Welcome to My Story.

I'm hoping this will be a place you can feel free to stop by
and learn a bit about me and whats going on in my life.
This page has been developing for several years and it's been
interesting to me to see the changes that have happened over that time.

My Story

I've been blessed with a long life
and it's hard to not to take up 20GB of space telling
my life story. I'll try to just give the highlights.

I am a baby boomer. My ethnic background is
Spanish and Italian. My father was from
Cordoba, Spain. He came to the U.S. when he was 16.
He was a well known chef in San Francisco and
he loved to fish. He fished almost up until the
time he passed away. He was a sweet man
and a good husband and father.

My mother is of Italian descent.
She is second generation Italian. Her parents both
came from Italy and were part of the immigrants
who entered this country along with so many
others through Ellis Island. My mother is a very
intelligent and talented woman. She excels in languages.
She has a natural ear for languages and speaks several.
She was a good wife and mother to four children.
She had two boys and two girls. I am the youngest of the four.
Both of my parents have quite interesting life stories,
but I'll save those for another time.

I am the mother of two young men.
One of my sons has tourettes and I will be talking
about that on another page.I have two grandchildren.
One boy and one girl.
I am a baby boomer and like many of my generation
I have Panic Disorder, General Anxiety Disorder,
and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
I have had these illnesses my entire life. I remember
my first full blown panic attack at the age of three.
From what my parents have told me I believe I've had
these illnesses since birth.

I spent much of my life being terrified of people, places,
and things. Eventually I got to a point where I could
not leave my house. I lived in the country and there is
no one who would have seen me if I went outside, but I
was unable to do so. I believe that my faith in
God is what carried me through the worst of those times.
I always felt that there was a reason for the way I had
to live and feel, and that someday I would find out what
that reason was. As it happens I have had some answers
to that already and I am very grateful for what I've
been through because I've been able to help others
learn about what they were experiencing and
watch them go onto their own recovery.

About 17 years ago I entered a Twelve Step program
which helped me a great deal to understand myself and
gave me the tools to use to help me with my panic
and anxiety. I was still very limited as to where I could
go and what I could do, but I was able to expand my
life somewhat and be very grateful for what I had.

Finally a few years ago the medical community
caught up to me and I found a doctor who was
of great help to me. He gave me the proper medications
to correct the imbalances in the Seritonan in my brain
and he gave me the encouragement to go out into the
world. I will always be indebted to him.

The last few years have been an awakening for me.
I have been able to go back to the ocean, which is
a place of serenity for me and somewhere I had not
been able to go for over 20 years, in spite of the fact
that it is only a 35 minute drive from my house.

I got my first drivers license 7 years ago
and now I drive to the coast whenever I want to and
I even go there for vacations by myself or with a close friend.

I have never been much of a crafter or an artist and
I didn't think that I would ever be able to create anything.
Then my friend Alice gave me a rubber stamp. I got onto a
Fidonet Crafting Echo just to read what others were
doing and the next thing I knew I was rubber stamping
my heart out and having a full blown addiction to rubber
stamping. I now own over 800 stamps and am still adding to that.

My creative side has exploded from me and I seem
to find something to make in everything I see. My
mind seems to be constantly creating some new
idea to try or some great idea to write about.

My advice to everyone is to never sell yourself short.
I still can only draw "stick figures" but there is so much
more to creativity than what I used to think. I find my
artwork to be solace and well, yes, obsessive at
times, but thats just who I am. If I must obsess I'd much rather
obsess on my art than on the weather.

I coordinated a support group for a local homeless
shelter here where I live and we used crafting as a way
to help the residents bond with each other and
get in touch with their feelings, and to be able to
express themselves without feeling guilty. It was a
wonderful experience for me and I got more knowledge
of myself than I ever expected to get.
My friend was the facilitator of the group along with me.
We learned a great deal from the residents.
I think we would both agree that it also taught us much about
how to love and support each other.

What I'm hoping this webpage will do is open people
up to their own self-esteem and creativity as well as
allow me the privilege of sharing some of
my many worlds with them.

I don't know where this will evolve to as I,
"Live One Day At A Time", and I like to let my
Higher Power guide my every endeavor.
 (1997)

A long time has passed since I first wrote this page so let
me catch you up on my life.
Since I last posted here there have been many changes in my life.
I've become a grandmother again. My eldest son
remarried and they now have a wonderful new daughter.
Making me a proud grandmother for the third time.
My new grandaughter was a bright light during a hard time.
After 32 years of marriage I am single again.
Getting a divorce was not an easy thing to do but
it was what I felt
I had to do and what I felt God wanted me to do.
It's been two years since my divorce. The fiirst year
was very difficult. I had much growing to do. I learned
how to be alone for the first time in my life.
I lost many friends and family. I'm not sure why.
I have no choice except to accept it. My closest friends
showed me that they were there for me even though I
was not easy to be around for awhile.
I've learned to work in many different environments.
I worked in two craft/fabric stores and a video store,
and then I went to work for a recovery center in
the new town I have moved to. Oh yes,
after a year living in an apartment I moved to
a beautiful town in the Napa Valley California wine country
called Calistoga. After a short time working in the recovery center
I decided to leave. There were several reason, the biggest one of them being
that the 11:00pm to 7:00am shift was just to hard on me. I returned
to the Video Store as Supervisor and am currently working there and
enjoying it.
On June 4, 1999 I met a lovely man through a personal add.
We have been seeing each other for 20 months. On New Years Eve
2001 at exactly midnight he slipped an engagement ring onto my
finger and we became engaged.
We are planning to be married somewhere near the ocean which we
both love, sometime in the year 2017. I feel by then I will be ready
to be married again. After being married for most of my life I
am still feeling the need to be on my own and to learn more about
myself before I enter into another marriage. We are best friends
and are not in any hurry. I will be 72 in 2017 and I think that
is a perfect age to get married. I plan to live a long time and
spend at least 30 years in my next marriage.
As you can see these last few years have been quite eventful for me.
There has been much growing and there is more to come I'm sure.
All during this last "growing experience" I feel my Higher Power
has been guiding my life and I know he will continue to do so
as long as I leave myself open to his guidance.
1/24/01

More time has passed and I'm updating this page again.
It has been one year and 9 months
since I last updated "My Story". I continued to work at the
video store for a total of about a year and a half.
I really liked my job as I'm an avid
movie buff. However much to my regret my employment was
terminated in September 2001.
Since that time I have been unemployed
due to poor health and a very slow economy.
I live in a small tourist town that was severly
affected by the events of September 11, 2001. Right now there
is not much work here for a 50+ woman who has been
out of the job market for almost her entire life.
They don't give graduation certificates for being a mom and wife.
In a tourist town they want pretty young boys and girls to work
at the counters of their shops and this
town caters to tourists who are into wine and mudbaths thus
the young faces at the counters. I'm not being bitter but I do have
a large concern about how woman in my situation are treated.
It has been a difficult adjustment for me.
In the last year I've had 2 surgeries and I've been involved
in court proceedings with my ex-husband.
There have been times when I thought my life was
never going to settle down. It finally seems to have
and I'd love to go back to working just a few days a week,
but nothing has come up here yet so I have to make
the best of it. I am no longer doing my crafting on any regular basis.
I don't know exactly why I lost interest, but I've gained some new
interests so I guess thats just the way life works.
I am a beginning gardener and have really been having fun
learning about plants and watching them grow
and treating them like my pets. It's such a rewarding
thing to do and I really enjoy it.
I am also learning how to do my own webpages.
When I did my first website I did all the designing but I
had a good friend who did all the HTML work for me.
He passed away last year and never gave me the passwords
or email address he was using so I've taken it on as a new hobby.
I've been able to copy some of my pages and bring
them here and refine them as I'm doing this one.
I am really having fun doing this although
it can be a bit frustrating at times.
I've renewed my interest in photography. I've been taking
many pictures of the ocean and am hoping to graduate
to a better camera next year. My old 35mil zoom is
starting to act up so it's time to go digital.
I'm still engaged to my wonderful man. He is my best
friend and he has stuck by me and taken care of me
when I was sick this last 2 years. I am one of the lucky ones
to have found such a sweet and loving man.
I bought a motor home recently as a tax right off
and it's been wonderful. I'm just like a snail.
I get to take my home (my "safe place") with me wherever I go.
With my health the way it's been, traveling got to be
impossible and this seems the perfect solution.
I always feel like I'm at home and I can cook foods that
my body can handle. It's the perfect thing for a peson with
my kind of physical and emotional handicaps.
Last June we went to Colorado Springs. Yes! I got in a plane
(several planes in fact). I rather liked the experience of flying but we cut the trip
to Colorado short because the combination of the altitude, the smoke from
the terrible fires they were having, and my poor health was
just to hard on me. We have taken several other short trips
since then and have decided that we are
lousy travelers and that was the straw that convinced me to take
the leap to buy the motor home. I've become rather good at
taking these "leaps" in the last few years.
I'm afraid some of my family gets concerned about it,
but I waited so long to live my life and it will be over
soon enough so I can't help but want to make up
for lost time. We spend most of our time going to the coast.
We love the ocean. It's the one place on earth I truly
feel at home and at peace. I don't know what will be next on my plate
and I couldn't have imagined that my life would be as
it is today so I try not to dwell on the future. My constant prayer
is to be able to live my life for the first time without being filled
with fears and to make up for lost time.

10/1/02

A long time has gone by since my last update and much has happened since then.
Larry and I had a lot of fun traveling to different places at the northern California
coast and life went on as it does. One day going into another. We had lovely Christmas's.
Last year 2004 we decorated the entire house inside and out and we won second prize for
best decorated house. That was fun because we had such fun decorating it.

On September 11, 2004 we had a commitment ceremony in my little back yard. I included the
ceremony on a web page as part of this website so you can look at it if you like. It was a lovely
ceremony and the happiest day of my life (other than when I gave birth to my sons).
I encourage you to check out that page it's quite nice.

On May of 2004 we were on our way to the coast to stay in a house that Larry had rented for
us as a birthday present for me. I'd been having terrible pains in my chest that the doctor
attributed to acid reflux,but it had gotten so bad I couldn't even swallow water without being
in terrible pain, so we stopped at the doctors office on our way out of town. The doctor
prescribed more prilosec for me thinking that the pain was caused by the acid reflux. As I was leaving
the doctor's exam room I told him that I'd been having very dark colored urine for several
months and that I thought it was all the tea I drank but it was kind of strange. He decided to
run some routine blood tests and sent me off to have that done and then and then we continued on
our way to the coast.

We rented a home that we'd been to before. It was on a cliff where when the tide came in the
ocean actually came right up to the house. It was a lovely spot. I always enjoyed watching the
ocean hitting the rocks while I would fall asleep on the window seat. This time though I was in
a lot of pain and even the sound of the ocean and the sight of the waves from the window seat
didn't seem to help. On the second morning we were there the phone rang and it was my doctor.
He told us the test has showed some abnormalities and I needed to come back right away.
At that time he thought that I might have hepatitis as the liver enzymes were all out of whack.
Larry packed us up and we left to go back to Santa Rosa to see the doctor. Little did I know
that it was going to be a long time before I got back home.

They admitted me to the hospital right away and began to do all kinds of tests. They started with
a CAT scan and went from that to putting cameras down my throat to look at my insides.
The tests went on for a couple days and then they told me what they had found. It seemed
I had a blockage in my chest from a tumor that was on my pancreas. When they did the test
with the camera down my throat they put a shunt in there to move the tumor out of the way
temporarily so that I could swallow food. I had several doctors. So many in fact I don't even
know what their names were. One would come in one time and then be replaced by another.
It started a trend. Every time a strange man entered my room I knew it was a new doctor with a new
specialty that was going to give me bad news. As soon as I saw them I'd say, "If your here with
bad news just leave I don't want to hear it". LOL Well, the news was bad all right. It seems
I had pancreatic cancer. I was told this was a particularly lethal cancer and that they could try
to get as much of it out of me by doing an operation called a "whipple". They wanted to do it
immediately but unfortunately they had put me in a room with a woman who had pneumonia
and I came down with an extremely bad cold. So they sent me home to get over the cold and get
well enough for surgery. That took about 3 weeks and even though I still wasn't completely over
the cold they wanted to do the surgery because waiting was not a good option.

This started a long ordeal. The operation was 6 hours long and they moved my insides around
and took some out and of course removed the head of my pancreas. The surgeon who did the surgery
removed as much as he could to give me the best chance he could. Unfortunately it was to late
and some of the cancer cells were in my lymph nodes. That means that once it's in your lymph nodes
it will travel.In my case it traveled to my lungs. We didn't find that out until months later but
I'm trying to make this very long story a bit shorter. I was in the hospital for around 6 or 7 weeks.
The operation was torture to recover from and to this day I'm still trying to get over it.
I've had to learn an entirely new way of eating and it took time for me to be able to eat a regular size meal.
After several weeks I was moved to another hospital and after about 10 days in
there I was able to come home. I was told to get my "affairs" in order that I had about 3 months to live.

EEK! Not something anyone wants to hear ever, but we don't get to choose all the events in our lives.
I was to weak to walk on my own so I had a walker. I was unable to eat very much because of the surgery.
The effects are much like having a gastric bypass. You eat tiny bits of food several times a day.

It was now July 4, 2004. I have a wonderful group of friends that I met on a website called,
"Everydaywomeneverywhere" or EWE. They all took such good care of me during my entire hospital stay
and all this time since. They have sent me cards and paintings and flowers and phone calls and
many many prayers. Even their blessed children colored pictures of hope for me. Through them I found
laughter and love and courage. I don't think I could have survived without them. I love them
all so much and I feel I owe the extra time I've been blessed with to them and their support and prayers.

Here where I live in this small senior mobile home park the people have been so supportive of me
and of Larry. People I had never met were saying prayers for me and started prayer groups for me.
This includes people that I met in the hardware store, on tour busses, on line, friends of my sister
from all over the world. They have all given me hope and strength and their prayers have given me
extra time to spend with my children and to get out and see a little bit of the world. I am so
incredibly grateful to all these people. There are so many caring and loving people in this
world and I've been blessed to be put among them.

I have survived past the 3-month date. It's been 15 months since my diagnosis. I've had several
different kinds of chemotherapy
and I take a mountain of pills but I'm still here. I got to celebrate Christmas 2004 as I mentioned
above and I got to have another birthday. The last round of chemo I had was particularly hard on me
and I reached a point where I couldn't do it anymore. My quality of life consisted of me being in
bed either asleep or in pain and I couldn't eat and I lost even more weight than I had already lost
so I make a difficult decision to stop taking chemo. I want to have some time to spend with my
family and friends and to do things with Larry that we always wanted to do, before it is to late.
At the end of June I went to Kaiser in Vallejo for another opinion. The doctors at Kaiser in
Santa Rosa didn't seem to be able to decide what was going on with me. Before I took this step
to stop chemo I wanted to have a complete new opinion of my condition. The doctor turned out
o to be wonderful and she was very thorough in looking over my records and evaluating my June CAT scan.
This scan showed that my cancer cells had not increased and that some had decreased and some were
dying. This was wonderful news. We were so excited. We had been wanting to go to Hawaii and the
doctor told us to go ahead and go and have a good time and then see her when we got back. So
we made arrangements to leave on July 19, 2005.

Two weeks before we left my mother passed away. It was a hard time but I was so glad she went before
I did. I didn't want her to have to go through the loss of a child. We talked a lot about death and
dying and the last days of our lives. We seemed to understand each other in a way we never had before
and I felt closer to her than I had ever felt before. I'm so glad she is at peace now and I know
I will be seeing her again.

July 19 came and we left for Hawaii. We were there for 2 weeks. Upon our return I went in for a
very intensive CAT scan and this time the results were not as happy. The doctor told me that the
cancer in both my lungs had doubled in size and that there wasn't much they could do. She suggested
going back to chemo. She says that could give me a 10% to 15% chance of staying around a bit longer.
At this point I don't know what I will do. We have another trip planned for September 11.
We are going to Las Vegas, Nevada to celebrate our first anniversary. I have an appointment with the
doctor as soon as I get back and we will see how things have progressed and I will have to make a
decision about Chemo. I pushed the doctor into giving me a time table. She didn't want to do it but
I needed to know how much time I had to do the things I still want and need to do. So I asked her
to give me an opinion as to whether or not I will be here for Christmas. She said, No but it was
a clinical opinion and you never know what will happen. I know I'm not feeling as strong as I
was but I still have all these wonderful people praying for me. I've been so fortunate to have
the extra time I've already had that I can't really feel sorry for myself. Mostly I'm grateful and
yes I am still asking God for just a couple months of feeling okay so I can spend some time with my kids.

I've rented a house for my children and their families at the beginning of October and I'm hoping
we can all be together there for one last time. It will mean so much to me and hopefully it
will give them some good memories. Both of my sons have been very supportive. I'm sure this is a
hard time for them but fortunately they have their faith and that will get them through all this.
Larry has been by my side every single step of the way. He's been to every doctor's appointment,
every chemo session, every lab test, every x-ray. He takes care of me and my yard and my house.
He is the most wonderful man I have ever known. I am so very grateful to God for sending me Larry.
I really can't imagine my life without him.

September 3, 2005


© by Valre, 2002

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