Falling Forward | The Next Phase
It’s all here. Staring at me. Waiting for me.
Four bottles of pills, on top of the two medications I’m already taking.
How did I go from never taking medication to owning a full-blown pharmacy?
W. T. F.
4 new pills to take in addition to the other stuff. FML.
What they don’t tell you is that once they submit the chemo order, it can take about a week for everything to actually get prepared and delivered. So for the last week, I’ve basically been dangling on a string, wondering, When is it coming?
And now it’s here. Just in time for the weekend.
Luckily, I don’t have to start until Sunday night, which means I get one more glorious weekend of being chemo-drug-free.
I oscillate between being totally okay and being scared. The fear is mostly about the unknown. I keep telling myself that after I get through the first cycle and understand how my body reacts, it’ll feel a lot less mysterious.
Cancer has also turned into a very strange crash course in discovering things about my own body that I never knew.
For example, I recently noticed my eyebrows thinning out. I thought, Well, that’s new.
Thanks to some savvy online research and ChatGPT, I learned that radiation side effects can continue for weeks after treatment ends, including hair loss in areas affected by radiation.
And then, through some bizarre stroke of timing, someone on Facebook happened to need a microblading model.
Obviously, I jumped on that opportunity like the universe had personally dropped it into my lap.
And now my brows look great.
Go book her @sargsyan_brows She’s an Armenian mother newly moved to LA with two kids. I love to support women owned businesses when I can and she was very kind and patient. And obviously did amazing work.
Fixing problems left and right.
Honestly, this is kind of how I feel lately: the babysitter from The Incredibles discovering that Jack-Jack has superpowers and just figuring out how to deal with each new development as it happens.
Fire? Cool. Laser eyes? Great. Floating through walls? We’ll figure it out.
What I feel like sometimes, these days.
I’m still incredibly grateful that I’m not tethered to a hospital. Yes, I have chemo now, but at least it’s in pill form.
And in much happier news, I’ve raised most of the money needed to greenlight my proof-of-concept short, Tumi & Me. We can still absolutely use donations, though. It is never too late, especially because Indiegogo threw a giant wrench into everything.
A heads-up to anyone planning to crowdfund:
I learned this the hard way, but Indiegogo was acquired last year and apparently a lot has changed.
I kept wondering why it took more than a month to get my campaign approved. I thought I was losing my mind. But the biggest change for me was discovering that they removed the flexible funding option, which was literally the main reason I chose Indiegogo in the first place.
Now, if you don’t hit your crowdfunding goal, you don’t receive the funds.
So unfortunately, I’ve had to go back and re-bother people who already tried to donate and ask them to donate directly instead.
I am annoyed that I have to be annoying.
But no pain, no gain.
And when I say every dollar matters in indie filmmaking, I am absolutely not exaggerating. Sometimes an extra $10 really can mean the difference between covering a location, feeding someone, renting a piece of equipment, or solving one tiny production problem that suddenly becomes very important.
But here’s the exciting part:
WE HAVE OFFICIALLY LOCKED A FILMING DATE. I’m Ecstatic. Even this was hard. But October 25th!!!!!
Hooray!
We’ve also secured part of the equipment and materials for the stop-motion portion of the film, which will be created in Austin by my longtime friend, Get Reelisms business partner, and collaborator Kellie Penna, our stop-motion artist.
My dear friend Daran Herrman is also helping us get the lighting setup figured out and helped us track down the camera we needed, because stop motion is an incredibly tedious and technical process. And it doesn’t help when I get BTS Instagram posts about how [insert film title]’s claymation took 4 months to do 1 minute
None of us fully know how this experiment is going to turn out.
This is our first attempt at claymation, and we’re also figuring out how that animated world will interact with the live-action footage we’ll shoot here in Los Angeles.
But I handpicked every person involved because they are ridiculously good at what they do, and I trust them completely.
Even better, besides being life long collaborators, they’re also forever friends.
There is something very special about getting to make movies with people you love who also happen to be insanely talented.
So that’s where we are.
Chemo pills are here.
The movie is moving.
The stop-motion experiment is becoming real.
And I’m going to keep documenting what happens as I go through the five days of my first chemo cycle.
In the meantime, you can still support Tumi & Me at tumiandme.com.
Things are moving.
Or, as I like to put it:
Falling forward.