It’s been so long since I last posted an update, and so many things have happened, that I found myself overwhelmed at the thought of putting it all on paper.

A lot of things overwhelm me lately, as it turns out. But I digress. 

Here’s a quick synopsis from our last 60 days:

• Contracted a gnarley non-covid cold/cough mid-October.

• Final chemo on October 17th. It kicked my butt hard, especially because I went in sick. (I did NOT want to delay it.) It was significantly harder than all the rest combined.

• Went on a week of antibiotics to kick the cold/cough before surgery.

• Bilateral Mastectomy at UCLA November 15th. It went beautifully. Thank you for all your love and prayers.

• Bob’s sister, Stephanie, unexpectedly passed away in Tampa, Florida four days after I got home from the hospital. He traveled to Tampa for three days. It was a shock to the entire family.

• Opened a massive month-long Christmas event at Bob’s stable called A Cowboy Christmas. Opening weekend happened 10 days after I got home from the hospital and three days after Bob’s sister passed. (This weekend is our final weekend. Thank God.)

• We received our pathology report back from surgery. It was what they refer to as a Pathological Complete Response… meaning, zero cancer anywhere, including on the cellular level. The chemo did its job!

• We went to Disneyland for a little family holiday mid-December. Thankfully, Gabby was able to join us for the first day. Bob and I slept the entire day in our hotel room. It was the first time we’d “stopped” in several weeks.

• Bob contracted Covid… likely from Disneyland. He is on Day 8, and thankfully it appears Henry and I have dodged it.

• … And let’s not even mention that Christmas is 6 days away. Which, ironically, I’d tried to schedule everything around so Christmas would be wonderful this year. But my Christmas spirit has truthfully been in the dumps.

It’s been a complete rollercoaster. I’d pictured myself in bed recovering the month of December, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

It’s All Hard.

Frequently people tell me about something they’re struggling with… only to conclude it by saying, “But I know it doesn’t hold a candle to what you’ve been through, and I shouldn’t be complaining.”

Hear me when I say this: It’s All Hard.

I’ll venture to say that I’ve been wonderfully cocooned in this little love fest of humanity for the last 9 months, and December is the first time I’ve popped my head out the door into the “real world,” particularly as we launched Cowboy Christmas. It was quite a reality check. Harsh words shocked and stung my now baby-skinned soul… a stark contrast to the warm, cozy feeling of being uplifted in nothing but positivity for going on a year.

It made me want to curl up and pull the shade on the real world. No thanks. Not ready yet, thank you very much.

I struggled with odd feelings. Anger and resentment. I wasn’t ready for this. Lack of inspiration. I had no will to create, much less work. Fear. Exhaustion. Maybe a little depression. It didn’t make sense. I’d received a clean report that I was cancer free. Why these feelings then?

It felt similar to Postpartum. Untethered and rudderless.

Aha! That was it. My hormones must be a mess. I proceeded to google post-chemo hormones, post-mastectomy hormones, post-Keytruda hormones. I took extensive blood tests and emailed my nutritionist for a supplement program that could support me in this area. Like a dog to a bone, I was on a mission.

This morning, Bob and I chatted with Dr. Kass on a video call to discuss the results of my blood work, particularly hormone levels. To summarize, no surprises were had. The bloodwork showed that I was in a menopausal state, as I had been since the beginning of chemo. Nothing new.

I was shocked. Surely something was out of whack? I needed something to be so that it could be fixed.

“Here’s the deal,” began Dr. Kass. (I’ve now learned he always starts something important with ‘Here’s the deal.’)

“There’s a whole bunch of things going on at once. The first is that all your hormones are changing. But there’s something else, too. From the very beginning when you got this diagnosis, we talked about this treatment. You were immediately in the mode of ‘Tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.’ You powered through all that therapy and nothing really threw you off. You were as solid and reliable as they come. Now here we are, seven months later. And even though it turned out as well as we’d possibly hoped, at some point, you get to just let down and say, ‘What happened???’ I think there’s this inescapable phenomenon of asking these questions.

He continued.

“Put it this way, if I see someone six months out from chemo still smiling, and still waking up every day and making plans, then the discussion we have is, ‘Call me on the day when you wake up and the world looks different.’ Cause it’s gonna happen. You can’t go through all the things you’ve gone through and at some point not just say, ‘What was that all about?!’ Give yourself the space to see this as an inevitable emotional crash that all women who do what you did have to go through at some point. And for women who go a year or two after surgery and it never happens, I almost wait for the phone call. It’s just inescapable. It’s a certain amount of PTSD.  

“At some point, you’ll begin to feel better and it will get easier. But you’ll likely find that, in the oddest of moments, someone will say something and it will bring you right back to it all. And that’s normal and ok, too.”

(May I introduce Dr. Kass: Oncologist and Therapist.)

As he was talking, I felt myself want to burst into tears. He’d given me the gift of Permission.

Yes, my hormones were out of whack. Yes, Cowboy Christmas exhausted me. Yes, the real-world stings.

 But also…

 I have PTSD. I’m allowed to be exhausted. My system has been shocked. My body is asking me to hibernate some more. Creativity will come in due time. We will be taken care of. And Love is the most powerful of all.

Your hard. My hard. It’s All Hard. And it doesn’t make the hard any less true for you or me than the next person. What I can say, with certainty, is that love – such as the love you all have showered me and my family with for months on end – gave me a peak into heaven and showed me just how collectively powerful it truly is.

I sit here typing in the quietness of my living room. The birds are excitedly singing as rain showers cease, the sun peeks through the clouds, and the air is fresh and cool, as if bursting with hope. I’m then reminded of a card my friend, Christie, recently sent me. Her words were powerful, I remember, and I think, “Maybe I could include some of it in this blog.” I walk to the kitchen table and pick it up, staring in amazement at its cover message:

“Permission granted to rest and restore.”

 Yet another divine tap on the shoulder.

 Hey! Evie! I’m giving you permission. To rest. To feel. To be. Did you hear me? I’ll say it again through Christie’s card. You have Permission.

Hope is always near, but sometimes I think we need to allow the hard to be hard before we can clear space for hope.

So, as we enter this holiday season, let your hard be hard. And then leave it be. Give yourself permission to acknowledge the hardness of it. And then intentionally seek out and lean into opportunities for love around you. Simple as that.

For me this Christmas, there is no greater gift than that.

A few concluding thoughts:

• I continue to get infections in my right breast (the one that contained the cancer). I’m on a second round of antibiotics and they are wrecking my stomach. Please pray that my stomach eases and the infection goes away after this round.

• Please pray for Bob. We are both exhausted.

• Please pray for guidance for my sister, Jamie, who found out she is also BRCA positive, as she and her family make critical preventative decisions.

• I have an incredibly special friend who I’d like to introduce to you all. Her name is Lillian Luu. She is younger than me but was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 gallbladder cancer. You can read her story here. If you feel so inclined, please consider a donation so she can access life-saving integrative cancer treatments.

Thank you all for your love and support on this wild ride. All the texts, notes, gifts, cards, hugs, calls…. What would we have done without it?

With love always,

Evie