Last week I had session 4 out of 8. The best thing about this session? I was put in a bay I had been coveting - Bay 40, a corner bay!
Not all bays have windows and those that do have everything oriented away from them. Here I was able to sit across the bed with my back against the railing with a couple of pillows for support. Now I could watch the changing sky, the traffic and the urban campers under the overpass.
Half-way there, cause for celebration, right? But it's like running a
race and you happily realize that you're half way through and feeling
good until you look ahead and see a huge hill looming as far as your
eyes can see. I feel that now I've got to dig down deeper and really
push to the end.
It's not the bi-monthly infusions so much, they've become a
part of the process. The worse part has happened after the last two treatments - 5-6 days later I have terrible stomach cramps and violent vomiting (is
that a punk rock group name?). The next day I am wiped out and it takes
days for my stomach to settle and my appetite to return (the first time
I lost 4 pounds in two weeks). They now want to add a course of dexamethasone and omeprazole to hopefully mitigate these episodes. I am not thrilled about taking the steroid, but if it prevents the nausea, I'll do it.
The last part of the puzzle is the surgery that will return me to normalcy. I was thinking it would be the middle of February, but now looks like it will be mid-March or later. What's a month or two when I will have been going through this for almost year at that point? Indeed, it's a lot. Which is why at this point I don't want to count down the remaining chemo infusion, I want to count down to the final day when all I have to think about are follow-up appointments. Now that will be worth celebrating!