Stacy Horn

Finney is on my lap and I can’t move so this is my view from the desk, looking slightly west. There’s Buddy on the couch, the humidifier is going now that the heat is on—love this new camera, you can see the steam!—new sneakers, blue not red because they are not making them in red anymore, damn them, and to the right on the desk is the book I’m reading now which I love, love, LOVE, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. Where have you been all my life, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn?  

I’m going to the doctor this morning after the cat gets off me.  More below …

Hopefully it’s nothing.  In fact I’m pretty sure it is, but I’ve had this nagging backache in just one relatively small spot in my back that has been growing. I saw the doctor about this a month or two ago. Here’s the thing: my mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2001, and her only symptom until it got bad was a backache, so I’m paranoid.  I went back to the pancreatic cancer Listserv I joined when my mother was first diagnosed to ask about this and found the very first post I made.  What makes it sad beyond the whole pancreatic cancer thing was my hopefulness about finding trials.  I posted this on March 14. She died ten days later on March 24th. Clearly no trial in the world could have saved her.  I think she was dead within 5 weeks of being diagnosed.

My March 14th Post:

I’ve been lurking for a few weeks on this list.  I haven’t said anything because my mother, who we’ve been told has pancreatic cancer, still hasn’t gotten a formal diagnosis.  They weren’t able to get a tissue sample from the first procedure (although that procedure told that my mother’s liver is clear).  They did a needle biopsy last Friday that gives my mother anxeity attacks whenever she thinks about it.  Are needle biopsies that bad?  She took some Xanax last night for the first time and had a horrible reaction from it.  She hallucinated.  I’ve never heard of such a reaction from Xanax.

Anyway, I wanted to introduce myself.  My name is Stacy Horn.  I live in NYC, and my mother lives in Huntington, LI.  The reason I’m speaking up is because I have a cousin who does cancer research at Dana Farber and I want to share what I learn from him and others.  My cousin does not specialize in pancreatic cancer so he is only sharing what he is able to find out.

But he told me to look into trials for EGF receptor inhibitors and proteasomeal inhibitors.  Apparently there’s some buzz going about in cancer rearch circles about these trials.

Has anyone heard anything about either of these?  I’m looking into them so I will certainly share what I find.

What I remember finding was that my mother was ineligible for every single trial I found.  Now I understand why, it was utterly hopeless, but at the time I couldn’t believe the horror of it.  I guess I still can’t emotionally, even though I now understand why rationally.  We will all get there, to the point where there’s nothing you can do, you’re going to die, and it sucks no matter what form it takes.  This form sucked in its having-time-to-look-into-options-and-essentially-be-told-“no, we’re not going to let you mother have this option” way.

So yeah.  I hope I don’t have pancreatic cancer, and I probably don’t.  I feel healthy as a horse. Except for this scary nagging spot of pain.

I can’t find anything about it. Did anybody see it?  Was it great?  I found this video on YouTube. Be sure to click on “watch in high quality” on the lower right, otherwise you can’t really see what’s happening.  But I can’t tell from this if people in the crowd were participating, the crucial thing! There isn’t anything on the Project Bueller website. There are pictures on Flickr, if you search on Bueller and then sort by the most recent. They got the look just right.  It looks like this. However it came off, it was a great idea.  But I’d love to hear from people who saw it!

My big yearly “Holiday Cleaning” is coming up, and one thing I try to do every year is pare down my clothes to things I actually wear and are flattering.

I never succeed.  I’m also hampered by the fact that money is tight, so it’s not like I can replace what I get rid of.

But I would love to have a closet full of only good things that make me feel pretty, and I’m okay with having very few choices in there as long as they are all good ones.

So that is the goal this month.  Be brave.  Be ruthless.

There’s not a lot of color in there.  That has to be addressed. That blue shirt on the right?  The color looks great on me, but I’m not sure the style works.  I think it has to go even though it’s one of the few spots of color.

Sigh.  I wish Tim Gunn would help me.  (For the record, I love Stacy and Clinton, and Finola Huges, too.)

It’s been a while since I posted dresses I cannot possess.  (New York taunts me with beautiful dresses in windows everywhere.) I like all three of these, but would probably go with the Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie one on the left, vs the Marilyn Monroe one on the right.  The middle one is cute but I don’t do short dresses anymore.

I took a bunch of pictures and a movie. I’m going out of my mind trying to compress and save the movie in a way where you can still see some of the great stuff in it. But first, pictures! I took this on the way to Pumpkin 4, where my band, Manhattan Samba, was told to line up.

There was one huge group of people dressed like sparkly witches. Here are three of them relaxing before the parade started.

This is what it looks like for us from within the parade.  We’re walking up Sixth Avenue.  I tried to capture everything, the city we see uptown, the crowds, but we were moving almost the whole time so it was tricky.

Some of my band friends, Ellen and ohmygodIforgetthisguysname.  And he’s really nice too.  I hate myself.

Here’s the spider which goes up and down the Jefferson Market tower every Halloween.

Here I tried to give a sense of the crowds.  I should have shot at the intersections, where the crowds are the biggest.  You just wouldn’t believe the hugeness of them.  It’s just so exciting, it’s almost impossible to describe.

And here’s the video!  I’m unhappy with the quality once it’s compressed. I wish I knew more so I could do this better, but this does give you some idea.

UPDATE! I just put in a longer version of this video. I put two clips together, so my description below is of the second half. The first half is just earlier in the parade, as we’re passing by the old Waverly Theatre, now the IFC theatre.

I got a girl dancing on the roof, and you can kinda see our dancers, who are at the front.  I think they come out best at the end.  I even got a shot of the spider!  The guy in the white at the beginning is Ivo, he leads the band.  You’ll see him giving us hand signals which tell us what to play.  Then you’ll see Glenn mirror Ivo’s hand signals for those of us in the back and for the short people. I was both in the back AND short.

[Special sidenote to Aly: I don’t really believe in life after death so I’m not really talking to Aly, but I wasn’t going to do the parade this year.  This was for you.  Thank you for jumping up and dancing that night all those years ago.  It gave me this, one of the most fun things I do.]