November 26

Wow. I have had a crappy week. Today is the first day I've felt somewhat up to snuff since last Wednesday. To celebrate this fact I went to the city pound and adopted three cats today. Yep. Three. Why yes, yes I am the crazy cat lady. I pick them up Monday afternoon. I'll have to post pictures of the new babies once I get them home. Diego is a 3 year old brown and black tiger mix. Although he's still in holding until Saturday. Owners have 5 days to come claim strays and believe me, fat boy looks like he definitely belongs to somebody. What a sweetie though, I couldn't help but sign up to get him anyway. Then there's Sterling. He's a one year old, all black cat. He's lean, lithe, and has legs that go on forever. And talk about nosey, that is one curious cat. He's going to give Itty a run for his money. I'm hoping Mr. Laidback Diego will simply sit on Itty once and will hopefully be left alone. Lastly, there's Ethan. I wasn't even looking at kittens. I prefer the older cats but when I was over talking to Sterling, there was this darned little black kitten in the lower adjacent cage who kept grabbing my pant leg with his claws and yelling at me to get him the heck out of there. His 3 siblings who were also in the cage with him were happy to be piled into a bed having a snooze fest but this little scrap of fur was totally storming the cage. I finally grabbed the cards to adopt Diego and Sterling and headed out of the room and up the hall. I only made it halfway to the front desk and I had to turn around and go get Ethan's card too. I simply couldn't leave that little 4 month old mouth there. So, yeah, three cats are headed to the Quinn household. Baby doll is flipping out. He grilled me like you wouldn't believe. He wanted to know how you introduce new cats to a household, if they go outside, how do they know where to come back to, how will the dogs handle it, how will the other cats handle it. Dude had a billion questions. Monday should be fun. :-)

Okay, so on to telling you about my crappy week instead of babbling about how I'm celebrating feeling human again. When I last left you, I had had my first appointment with Michelle where we actually did all sorts of exercises for 45 minutes. I think that's what kicked off my problematic week.

Thursday, after radiation, I came home and went straight to bed. My jaw was absolutely killing me! It hurt so bad that I was crying! They're always asking me to rate my pain on a scale of 1-10 and if I hurt it's usually a 3-4. I think there was one time where I rated my pain a 5 and it was a really bad day. Well let me tell you, the pain in my jaw was at least an 8. It was THAT bad. It was the empty socket where my tooth used to be that was throbbing so badly. Oxycodone didn't touch the pain one bit. I finally got it down to a dull ache by taking liquid Tylenol and pouring lidocaine gel on the area. It still didn't make it go away but it muted it enough to be bearable. I never made it out of bed on Thursday other than to use the bathroom. Friday morning I woke up at 5:00. Still a dull ache going on so I did some more Tylenol, a shot of Oxycodone, a dose of the good nausea medicine, and 20 oz of Gatorade. I then went back to bed until 6:30 when my alarm went off. I woke up totally pain free. It was freakin' amazing! I felt wonderful! So Friday started out great. Then 2:30 came along. The pain came back with a vengeance. Not good. I immediately did my little miracle combo from the morning but it was not so miraculous this time around. It did dull things up though so I thought I was good to go for the play that baby doll wanted to go see. Well, I ended up throwing up in the car on the way there. Luckily, I'm still sucking on these damn washcloths so it came up, hit the washcloth, and went right back down. Baby doll would have killed me if I puked in his car! Well, actually, sweetheart that he is he would have been totally sweet and understanding about it, but I still would have felt like crud for messing up his car. I threw up again at the play while I was in the bathroom. A small amount escaped that time and I got a red medicine stain on the front of my brand new white down winter coat. Now I'm pissed. On top of it all, the play kind of sucked. It was a college production. The voices weren't that good, the acoustics in the theater were lousy, the casting was odd. I fell asleep for almost half of it.

So Saturday was supposed to be the big flat screen TV shopping day. Yeah right. I ended up on the couch all day long. I was running a fever off and on all day. No more vomiting but I felt like death. I'm supposed to call some emergency number if I run a fever over 100.4. I was running a fever of 100.5. I refused to call. I spent the day watching movies and napping on my man's shoulder. It was actually a pretty good bump day.

Sunday I felt marginally better but still really rundown and the jaw pain came back in force. I stayed right on top of it this time though and kept it to a dull roar. Sunday night though I was doing the regurgitating thing and I woke up coughing crap out of my stoma again! What the hell! It happened like 3 times. That hasn't happened in a while now. Both the regurgitating thing and I swear I did not overeat this time and there was no homemade milkshake involved. And the coughing stuff out of my stoma. I thought the damned fistula had closed which is why Michelle has me drinking water and eating pudding during our sessions! Anyway.....

Monday finally came and I griped to my tech team about my crummy weekend. They called a nurse to see me after my radiation appointment. I went through all of my trials with her. She then went and got Dr. Mike. I went through everything with him (thank goodness it was Monday and I had my iPad so I could simply type everything once and then have people read what was already typed!). Dr. Mike then went and got Dr. S. I went through everything with him. He wasn't happy. He immediately called up and got me an appointment with Dr. V. He also scheduled me to get exrays taken of my chest and my jaw. He wanted pictures of my chest because he was afraid that me aspirating all this liquid caused me to get pneumonia which could account for the fever. He wanted pictures of the jaw to see if some kind of infection had set in or if there was some other reason for my jaw to be killing me. I then went and saw Dr. V. He said he doesn't see anything wrong in the area where they yanked my tooth other than the exposed bone. He said there could be a chronic infection there but it didn't sound like he was going to do anything about it. He said eventually down the road they can file down the exposed bone and I can get the hole capped. He said there was a huge ulcer further back along my jaw from radiation. He said that might be causing the pain and that's simply a price to be paid for having radiation. It will eventually go away once the treatments stop. He then looked at my stoma. He said the fistula has reopened. I'm once again not allowed to take anything orally. Guess that puts a stop to the swallow lessons from Michelle once again. He said it looks like it's the hole they originally put there to hold my speech prothesis. He says if it stays open, they can eventually use it to put another speech prothesis in without having to repuncture. I have no idea if I'm rooting for that or not. Getting something repunctured sure doesn't sound like fun but I'd really like to be continuing on with working on swallowing with Michelle. Anyway, once I was done with him it was off for the usual port draw. Then I got to see Dr. K. All goes well with chemo as far as he's concerned. I won't see him again until Dec. 23rd for a final follow up appointment. Then it was back to infusion so that I could get my chemo treatment. Alas. I was unable to hold my bladder for them like I usually do. This means I did not pee nearly enough for them to approve the start of my treatment. I had to sit around for an hour while they hydrated the hell out of me but even after peeing a second time I still didn't go enough for them. They had to call up and get special permission from Dr. K to go ahead and start the chemo without the necessary urine numbers. Sheesh! Then the jaw pain set in. I immediately asked Nurse Lindy if there were any pain meds she could get me. I told her I had some oxycodone with me but that it usually didn't help much. She paged Dr. Mike to see if he would approve some liquid tylenol for me. I was very upset with myself that I hadn't packed any of that in the lary bag. It's in there now, believe you me. It took FOREVER to get the liquid tylenol so I finally went ahead and took my dose of oxycodone 2 hours early. Then 15 minutes later the tylenol arrived. Between those two things and rinsing my mouth out with the ORa-Magic that Dr. Mike had given me, I was able to take the pain back down to a manageable level. After it made me cry, of course. And for the first time I ever I curled up in a little ball and slept through my treatment. Usually I'm on my iPad answering e-mails or playing some cool games. Not that day, my friend. I was whooped from day after day of crappiness that was going on. I needed that nap too because after chemo was finally done, it was off to radiology to get those pictures taken. Which I did, and that made me cry too. The second machine they stuck me in needed to have my neck bent at angles that it currently cannot go so the tech chick running the machine had to manhandle me a little bit to get me in the right position which hurt like hell and made me cry. I think part of it was exhaustion at this point as well. I didn't get home from the hospital until 4:45. I had been there since 8:30. That was a long freakin' day.

I ended up having to cancel my movie date with Kit because of it. She ended up being my princess in shining armor anyway though. She and her mighty steed came over with gifts of Gatorade and liquid ibuprofen for me so that I could avoid the Thanksgiving shopping craziness at Wegman's. I love that woman.

As mentioned previously, today I finally woke up feeling slightly back to normal. I'm alternating between liquid tylenol and liquid ibuprofen to keep the jaw under control. I'm not even waiting for it to hurt. I'm simply taking something every 4 hours. Dr. S stopped by to see me after my radiation treatment. He said there are some small bubbles in my lungs that show that I AM aspirating some liquids but he says they're nothing to be concerned about. No pneumonia. He said there was nothing found on the xrays of the jaw bone either. There could be some breakdown of the jaw bone starting but since it's not visible yet, he doesn't think we should change our current plan. He said even if it was visible, he still wouldn't want to change our current plan, he's rather wait until all was said and done and then correct it with surgery. He said there's no point in letting the cancer come back and kill me while we dick around with whatever is going on with my jaw. So, that's that. I also signed up to go in for radiation this Friday. Dr. S asked if I wanted to and I said sure. I think he was a little taken aback. He had a whole speech prepared to talk me into coming in for the radiation. He said that 4 days of not being radiated mid-treatment is a big enough window for the cancer cells to start growing again. So, my choice of going in on Friday sounds like a good one to me!

After Dr. S was done with me it was Joanna's turn. She said she had heard about my rough week of fevers and vomiting. She was a little concerned about how that affected my weight but as it turns out, I went up!! Woo hoo! At least one thing came out right!!

Okay, I'm done rambling about all the health crap. Plus I"m getting tired. I think it must be bed time. Some quick fun stuff. I last blogged right before walking out the door to the casino with Baby Doll. He came home with $82 in winnings, I came home with $55 in winnings. I'm seriously loving that place!!

Baby doll remembered that he gets a discount on GE products for some reason. I guess just for being a FedEx employee. So he found my oven for almost the same price as HD had it on sale. I think there's a ~$30 difference which is negligible. So, he's on his iPad right now getting ready to order it. Woo hoo!

I'll end with some pictures tonight. I made something called Sex in a Pan for baby doll's coworkers. I hate when chicks name their desserts stupid stuff like that. I should tell baby doll to just call it pudding cake although knowing the pervs he works with, they'll probably get a kick out of the actual name. Baby doll was also in the kitchen cooking tonight. He and I are spending a quiet Thanksgiving Day together. I bought a small 13# turkey for him with some usual trimmings. He said that he makes a chocolate pie every year for turkey day so I let him take over my kitchen tonight. Here's what we got:

I hope everyone has a safe and fun filled holiday this week! I'll catch you on the other side!