Last week

So it's been a bit since I've posted anything on here. This week was a decent week I suppose. I'm still not feeling totally normal.

Tuesday I went to work for like 7 hours I think. That was exciting.

Wednesday I had an appointment with Dr. Kasamon (more on that later), then went to work. I got to work around noon and nearly immediately felt tired. I left at 4:00, got home at 4:30 (and was still extremely tired), and passed out asleep basically until the next day.

Thursday I went to work (at like 2PM) and worked for 4.5 or so hours, didn't feel too bad... but a little tired by the end of it.

Friday I had a PET scan (no results yet), which was at 1:30PM and lasted until about 3:00PM. Then I ate some food I had brought with me (since you have to fast before a PET/CT I was rather hungry). I decided it was too late to bother going to work for just a couple of hours and came home. That was a good decision because I felt pretty terrible shortly before getting home. I went to bed at like 5:30 or so and slept for a couple of hours, then got up and felt decent later at night.

Today I am feeling pretty good so far.

One of the suggestions I had from the pharmacists at Johns Hopkins was to take colace and senna to "stimulate the bowels". I was using just colace mostly. I used colace and senna on Tuesday and Thursday night. I will say that it certainly opened my bowels up, but I think it upsets my stomach... a lot. I'm not going to take any senna anymore and see how things go naturally and hopefully I don't get the stomach pain I had been having.

A friend at work (Dave) astutely observed the mostly likely reason I have been so cold lately: I've lost a lot of weight. I weigh 153 pounds right now, which is about 30 pounds less than what I consider my "normal" weight.

As to the meeting with Dr. Kasamon, it went well. I will be using him as my primary physician for treatment. Unfortunately, the Columbia office where I see him doesn't have facilities for instant blood tests. If I wanted to be treated at the Columbia office I would have to come in (or go somewhere) the day before and have blood drawn and tested. That is a huge pain. So I will likely be going to the Tate Center, which is a big cancer center attached to Baltimore Washington Medical Center. Dr. Kasamon works out of there as well. They can do instant blood tests there. It's only about 3 miles farther away (but in the opposite direction as the Columbia office). My first treatment is Monday, March 2nd 2009. I have to go back on Wednesday to have my portable pump removed (which is also sort of annoying, but I guess chemotherapy isn't supposed to be a stroll in the park).

Emily and I are coming back to Florida from March 12th-March 15th. We're going to Gainesville this time to spent it with my family. We're hoping to come back again in the near future for the same set of days (Thursday-Sunday) and go to St. Augustine to visit all of Emily's family. Emily hasn't seen a lot of her family in a long while. I'm trying to conserve what leave I have so that I can take both of those "vacations", because after I'm out of leave I have to use this "leave bank" thing where I can still be paid even though I'm not working 40 hours a week (because of the treatment). Problem there is that I then have no leave for personal purposes, so I can't just take off a couple of days and visit Florida. *sigh* I'm sure we'll get it worked out though.