Some Girls Prefer Carnations: A professional patient with professional care

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

A professional patient with professional care

How am I doing today? Am I better or worse than yesterday? What do I need to feel better? These are all exceedingly difficult questions to which I have no answers. I know that I was the absolute worst over the weekend, and I know that I'll feel monumentally better by this coming weekend, but everything in between is just shades of gray. The (now-tiresome) side effects, in order of appearance: fatigue, hot flashes ("chemopause"--thanks Lori and Kendal!), sore bones, constipation, sore fingertips and nails, blurred vision, sore guts, dizziness, sore back, eye twitches, brain fog, diarrhea, fatigue. The treatments, in order of administration: rest, visitors, helpers, heating pad, oatmeal, gatorade, grandma Lori taking the girls for 24 hours Friday/Saturday (an essential treatment for all of us), yogurt. The visitors and helpers are so critical; a shout-out to all of you who made time out of your busy holiday break to spend time with us and help us. You make me feel like we're all in this together, which is incredibly powerful. We're getting through this!

As your teammate I should fill you in on the cancer's retreat. Visually, it's nearly gone. There is still a red blush on one side, about the size of a half-dollar, and Dr. Oncologist would be happiest if that went away. The swelling is also nearly gone. In short, the success of the treatment continues.

I am spent, but I really want to graph something for you. Dr. Oncologist says that I'm a bit anemic now, so perhaps my hemoglobin is doing something interesting. I'll leave you with a hemoglobin graph, with the hard chemo treatments plotted at y=9 and the easy chemo treatments plotted at y=0.

Weakened, but holding steady!

4 comments:

MarthaJanuary 4, 2011 at 1:55 PM
Glad to hear you got some rest on Friday, and about the shrinking redness, yay! Keep up the hard work of feeling better.
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FrankJanuary 4, 2011 at 8:59 PM
Remember in college when certain friends of ours were blacklisted from donating blood until they got more iron in their systems? Your advice (ever the scientist) was: "Eat broccoli. Or nails." That's what your hemoglobin graph reminded me of.
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HilaryJanuary 5, 2011 at 12:41 PM
Are they having you take iron supplements? That helped me within the 48 hours after I had Kael.
And-by the way- the graph does indeed look like your hemoglobin is holding steady!! And that's b/c they are yours and they are strong-willed!
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HeidiJanuary 10, 2011 at 11:16 PM
ah nothin' so long as you live at sea level all is good my dear!
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Books I've read recently

TRUTH AND BEAUTY by Ann Patchett "'Grief isn't something to "be gotten through." It has no life of its own like that, it's just plain and simply there.'" and "History is strangely incomprehensible when you're standing in the middle of it."
THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS by Ann Patchett "I wanted to be able to stop hoping that she would turn into something else."
MY OWN COUNTRY by Abraham Verghese "I remember the acts of human kindness that illumine our world."
IN THE COMPANY OF CHEERFUL LADIES: No. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY NOVEL #6 by Alexander McCall Smith
CEREMONY by Leslie Marmon Silko
THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG by Muriel Barbery "There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature..."
A WALK IN THE WOODS by Bill Bryson
THE LACUNA by Barbara Kingsolver "'Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.'"
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE by Lucy Grealy "Sooner or later we all have to learn the words with which to name our own private losses..." and "Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people..." and "Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them."
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sarah Gruen "Age is a terrible thief. Just when you're getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back. It makes you ache and muddies your head and silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse."
THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett "'I have decided not to die.'" and "Oh, I just break down then. It's like two years a doing and trying and hoping all come out at once."
THE TENNIS PARTNER by Abraham Verghese "Would that I had the chance in my sons' lifetime and my own to one day explain to them all the forces that moved me."
THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison "And then the tears rushed down his cheeks, to make a bouquet under his chin."
REMARKABLE CREATURES by Tracy Chevalier "My life led up to that moment, then led away again, like the tide making its highest mark on the beach and then retreating."
RAMONA QUIMBY, AGE 8 by Beverly Cleary "Mrs. Quimby smiled and said, 'I can tell you're beginning to get well when you act like a wounded tiger.'"
THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway "You see, Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived so very much that now I can enjoy everything so well."
THE FORGOTTEN GARDEN by Kate Morton "The happiest folk are those that are busy, for their minds are starved of time to seek out woe." And, speaking of hospitals: "An irony that a place relying so heavily on routine should operate so resolutely outside time's usual rhythms."
THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins "Of course, the odds have not been very dependable of late."
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot "That cancer was a terrible thing."
THE THIEF OF ALWAYS by Clive Barker "Was there some way...to take back the stolen years, and live them here, with the people who loved him, and whom he loved dearly in return?"
CUTTING FOR STONE by Abraham Verghese "The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not." Best book I've read in a year

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Tuesday, January 4, 2011

A professional patient with professional care

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