AT LAST! Chemo!

Finally! Tuesday I was able to do my chemo. Strange isn't it? To hope and pray for the chance to put poison in my body. What a paradox, without chemo, I feel "NORMAL" except that the cancer rages through my body. With chemo, we halt the progression of cancer but I feel like crap, what an absolutely ridiculous circle! I have finally accepted the fact that this time it is terminal. NO.no, no I have not thrown in the towel, so all of you grabbing for your phones, put them down, I'm still fighting this with all my might but I am also being pragmatic, I am well aware of what the outcome may be, what I"m trying to say is that I am at peace with whatever God's choice is. I only have one contentious area in my life that I wish I could resolve, but the two people involved can't seem to come to an understanding and put the past and their differences behind them, I pray everyday that they will resolve this before God calls me home.



$5,000 for this?!

The chemo went OK, I felt terrible the first night, but yesterday was better and Tim gave me my Neulasta shot last night. Can you believe $5,000 for one injection? Amazing!! No gold filagree, no rubies or diamonds encrusting the case, what a steal! Anyway, I hope it makes me feel better, it is supposed to boost my bone marrow production, thereby lessoning the chance of infections setting in, it is made from E-coli bacteria which  is a little disconcerting.
Overall, I actually feel pretty good and I hope to fly a least one trip in a few days, keep your fingers crossed.
God Bless

Boogers!!!!

Two weeks in a row of not being able to do chemo. I flew this last weekend and felt pretty good, but started developing small bruises everywhere, even on parts of my body that should not be bruising, SO I knew platelets were down some. Flew into Little Rock this morning, drove home, went straight to chemo and sure enough, platelets had taken a nose dive. Last week it was my white and red cell counts. It's almost as if my body doesn't want me to fight the cancer with chemo, can't blame it, how many body's truly enjoy having poison dumped into their systems!!!!

There is nothing I can take to raise my platelets except rest, which means no flying until I can get a chemo session behind me. At least I am in middle of a 900 page good book!!!!!! Couch, crocheted throw, cuddly dogs and a good book, what more good a bummed out body hope for! I'll let you know how it goes, keep your fingers crossed all counts are good on the 25th.
God Bless all of you

Shoot... Where do I begin

Well, I' ve been back and forth to MD Anderson in Houston 3 times in 3 weeks. My first chemo therapy  was yesterday. We met with Dr. Frumovitz at 9:00, the Pharmacist right after that, then grabbed a quick lunch ( I've discovered chemo does better on something in the stomach) They started the infusion at 12:30, we were done between 5:30 and 6:00. Tim had too much going on at work and couldn't go with me, so my best friend Lynn and my daughter, Tiffany were with me all day. When we finished, we decided to go ahead and drive back to Texarkana so that we could wake up in our own beds this morning. Tiff headed back to Austin and Lynn and I - 6 hours back to Texarkana. We made it, but we were both operating on fumes today. I don't think the chemo did me much good either.
It all feels very surreal, I know it's happening, but I sure wish it were all a dream. A little bit of good news, I may not lose all my hair, they said it would "thin". If it gets too thin, I'd rather buzz it and not look like a concentration camp refugee! The other bits of good news are that although the cancer will never go into remission, it can at least disappear for awhile, whatever that means. The third piece of decent news, they are going to start me out at a lower dose to see how well I do, since I have been "pretreated" with so much chemo before. The lower dose may allow me to continue to fly albeit on a limited basis. But I can fly!! And lastly I can do the majority of my chemo with an oncologist here in Texarkana. There is only one that I trust, and he is willing to work with Dr. Frumovitz at MD Anderson and treat me here. That will save us time, travel and finances which are mounting,again!
I've really given my bucket list a thorough going over. Some things I've already done, some are doable while others I realize are probably just a pipe dream. I'll line them out for you when I get a better grasp of them. Maybe in the next week or so. A pretty eclectic bag of wishes, even if I do say so myself!
I'm going to close with a couple of pics from yesterday's chemo, one is me trying to at least look a little classy while having lots of toxic fluid pumped into my system, the other is a picture of all the various bags of toxic fluids.  The two chemo drugs are Carboplatin and Gemcitobine (sounds like Jim Beam to me, so I call it my Carbo Bourbon cocktail) Geez, where do they get this stuff!!

I'm hanging in there, God Bless all of you!