Five on Friday (August 23, 2019)

-
Rory says "good morning!"

Untitled

1. Event #1 in the Lewis household this week was a very unexpected 36-hour trip to the ER. I was very, very sick and signs were pointing to a quite serious complication related to cancer. After many tests, the very last one cleared me. My oncologist says she can't quite explain what happened, but I'm on several new medications and we have the knowledge that a tumor is pushing against my liver and compressing the bowel. But it is not blocked! Dr. C says maybe chemo last week made the tumor angry, maybe it blasted it dead, or maybe not. Only time will tell. I'm feeling much better but tired and weak. I am a professional public vomiter, which is not a title I want to keep. I managed some coffee this morning which means my caffeine headache is gone.

2. Any longtime blog readers remember the early days of my cancer diagnosis and all the hospital stories? (My favorite involves when a man's pair of underwear showed up in my hospital bed after surgery. Yikes!) Well, 36 hours in the Vanderbilt ER gave me new stories. That place is a noisy, filthy war zone (although I was incredibly impressed with how calm the doctors and nurses remained). For instance, there was a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit with his own armed guard in the room next to me. And the time they performed a medical procedure on a patient who needed no less than 5 nurses holding him down. Scalpel, blood, screaming, and all. We saw police officers running down the hallway multiple times. The very narrow hallways were lined with patients in beds and wheelchairs. I am so thankful that I had a room at least!

3. Rory likes to make up her own phrases. Instead of saying "Oh, shoot" she'll say "snap crackle" or "fiddlesticks." This week that phrase has been, "Oh, sugar nuts."

4. We've been pulling out old movies to watch with the kids and last night was Robinhood: Prince of Thieves. Definitely darker than I remembered, but I don't think they had nightmares so we're all clear. Last week was School of Rock. Next week is going to be Anna and the King.

5. I've read several good books lately. Here's a short list:

The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs - historical fiction about Harriet Tubman
Field Notes on Love by Jennifer E. Smith - a cute teen love story that wasn't too sappy
Girl in Translation by Jean Wok - would have been a 5-star read for me if the ending wasn't so abrupt
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead - I didn't like this one as much as the author's previous but still enjoyed
Save Me the Plums by Ruth Reichl - my first food memoir and after a slow start, it really did read like fiction

Untitled


Our weekend should be uneventful. Let's hope so anyway! Rory is meeting friends at the mall this afternoon (a first for her and I don't quite know how I feel about it) and that's the extent of our social life.

Comments

Jocelyn aka JoBear2 said…
Sending love and prayers.

Jo xxoo
12:39 AM
Joan B said…
hope you are feeling better. and yes ERs are unbelievable places
9:47 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Scoop

-
Our meeting with Dr. W today was fine. Not encouraging, but fine. I don't know why I expected better news, but I think it's hard not to hope that the bad news you hear is somehow wrong; that they've somehow made a mistake. Basically, the cancer is still the same as prior to chemo. Possibly a little larger, but he said it was hard to tell. He was glad that it had not returned to my bowel or colon (because that was a large part of my initial surgery), and my chest and lungs are still clear (apparently, this is the next place the cancer would go). It does not change my stage of cancer (still 3c), and remission is still a possibility, but he said that it would be very tough to get there.  There are several more drugs that we can try, which is good, but unfortunately they each have a success rate of only 25%. It's a little too early to be considering clinical trials because hospitals who hold the trials like for the patients to have tried the more main-stream drugs firs
Read more

Late Night Ramblings

-
Image
1. Thanks to Andrea for driving me to chemo today. I'm always a little anxious on the way in and the very few times I've had to drive myself, it's been a little lonely coming home. But not today. 2. A fellow chemo patient today thought I was in my 20's. Score.  ("score" would be a term I'm borrowing from Becky ) 3. I did not wear a scarf today to chemo, and all the nurses and doctors did a double take since they didn't recognize me. So wierd. I recognize me with hair, bald, and with a little puppy fluff. 4. Dr. W. is adding Avastin , a new drug which will help prevent cancer cells from growing, to my current Gemzar routine. Good news is that it won't make me feel any worse. Bad news is that in a small percentage of patients it causes severe side effects involving blood clots, kidney failure, ulcers, and holes in your bowel. Good times. 5. I've been instructed to head directly to my primary care doctor for blood pressure medic
Read more

Scenes from the Soccer Field

-
Image
So I may not have apologized yesterday about the number of pictures, but I am definitely going to today. Because  coughcough thirty coughcough just might be excessive. And probably my family will be the only ones who look at all of them. But I don't care. :) By the way, we completely lost and did not even score a goal yet again. Rory tried really, really hard. This team was head and shoulders bigger than we are, way more coordinated than 4 year olds should be and their coach kept their A team in the entire game. Even after scoring some 15 goals. Oh, well. Rory still enjoyed herself. Which way is the goal again? Notice her position in this picture. Notice how she passed the girl next to her? No, I am not competitive at all. Not sure where the other team is. Oh, wait. There they are. See how much bigger they are? You'll notice she almost always runs with her mouth open. Either that or her tongue hang
Read more