September 1

Holy cow! It's September already?? Well, that means that this Saturday I was supposed to participate in the Dirty Girl Mud Run with JBB as a cancer survivor. That ain't happening. Huh. And JBB told me to let her know if I would still be up for a visit. I'll have to e-mail her and see when she wants to come out. It also means that next weekend is the family reunion on my mother's side. I had told my Aunt Dora that I was definitely planning on coming this year. I even have a whole box of books in the garage for the book exchange! Ah well. Maybe next year if I'm still kicking around on this earth. An old high school friend, Wendy, sent me a Facebook note yesterday wanting the link to my blog. She said whenever you used to ask her grandmother how she was doing she would respond 'upright and above ground'. Ha! I like it!

The dogs are finally back to normal with me. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. I had forgotten that when I'm prepping breakfast for them in the morning, Freedom is constantly nudging me in the knee to hurry me along. It turns out it's my right knee that he does this to. While it doesn't actually hurt, it feels kind of gross because once again, there is an area on my body where all of the nerve endings have died and it leaves behind a weird, uncomfortable tingly feeling when touched. Freedom made me jump 4x this morning in his efforts to make breakfast come a whole 10 seconds sooner.

Today I'm making an effort to do my morning rituals in a better order. Yesterday I did my power cocktail and then my feeding. It turns out shooting 12 drugs directly into your stomach at the same time can cause some nausea. So today I'm doing my feeding first and I'll shoot in the power cocktail after I eat. I'm hoping it helps.

And I can confirm that I'm definitely swallowing at night. I started out with a washcloth in my mouth last night and very soon had to remove it because my mouth became uncomfortably dry. I left it out all night without a problem. Yay! This means the swelling is definitely making some noticeable progress in going down! Unfortunately, the moment I'm upright, I immediately have a washcloth stuck back in my mouth.

I'm still working on getting the hang of this whole mister/suctioning thing. I turned the mister off at 4:15 am because I was once again feeling 'swampy'. And sure enough, when I squirted some saline into my lungs at 7:00 this morning to commence with my suctioning activity, it barely made me cough at all! That's not good. You swallow water into your lungs you damn well better start sputtering. So, I think I need to tone things down with the mister. While it makes it easier to have my lungs moist, wet is definitely not good. I'm going to end up being the cause of my own damn pneumonia!

Ha! And I'm sitting here all irritated about the fact that I can't get the hang of taking care of my suctioning/mister stuff which makes me realize that it's not always a bad thing to be such a continuous overachiever. The fist time Nurses Marjorie and Beth had me suction myself after showing me on Trachea Jake (the practice dummy) they were exclaiming that I must have already been suctioning myself because nobody is that good the first time out. And 3-4 other nurses commented on my 'pro' status after that so I must have been the talk of the floor. Yeah, I'm such a glory hound. ;-)

Oops! My feeding is done so I'm out of here. My friend Renee, another cancer survivor, commented on Facebook last night that I'm making her tired with all of my running around that I talk about in my blog. And in his goodnight e-mail to me last night, babydoll said I even pooped him out yesterday and he's healthy! So since it's Sunday, the "day of rest", I think that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to lounge around today and screw getting the house cleaned until tomorrow. I hope everyone out there is enjoying a relaxing holiday weekend!