This week is the last normal week for about 6 months and besides the belated results posts there is little if anything happening this week. Patti is working a full 40 hours and seems to be happy as ever to going back to the basics. After next week I will be going on overnights for a month so that is exciting... By the end of December, by the start of the New Year, Patti will be 3 treatments in or have 1 1/2 cycles complete with only 4 1/2 cycles to go! By May we might get the news that she is in remission.
Now what to do in the mean time...I kind of like this blog and the writing it entails so a whole week of nothing gets a tad boring. Add to this my phone goes on the fritz causing me to have to replace it sometime soon; apparently being out of contact is detrimental when the first chemo session is days away.
First, a shout out, we got a dinner made for us by friends of my sister Wendy. It was delicious and was gone wayyyy too soon.
Second I was asked a few times whether I just remember everything or if I take notes or if I just summarize from paperwork given to us. I would say 80% of it is memorized from what the nurses and doctors tell us. 19% is from the paperwork given to us (especially drug names and side effects) and 1% comes from notes. The only day I took notes was the day we got most of our results, last Tuesday:
As you can see it's little more than chicken scratch and its the only page of notes i took in the hours of information we got. Halfway down when they were talking about drugs, if you can see I say: "Way too much info read paperwork later". I then went mostly back to paying attention. For that post most of it was from memory, the links were just made to help people reading, and I looked at the paperwork for proper spelling of certain terms and drug names.
I have a really good memory, not photographic but it's very, very good. Our quick 5 minute visit to Dr. Hamler's office to get all the information about the biopsy on Patti's lymph nodes, we got crammed full of a lot of information about the procedure, where we were supposed to go, at what time, how long it was, etc. and were promptly rushed out the door so we could run back to the hospital (we were hours later than we thought we would be at the hospital already). When we got back and we were asked by Dr. Hanzen how it went, I was able to spout off all the information we had gotten from Dr. Hamler. I am not tooting my own horn, just explaining how I write the blog.
When I sit down to write the different posts, I take all the information from various sources relating to the particular topic and I try to set it up in chronological order as best as I can. Also I ask for Patti's input as well since this is all about her, her feelings, what she went through if I wasn't there, etc. I also include helpful links to some topics that relate to the post, especially if I don't want to make long posts longer. Some information isn't exactly needed to get the point across so links help those who want to explore further. Some of it is harder to write than others, I am talking about my wife here. Luckily she hasn't had a whole lot of pain, but it has worn her down at times and we haven't even gotten to the chemo. She does plan to make her own posts, when that is, I do not know. I can't imagine collecting your thoughts on something that is currently trying to kill you. That sounds harsh but it's reality, a reality that we are going to crush because the only good cancer is a dead one.
There's no real good way to to end this post so I'll leave you with this:
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