April 19

Phew! I've been a busy girl over the past week!

So, I discovered a new lump on my neck. The same type of lump that started growing after surgery but before radiation last fall. The type of lump that Dr. Singh said was the cancer returning. I'm going to have to ask Dr. Kim if chemo will do anything about this lump or not. I don't want it to balloon up and become an eyesore.

I saw Dr. Kim last Monday. Actually, I saw his resident first. Normally that kind of gets on my nerves, that you have to spend 30-40 minutes with the resident before you can even see the doctor. But it actually worked in my favor this week. Dr. Kim and I seem slightly uncomfortable with each other. Convos are always a little stilted, and communication isn't easy. But his resident is a chipper little bird, always tweeting along. So, I bombarded her with questions. She deferred a lot of them to the doctor but I did get some stuff out of her. She pulled up my PET scan on the computer screen and showed me the spot on my lungs and the spot in the chest cavity on the other side. She then pointed out all of the recurrent cancer in my neck, jaw, and throat. I was like "What do you mean recurrent??". She said meaning my cancer had come back in all the areas they had operated on. Say what!? Dr. Miller hadn't mentioned that. At least I don't think he did. He said that if you take pictures too soon after a surgery, when things are still healing, then the PET scan tends to light up all over the place. So now I'm torn. Did he not mention it because he thinks it's just surgical feedback or did he not mention it because worrying about my lungs is quite enough...........

Anyway, I finally got to see Dr. Kim. He said we have three options. 1) Do another run of chemo. And he said it wasn't so much to extend my life any, he said it was to make my quality of life better. Keeping the tumors in my lungs shrunken will allow me to breath better, etc. 2) He started talking about some clinical trial that was going on. I immediately waved him off, I'm not interested in anything that sounds like work. or 3. Do nothing.

So, I went with option 1. He then gave me some paperwork to take home and examine. They are currently doing a study of cancer patient's genomes. They are then able to dictate what chemo drugs are likely to be most effective in helping to shrink the tumors. Unfortunately the study takes 30 days which means it's HUGELY expensive. Sometimes insurance covers it, sometimes it doesn't. So I sat on it for a day or two and then sent an email to his head nurse letting her know I'm going to skip it. I have no idea if my insurance would cover it or not and I don't think there's a way to find that out ahead of time. Getting surprised with an invoice for $20,000 3-4 months down the road is NOT something I want to invite into my life. Dr. Kim was really pressing me to do it. He hates being forced to use the same exact medications on every cancer patient that comes to him because he knows we're all different. Alas, I'm okay with taking a drug that was intended for the masses if it means more money to have some fun in the short term.

So I go in on Monday to have blood work done and to meet with Mary so she can brief me on what's going to go on again. Tuesday I start chemo, bright and early, at 8:00 AM. Supposedly there's two different drugs involved, one after another and the entire treatment will go for 5-6 hours. I then need to go back every 3 weeks to get a treatment. Although the first round is going to be pushed out to a 4 week cycle to accommodate the cruise I will be going on.

Yes, you heard that right, in just a few short weeks I will be laying on a sandy beach, someplace hot, with an incredible gorgeous man by my side. AHHHHHHHHHHH.

And before I even get that far, we'll be hopping in the car and heading to Atlantic City for a long weekend. How cool is that? I made an abbreviated bucket list and we've already pinged two things off my list! Woo hoo!

And as an added bonus for the Atlantic City trip, I'm going to be there the same weekend as a girlfriend of mine so we're going to hook up and do dinner one of the nights we're there. Other than that there's an aquarium, a Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, we got tickets to see Wayne Brady, I read that the boardwalk is 4 miles long and a lot of people like to walk it and casino hop, there's a place called Steelpier that is a big amusement park. I can whip baby doll's butt at ski ball while we're there. It's going to be fun!

Today we hopped online and booked the excursions for our cruise. We're doing a walking tour in one of the ports, a beach/stingray experience in another port, and then a skyway tram at the last port. The tram thing is only an hour and then we're going to go it on our own with shopping and finding a beach. Get a little adventurous without having our hand held by the cruise line. I'll have to let you know how that goes.

So, I ran out of anti-depressants last weekend. I told Dr. Rob that now that I'm on Medicaid, scripts need to be pre-authorized. I have no idea what happened but I didn't end up getting more pills until Thursday. Not good. Sunday night I had night terrors. Yeah, not night mares mind you, but actual night terrors. It sucked!! Then I was so scared to go to sleep on Monday night that I ended up staying up the entire night. I spent the whole night researching cruises and making up a comparison spreadsheet for baby doll showing him what cruises I thought would be best for us. I finally fell asleep about 8:30 Tuesday morning until 3:00 in the afternoon. Messed up my schedule for a few days.

Wednesday night I was having baby doll's sister and BIL over for dinner along with his daughter, Jessica. Jess had just gone on a class trip to Baltimore and didn't have a chance to try crab cake's while she was there. That's just downright sacrilegious! So, baby doll was telling her how yummy MY crab cakes were and voila, a dinner was in the works. Then I started panicking. I've only made crab cakes once and it was like a year ago and honestly I don't remember them coming out all that good. Anywho, some of my guys from work were nice enough to come over Wednesday at lunch and do a taste test on the meal I was prepping to serve Wednesday night. I got some great feedback from them, made some tweaks to what I was doing, and dinner was a success. Woo hoo!

Last night we had tickets to Phantom of the Opera. First of all, I picked some really crappy seats. I couldn't see a damned thing. And every time I found a little line of sight to the stage, the lady in front of me moved her head and blocked my view. Was driving me nuts! Unfortunately, Friday was a bad day for me. I'm thinking it's because I started on the anti-depressants again on Thursday afternoon. The last time I started them I was nauseous and exhausted the entire next day which is pretty much how I felt yesterday. After trying to see something for the first 15 minutes of the show I finally gave up and fell asleep. I slept through the whole damn thing. That had to be one of the most expensive naps ever! On the bright side, baby doll said it was an excellent production. He said it's the one and only Broadway show that he's seen before and this production was better than the one he originally saw. He said the set decorations were incredible! So at least one of us got some enjoyment out of it. I have tickets to see The Odd Couple in a couple of weeks. Hopefully that one goes better for me.

I think that's been all the excitement this week. Baby doll started digging up the spot where my elevated garden is going to go. And my seedlings are looking strong and healthy. We were going to go buy the lumber today and finish digging up the sod but my honey bunny had to work all morning. It didn't seem fair to then make him run around shopping for MY project. Plus I'm still not feeling well. I'm not nauseous or feverish anymore though. Now I have a really bad sore throat and my jaw keeps having sharp pains shooting through it. If it's not one thing, it's another!

The doorbell rang a couple of hours ago. It was the neighbor from across the street. She was carrying Ethan. She wanted to know if he was ours because if not, she was going to adopt him. She said he's so sweet and friendly. <sigh> That cat is going to be the death of me. I don't remember if I blogged about the girl next door or not. A couple of weeks ago he was next door getting loved up for about 45 minutes by some chick named Christina who was in Linda's backyard for some reason. I finally had to walk over there and let her know his name so that she would know he was owned because I could see in her eyes that she was thinking about taking him too! Everyone wants that cat! I feel like telling them all that I got him at the city pound. Maybe it will encourage more people to head down there and rescue cats.

I got my eyebrows waxed on Thursday. Figured I should start trying to look as human as possible for the cruise. I then buzzed over to Walmart to pick up some more Tupperware. At one point I parked my cart and jogged over to the food half of the store to grab some milk. On my way there I passed a rack of beach coverups so of course I had to stop. I ended up picking up both a coverup and a one piece swimsuit. This got me thinking. I have no idea what size I was wearing last summer. Was I all the way down to a size 2 yet or did that happen after the surgery in August/September?? I decided to start packing for the cruise yesterday. I figured I would need time to hit the thrift store if I had nothing to wear. I found some stuff. It's a little big. It looks like there is mostly size 4-6 in my summer closet. I had started getting back up to a 4 but since the surgery on my neck, I seem to have lost the 8 pounds I had managed to gain. Major bummer. But I don't think I need to go purchase anything. Except maybe a comfy pair of shoes. I might order some skechers from Zappos. We'll see. It got me all sorts of wound up to be packing for the cruise already. Baby doll said it's kind of neat. Usually cruises are booked months in advance and feel like they're years away but we just booked ours and it's right around the corner already!! Fun!!

Okay, I'm off to find a movie to watch. The guys from work were going on and on about how much they liked Frozen. Really?? Neither of them have young kids either. Their kids are in college, or at least late high school! So, it must be good if they were raving. I'm going to go see if it's streamable on Amazon. Later!