The Rug

This is the rug my mother made.

The very large, very thick, every stitch hand-crocheted out of hand-cut strips out of hand-picked Tucson thrift store t-shirts. 

My mom flew back to Ohio yesterday, after her third trip to Tucson in three months, and I think that this rug (which took every bit as much work as it seems to have) was among the least of her labors while she was here.  Taking care of me, cooking, cleaning, moving, fetching, reading aloud, calling my friends, driving me to chemo, waking up with me in the middle of the night, keeping me as comfortable as she could.

Thanks for the rug, Mom.

Frozen Banana!

It was a hard week in Tucson, my chemo hometown, and kind of hard to describe beyond detailing my dynamic body mass (I don't have a scale, but I wouldn't be surprised if I'm back to 120 by this evening).  The expected side effects came on schedule and are abating - tender armpits, sore throat, fatigue, minor constipation.  And yet, by Thursday I just felt awful, just totally knocked down.  I didn't have the energy to write eloquently about it either.

I made it, though.  My friend Miriam is here to take care of me now, and I know enough about this yucky cycle to make plans for tomorrow beyond resting and reading.  Oooo, like blood test tomorrow morning!

My new favorite food:  frozen banana  (extra cold + extra potassium = yummy healthy goodness)

By the numbers

Like most visits to a doctor's office, every day at my oncologist's starts with me hopping on the scale.  I am always curious.  Regardless how much I eat, I can't get the numbers to go up, except on my bad weeks.  Then they jump by leaps and bounds.  And so, every day on the bad week, after being pumped full of saline and various forms of poison I pass the scale on my way out and am tempted to hop on it again, just to see how much weight I gained in the intervening 4-5 hours.  Today I went for it, and here is more information about my weight than you ever wanted to know:

Monday morning (as every Monday morning since I started this crud) I weighed 120 pounds.
Tuesday morning I weighed 124 pounds.
Wednesday morning I weighed 128 pounds.
This morning (Thursday 9:30 am) I weighed 133 pounds.
This afternoon (Thursday, 2:00 pm) I weighed 138 pounds.

Let's recap.  That's increasing my body weight by 15% in less than 4 days.  Today, while I was in the chemo room, I gained weight at a rate of more than 1 pound/hour.  But it's all the good stuff: saltwater, poison, and anti-nausea drugs. 

So I still feel the crummy kind of pudgy and at least 35% less adorable than this:

More Tired, More Bloated

Hard to believe, but it's true, so I'll make this one short and go to bed with a book.  At least the week's more than half-way done.

Good night,
m

Tired and bloated

Five days of chemo sucks, and it's only Tuesday.  The best part is sleeping I think, and I did get a Benedryl Drip Trip nap in today along with a Late Afternoon Nap.  Plus, they cut my steroid dose in half, which means more sleep and less bloating for me.  It's the simple pleasures in life that count, ja? 

Cancer and . . . Spa Treatment

Therapy 4.1 is complete.  I started off the week sitting next to a woman there for her first treatment.  She looked about as scared as I felt the first time I walked into the chemo room.  I didn't know which of my stories to tell her to find the balance between
"This is really crummy and the side effects (insert long list of my complications here) are no fun at all, and you'll get through it"
and "It's really not bad - by your second week off you might be feeling more or less back to normal !" [she doesn't even have Bonus Bleomycin on the off-weeks]
and "Every body's different, not to mention our drugs and doses and diagnoses (we do both have ovarian cancer) are totally different, so I can't begin to tell you what it'll be like, but the nurses are really nice and good at their job."
Even though I didn't know what to say, I kinda felt like an old pro at this whole chemo thing, so I showed her how I tie my bandanna.  And I got the best Benedryl Drip Trip Nap since Round 1.

For the more wholly enjoyable part of therapy today, Mom and I went to a foot reflexology place where a friend had given me an hour-long massage.  It was simply wonderful.  I'm used to going places to have people focus on my body, but usually in those places they poke me with needles and put their fingers where I'd rather not have them and measure embarrassing things like my urine and mostly make me feel crummy.  Here this great Chinese woman spent a whole hour focusing just on making my body relax and feel good.  Heck, it would have felt good just to soak my feet in the tub of hot water for an hour.  (Thanks, Betty & Harvey!!)

Also on the Spa Treatment theme, I got a haircut yesterday.  "A haircut?" you ask, incredulous, "Margaret, no offense, but you're Bald as a Ping Pong Ball!"  Well, it's hard to see in the pictures, but I'm not actually that bald.  I have very thin hair that up until yesterday was 1/8" long and, also up until yesterday, I had left my thining sideburns in tact in an effort to preserve the illusion of having hair under my headcovering.  In the past couple weeks, I've decided that this deception was failing entirely, not to mention the out-of-context sideburns giving me a disconcerting Elven aspect when I went bareheaded, which I almost always do at home.  So my friend and constant hairdresser in Tucson, Kristi, came over and got as much hair off with a clippers (no attachment) as she could.  We decided against a razor because my blood is so thin, so there's still a little little stubble, but in my personal opinion, going even balder and loosing the sideburns makes me even cuter than before.  I guess a little bit of arrogance and a very stubborn kind of vanity are good tools to have in one's Living With Cancer Toolbox. 

As I was walking out of the lobby at my oncologist's, I saw an elderly woman in the waiting room in a hospital gown and housecoat and no headcovering.  "We have the same haircut!!" she exclaimed.  She told me how hers was growing back like a stiff, white cotton ball, and I told her I've seen pins that say "Hair by chemotherapy."  I didn't point out that in fact, she had a lot more hair on her head than I do, hers being easily 1/4" long.  That would be splitting hairs, and ours are thin enough already, thank you.


In Exciting Medical News: I got my AFP (tumor marker) count from Friday.  Three weeks ago it was 27.  Now it's 14.  Score another 13 points against Grazelda.
This is good news because it's still above 8, which means I still have cancer and can continue to use it in conversation/plying my mother to rub my feet/general whining.  This is slightly less good news because it's still above 8, which means I still have cancer.  I'll talk to my doctor on Wednesday and get the details, but I think that essentially sets the bar for this round: I need 6 or more points to win.  Loser goes back for overtime chemo cycle(s).  Great pep-talk I guess, but it doesn't feel like there's a whole lot I can do to put more pressure on her besides sit in the chair with the drip in my port.

More Tales From The Drip tomorrow.

Cancer and . . . Camping

Church campout was this weekend, and I was pretty thrilled that it fell on the very best time in my chemo cycle. It was good for all the reasons I usually love Shalom (Tucson) church campout - get out of the city into beautiful mountains, hang out with some of my favorite people without any work to get done, doing creative things like making music and delicious camping food and acting bizarre skits, going on walks and hikes in the desert, and did I mention the mountains all around us?

This year there were some new reasons to love campout, too.
First, there are several families with young children who've moved in during the past year, so this year we had ample young folks with lots of energy for spontaneous games of badminton, Set, tree-climbing, dramatic acting, etc. That is to say, if my entire right side hurts tomorrow, it's not some weird chemo side-effect - it's because I got to hit around a birdie with some new friends who really, really like hot chocolate (making me, as the designated Bringer of Hot Chocolate Mix, a very, very important person).
Second, I took along the accordion, on which I can play songs just written as chords and melody (provided the chords are all major and one of these: A, D, G, C, F, or Bflat - bonus points if you're a band geek who recognized the circle of fourths!). But you can do a surprising number of songs with just three or four chords, so I got to play with the impromptu folk band that tends to assemble itself at such occasions, as well as for Sunday morning worship. If you haven't sung Over My Head accompanied by a free-reed instrument, you need to broaden your hymn-singing horizons.
Third, my Mom was there. Good things are even better when you get to share them with people close to you.

So maybe the title of this post is misleading, as camping had very little to do with cancer, which seems like a sensible sort of turn for my life to take. Ah, but of course, tomorrow (Monday) begins the "big" week again. I'll gain 12-15 pounds by Wednesday, get stopped up by Thursday, and feel like my whole upper body is bruised for all of Saturday and Sunday. They'll knock me down, but at least I know what's coming. And the plan is that this is the last chemo cycle, and then I'll be done with that nastiness.