Chemo Cycle 7 – Round 1

It is early Thursday morning, about 4:30 AM. I finished my chemo cycle about 9 hours ago. The logistics weren’t too bad. We left home about 3:00 PM and got back a little after 9:00 PM. I always consider it a success when we miss the rush hour traffic. I gave a blood sample and my counts were acceptable. My chemo nurse hit my vein the first time, but with a little fiddling. Still a plus in my book. I’m up this early because the pain medicine I took at 9:30 PM last night wore off a few hours earlier than had I not had the chemo. As such, I took some more and am waiting for it to kick in and then hopefully will fall back to sleep for another few hours. It’s not a lot of pain right now, mostly just a slight headache, nausea, and a minor tightening in my neck area (tissue or muscle, not sure which anymore). The real pain is the anxiety of not knowing how far the pain will go over the next week. This dosage was reduced by 25% from my last cycle, but I’ve learned that the affects of chemo accumulation for me are unknown but tend to be on the more sensitive side than what I believe other patients experience.

I was feeling well enough before the chemo to drive, throw a few things on the pottery wheel (I’m way out of practice – plus, throwing a piece is a long way off from finishing a piece), and setting up a mini golf driving range in my backyard. The driving range looks good, but the temperature here has been in the upper 90s with high humidity, so I’ve had to leave it to just looking good and not really giving it a good workout. I wasn’t feeling quite well enough to begin exercising again. It was only a matter of days until I would have been able to, but the chemo was more important right now.

With all this, life goes on, for me and those around me. It is filled with the joy and happiness of being around friends and family. The best part is seeing good things happen to those close to me. Sometimes I don’t show it, but that really is the best part.

For those of you who missed it and are interested, my younger, but elder of my two brothers had a story and big picture of himself on the upper left hand section on the FRONT page of the Sunday NY Times newspaper two weeks ago. There is also a 5 minute video dedicated to him and his life style within the story published online. The URL link to the story is…

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/technology/05rich.html?ex=1188014400&en=7f299316dd0d316a&ei=5070

It was fun to have a celebrity so close to home. 98% of the feedback he got from the article was positive.

Thanks again to everyone that is keeping up with me via the blog. I’ll be stopping the mini survey soon. It looks like about two-thirds of you are reading this on a weekly plus basis and the rest a bit less frequently. Take care everyone.