetic

4.) I can feel complex, conflicting emotions

5.) to be fearless

6.) how to ask for help and stopped feeling any shame about anything

7.) to let my light shine.

8.) there’s absolutely nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything.

9.) to go for it, whatever it is.

10.) to tell my friends I love them all the time.

11.) I don’t need to spend time doing anything I don’t want to do. If I can’t do it with my whole heart, then I just don’t do it. If I’m in the midst of something and getting no joy from it, I stop.

12.) stop pushing through just to prove I could. To live, sure. Out of of some made up obligation, nah. The word “should” has left my vocabulary.

13.) to love working out every day.

14.) to take a lot of pride in taking care of my health – my diet, my stress level, my mental, physical, and emotional health. I’m healthier and more whole than I’ve ever been. 

15.) to be grateful for all of it.

Thank you to everyone who helped me along this journey. I still have 5 more years of medications, and I’m celebrating this milestone. I’ll take every win I can get. Long may they continue.

creativity

Day 3: Being Alive is Grand

Christa Avampato
My last bottle of letrozole

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” ~Agatha Christie

To make sure I never forget to take my meds and supplements, I parse them out each week. Today, I parsed out my last 2 pills of letrozole and tossed the empty bottle in this photo into the recycling bin. And I smiled and cried.

I’m grateful for its service; it’s kept me alive and cancer-free for the 5 years and 3 months I’ve taken it. And I’m so looking forward to bidding it farewell; the painful and difficult physical, mental, and emotional side effects have been a daily struggle to bear. And I have mostly carried them in silence so they wouldn’t overtake me.

Inching closer to ending one chapter and beginning another, I’ve felt a shift. That something in me is changing. That my small corner of the world around me is changing. That this is about so much more than switching medications.

It’s about getting to begin again. To reshape my life. To build back better, from the inside out. In the immortal words of Whitesnake, I don’t know where I’m going but I sure know where I’ve been. And I can’t wait to see what lies ahead. It will be grand just because I get to live it. I’m ready for an adventure.

creativity

Day 12: Drawn back like a bow

Christa Avampato
Photo by Remy Gieling on Unsplash

It can be difficult to get from day to day when we feel like we’re stuck, or even worse, going backward. We are, rightly, obsessed with progress and forward momentum.

But life will sometimes slow us down. Something will stand in our way, seemingly immovable, and so we have to search for a way up, over, and most often, through. Illness and injury are the most palpable examples of what it feels like to be held back, no longer able to do what we once could. Maybe it’s temporary. Maybe it’s permanent. All of it is frustrating at best, and often downright depressing.

Over the past 5 years, I’ve been held back a lot. My health took a lot of time and effort to restore. It still takes a lot of time and effort to maintain. Side effects are a daily struggle, and I’m only half way through the decade of meds I need to take. This is the hand I’ve been dealt.

When I see myself being held back, and even actively pulled backward, I close my eyes and remind myself I am like a bow and arrow. To fly forward, an arrow must be drawn back. The stronger the force pulling it back, the further it will fly when eventually that force relents. And it will always eventually relent, releasing the arrow.

What keeps me going in moments of regression is knowing that one day I will get past all these obstacles standing in my way. In the meantime, I am getting stronger, more resilient, and learning because of these setbacks. I am an arrow, and my day to fly will arrive.

creativity

Day 14: Motion is Lotion

Christa Avampato
Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash

As I close in on 2 weeks until my med shift, I’m feeling pretty run down. Work is very busy (in a good way). I’m trying to adjust my sleep schedule to match what my senior foster dog needs. I have a bunch of personal project deadlines coming up in the next few weeks. I’m making time for out-of-town guests and fun because it’s summer. And I decided to take vacation after all because, again, it’s summer.

For a couple of days, I skipped my FitOn workouts. I’ve been working out with the FitOn app since 2022 and it helps me manage many of my side effects: fatigue, insomnia, joint pain, muscle pain, and my mental health. (It’s free and has so many excellent coaches and classes!) Yesterday I was feeling cranky and the area all the way around my shoulder joint was hurting. Though I’m taking my foster dog on many walks every day (older dogs need to go outside more often!), I’ve skimped on my own daily workouts. My mind and body were both feeling it.

When we’re crunched for time, we often let our own needs fall by the wayside. That’s exactly what I was doing. A number of years ago, one of my yoga teachers said to me, “Motion is lotion. When we move our bodies more, we find it’s easier to move our bodies more. The more we don’t move, the harder it is to get moving.”

So despite being tired and geared up for a long day of work ahead of me, I got my workout in this morning and felt better for it. I really can’t skip any of my daily workouts. Lesson learned, over and over again.

creativity

Day 18: What Lies Beneath

Christa Avampato
Print by Nicole Barsaleau. Photo by Christa Avampato.

My friend, Alex, sent me this print by Nicole Barsaleau a few years ago. I have it framed in my kitchen and I read it often. It reminds me of something my therapist, Brian, said to me many moons ago: “The prana (the all-knowing energy) cares about you and also cares about the system.” In other words, as we get better, we make everything around us better, too.

When I first got sick, I was angry and confused. How could this happen to ME? I try to do everything right. I follow all the rules and best practices. I take care of myself. How could I get cancer at a young age? Scientifically, I knew I was exposed to toxic fertilizers and industrial pollution in my hometown where I grew up. I understood cancer happens when one of our cells has a mutation that our immune system misses and then it quickly replicates while masquerading as a normal cell. Cancer is a sneaky little f*cker.

“This cancer came to hone you,” Brian said in one of our sessions as I was preparing for surgery and the long treatment road. “There will be a kind of death. And also a rebirth.”

To which I responded, “The Universe couldn’t hone me with something that WASN’T cancer?!”

I didn’t choose cancer but I could choose how to approach it and learn from it. Part of living is to make meaning of the things that happen to us. To do some good with whatever finds us, particularly if we didn’t choose it. What good was I going to do with cancer if I lived to restore my health? That puzzle kept me looking forward and reaching out. It still does. Universe willing, I’ll be learning from cancer and using what I learn to help others for many years to come.

I’ve coached people through their own illnesses, many of them different types of cancer. I’ve participated in clinical trials that yielded new medications and treatments. I’ve referred friends to my doctors. I’ve written articles and done interviews about my experience and they’ve helped thousands of patients and caregivers make a way out of no way. My nearly dying from Taxol changed the way my cancer center evaluates bloodwork to identify a rare but potentially lethal side effect at its earliest stages. I’ve signed off to have my data join with thousands of others in enormous databases for scientists to use today and in the future.

“Use this body for science,” I tell my doctors. They did. They still do. They will continue to.

In an ironic way, cancer made me healthier, happier, more grateful, and less stressed because I learned to make my own health my single biggest priority. Without it, I can’t do anything for anyone.

Do I wish I could have learned that without cancer? Sure. Do I think I would have? Maybe briefly but it wouldn’t have stuck. Now, my body, mind, and spirit force me to maintain it.

I’m better now, and the system’s better, too.

creativity

Day 19: A Bit Better Every Day Adds Up

Christa Avampato
Sunset from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Photo by Christa Avampato.

“If you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.” ~James Clear, Atomic Habits

I don’t need to shoot up like a rocket in any facet of my life to have the life I want. Instead, I’m consistent. Every day I try to be a bit better, do a bit better. Those small consistent changes are sustainable and measurable. They add up and they matter. This might feel slow. Some days I feel like I’m not making any progress toward something that’s really important to me.

But then I look back a month, a year, two years, five years. I see how far I’ve come. I look at old pictures and I see how sick I looked. I remember how sick I felt all the time. I still feel sick a lot but I’ve learned to not dwell on it. I acknowledge it.

“I see you trying, body,” I say. “Okay, we’ll rest for a moment.”

I take a deep breath. I pull myself up. I remind myself every day how far I’ve come. I keep going. I do things that make me happy. Things that bring me joy.

And tomorrow, I’ll do it all over again, I hope. Universe willing. For many, many days to come. Long may it continue.

creativity

Day 26: Sometimes strong is the only option

Christa Avampato
The Little Prince statue outside of Villa Albertine. NYC. Photo by Christa Avampato

“You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.” ~Bob Marley

When I was going through cancer, a lot of people said to me that they couldn’t do what I was doing if faced with the same situation. They meant it as a compliment and I absolutely appreciated it. The truth is that strength was my only option. The choice was be strong or die. Blunt but true (this is basically the best description of me. Ha!)

A few years ago a dear friend of mine was diagnosed with breast cancer and she had to start making the lightning fast decisions I had to make. When I was going through it, she sent me care packages and messages of love and support. The first time I saw her after her diagnosis, she gave me a huge hug and said, “I knew you were going through a lot but I had no idea just how much it was. And you had to do it during the pandemic and on your own.”

She almost sounded apologetic. I told her very truthfully, “There’s no way you could have know. There’s no way to explain to someone what it’s like to have to face a bilateral mastectomy, reconstruction, chemo, radiation, and heavy doses of medications for a decade to try to save my life.” There just aren’t words to sum up all of that – the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual strain. The only people who really understand are people who live it.

I recently heard about a program called Camp Breastie, a summer camp of sorts for breast cancer survivors organized by the nonprofit The Breasties. The article said one of the most profound benefits of the camp is that attendees don’t have to explain what they went through or how it felt because everyone there just knows. Everyone gets it. And there’s a real freedom in that. And so, I’m thinking about going next year. I’ve coached a number of people through cancer and health challenges after surviving my own. I think going to this kind of event would be a way to fill my own cup, to care for myself. It could be another source of strength; after all, building community builds us up.

creativity

28-Day Countdown to Healing

Christa Avampato

This is me after acupuncture today. It was my 10th session with the incredible Dr. Degenhardt at NYU Langone Health. My body’s responded so well to the treatments that I have no more blocks in my body. Now we are moving on to strength building in my core, left hip, and left leg. This is a huge milestone and we got here much faster than expected.

Tomorrow marks my 28 day countdown to my medication switch. Over the weekend, I opened my last bottle of letrozole – a medication I’ve taken for 5 years to prevent cancer recurrence. The side effects it’s caused, along with the side effects from my other treatments, are what brought me to Dr. Degenhardt. The medication did its job, and also took its toll. The hope is that this new medication will be easier on my body.

To mark this turning point, I made a special dinner: zaalouk, a Moroccan dish that is synonymous with celebration. It’s meant to be scooped up and savored with our hands – a tactile experience to nourish ourselves. I made these za’atar flatbreads by combining greek yogurt, flour, salt, baking powder, and olive oil. It’s all topped with toasted harissa chickpeas – a symbol of prosperity, continuity, the cycle of life, feminine health, the sustaining power of nature, and the desire for a good life. All fitting for this day.

When I was a kid, I loved making paper chains that countdown to Christmas. When I was going through radiation (another treatment that precipitated side effects Dr. Degenhardt is clearing!), I made a paper chain with inspiring quotes to count down the days of that treatment. I’m going to do that this month as well, but rather than a paper chain, I’m going to count down the days by sharing my thoughts about these past 5 years via writing.

Thank you to everyone who has played a part in this journey in so many ways. I’m so grateful. I’m the luckiest, and I know it.

creativity

A new chapter in my cancer journey begins

Christa Avampato
It’s me!

Yesterday, a new chapter in my life began. I got my last Lupron shot. This is a photo of me outside Perlmutter Cancer Center right after I got my shot. I couldn’t stop smiling, and right after this photo I cried many happy tears.

By the end of August, it will be out of my system and I’ll transition to a new medication regimen to keep cancer recurrence at bay now that I’m approaching the five-year mark since the end of active treatment. For a few weeks the old and new meds will mingle in my body — orchestrating the hand-off as one recedes into my past and the other ramps up to carry me into the future for the next 5 years. The hope is that this new medication will cause less chronic pain and fewer, less severe side effects than what I’ve been taking for 5 years while also protecting me from having a recurrence.  

These past 5 years have required me to break down and rebuild every area of my life several times over. It’s felt like a constant dance of doing and undoing. Just as I started healing and getting my bearings, something else would send me back to square one. To get through, I reminded myself that this is exactly the process that also strengthens muscles. I’m very strong physically and mentally. I’m also very tired. 

All I can do is what I’ve been doing. Living each day, one day at a time, as best I can. It’s all any of us can do. 

After my June 18th storytelling show at the AKC Museum of the Dog, I’ll be taking it easy this summer, mostly because I need to start this new chapter as healthy as possible. As I bid farewell to these medications that massively impacted my body and mind, I’m grateful for their service and everything they taught me. I’m grateful that they worked as hoped, even though they made daily life difficult every day. I’m still here and that’s what matters.