But first, the catch up ( Read more... )

We left our intrepid cancer patient mid-round 4 in the last update. I survived, but I never got past the super tired phase. I slept a *lot*. All the way up to the day I was supposed to do my pre-chemo bloodwork, and found my platelets were at 43. A "normal" person has something in the 200-400 range, and chemo isn't safe below 100. We hoped ( Read more... )

So, we left off with day 1 of round 3. I don't really feel like going into day by day detail about it, but let's just say round 3 SUCKED. I lost 16 pounds in 8 days (mostly dehydration I'm sure), I ended up going in for IV fluids twice, changed acid control meds again, saw a GI specialist, learned that technically there isn't anything wrong with ( Read more... )

Round 1: Chemo day itself was VERY long, I was there for about 9.5 hours. But that's how it goes on day one, they want to make sure that you aren't going to have any allergic reactions to any of the individual drugs. I didn't, and that's good news, and I actually felt pretty good that day and the day after. I started getting tired on Wednesday ( Read more... )

I started a Caring Bridge site to document all my cancer stuff, but then I realized that it requires a login. That's annoying. So I'll be cross-posting all my entries there over here, and making the ones here Public.

Hi! Thanks for coming by! I suppose this is the time and the place to write it all down, huh?

( Throwing in a cut, this got long )

I made a decision this morning based on a lot of FB articles and comments and stuff, and I didn't feel like starting a flame war, so I'm putting it here instead. I would like to make it clear that I am open to reasonable discussion, like always, so if you profoundly disagree with me I don't mind if you say so. I'd just like you to be fair about ( Read more... )

Early last week I started writing a post about how hard everything had been for a few days. And it was, Monday and Tuesday of last week sucked out loud. But it's never been easy for me to write about stuff like that because it feels a lot like whining. And then, before I could even get the post written, things started getting better. Little ( Read more... )

... I was probably still in Labor & Delivery, finishing up with all the afterbirth messiness before moving to my room for the rest of my stay. And Miss Clara was about an hour and a half old. Now she's sleeping next to me in my bed, all 30" long and 18 lbs of her, and I'm just amazed that it has all gone so fast. She's a walking, babbling, crazy ( Read more... )

Today was a milestone (one shofixti says I've claimed several times already, but this time I MEAN it): I worked my final shift at LAPP as cwsmithiv's parent. If everything goes according to plan I'll be back in a couple of years with Clara, but this is still kind of a big deal. Three years of parent participation preschool, two years on the board, and it's all ( Read more... )

It's kind of funny, because there are so many times that I will compose a blog entry in my head. Something will happen, I'll think of how I would describe it, and then the time to write it out just never comes. Today isn't like that. I don't have anything I really want to write about. Things are happening, some good, some bad, possibly all post ( Read more... )