Snow Day

chemo went well yesterday. i went on my own again. i find that i talk with others around me more when i go alone.

first i talked to a 20 year old guy who is going through chemo and his mother (who is my age). it was interesting and entertaining to hear him describe a lot of the same things i'm going through from a 20 year old guy perspective. his poor mom is so worried about him, you can just feel it.

i talked to a daughter (who was around my age) who was there with her mother for her first chemo. that first-timer fear was palpable. the daughter asked me questions about what to expect.

we didn't talk for long though because i started talking to another woman (who was around my age) who was there for her first chemo. we discovered that we have the same team of doctors. we talked about cancer stuff a bit and other things too. pretty amazing woman.

a mother going through cancer with her child, a child going through cancer with her mother, a woman going through cancer herself. everyone i talked to was amazing. they all inspired me and i hope i helped them in some small way too.

i did see janie again, the girl i sat by and talked to last time. but she was in a different area of the room, and she was sleeping most of the time, so i left her alone after i wheeled my pole over and said hi to her.

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dr. doane and i discussed my treatment plan. she says that we'll keep going as we have been and reevaluate things when i get to my 18th treatment at the end of May. i will have been on these drugs for a year by then and she doesn't like to keep patients on taxotere for longer than that because of the damaging effects it has long-term. she said that a lot of patients couldn't have tolerated it for as long and as well as i have and that they would've had to have stopped already. yay me and my crazy blessed/cursed body!

who knows, i may come to that point too. we just go test by test, day by day. a lot relies on how my weekly blood tests go, as long as my counts go down and then back up as they should that is a good thing in medical terms. a lot also relies on the CT scans i get every third cycle. my next one will be toward the end of March. we discussed switching to a different drug (also a chemo drug), but have not come up with a definitive plan yet...we have to get to #18 before we can set a new plan in motion, if and when it comes to that.

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i am feeling okay so far. i took my last dose of steroids this morning. minor/normal things like lack of sleep and messed up taste buds are about it for now. i'm expecting the really bad stuff to hit later this week and into the weekend.

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it did snow, work did get called off....which i didn't know until i got there. when i called in for the inclement weather message (twice), it said that we were to come in at 10:00...i noticed there weren't many cars in the parking lot, but i thought that was because every single school in KC was closed and the only people who were there were those of us without kids. nope. as i walked in, bruce, our security manager told me that we were closed for the day. no biggy, since i was there, i stayed for a few hours and got caught up from being gone monday. i'll be ready to go tomorrow.

book club got called off too. i was looking forward to seeing my girls, but it's just not worth getting out on the streets when it's this bad. some of them live in the far reaches of KC and it's quite a drive for them even in good weather.

therefore, i came home after my two hours at work, read, took a nap, then made a big pot of chicken noodle soup. plan b worked out quite nicely!