Cycle 8 scan coming up

The first half of my cycle continued mostly better than expected.  My friend Jon got married in the South Bay on Wednesday (Jerry's 70th birthday), and I was in the wedding party.  I had been somewhat trepidatious about this, because it was on day 1 of week 2, historically a point where I haven't done too well.  But everything went fine, and other than being a bit overwhelmed by the intense heat when we first arrived, which thankfully cooled down as evening approached, I felt well and had a good time.  Maybe a tad bit too good of a time, because Thursday was a totally different story.  It started out okay, but by the end of the day I was feeling really bad, and was pretty non-functional.  Friday was a little better, but still not that great.  Perhaps I got extremely lucky on the timing, and it would have happened anyway, although I suspect that the combination of too little rest, plus perhaps a little too much alcohol, and sugar, and caffeine, didn't help things.

Jon and Lisa's wedding.  I'm the one sporting the fancy hat.  Photo courtesy of Michael Villa.

Fortunately, things started to turn around by the weekend, and I'm feeling okay now that I'm in the second half of the cycle.  Saturday I even felt good enough to get back on the bike and we made it to the farmer's market for the first time in a while.  I got an even better deal from the same farm that brought us the bounty that became the previously mentioned peach/ginger pie.  Last time I bought the somewhat discounted, "Peaches to be eaten by candlelight", which are generally those that are a bit bruised.  This time I bought what they call a "pie box", which is 10 pounds of kind of beat up or otherwise defective peaches for only $10.  Even after cutting away bad parts, that's way more than I could use, but I found someone there to split it with.  I turned them into both peach ice cream (using the same flavors from the pie), and a peach galette.

Another bit of good news for cycle 8 is that, unlike cycle 7, my white blood count stayed normal.  So no antibiotics were needed.

I've been trying to get my cycle 8 PET scan scheduled for a little while.  It's more complicated than it ought to be, largely because the damn insurance company feels the need to get involved.  I'll spare my complete rant here, but the bottom line is that although the approval was supposed to have been submitted more than a week and a half ago, it turns out that it wasn't until today.  I'm kind of pissed off at my oncologist's office.  But then all of a sudden they moved it along crazy fast, and I get a call telling me that I have a scan scheduled for tomorrow.  Sort of like the opposite of hurry up and wait.  It's actually a bit earlier than I was counting on, but the timing is kind of good because I have my weekly checkup the day after that anyway, which means that I can use that opportunity to discuss the results.  The only downside is that the scan is scheduled for 1 PM, and I have to fast for 6 hours beforehand.  Normally I'd like to schedule it early in the morning, which just means having a delayed breakfast.  I thought about postponing it, but I'm kind of eager, if not impatient, so I'll take what I can get.  And it's not that big of a deal to just get up a bit before 7 AM and scarf down a quick breakfast and then get some more rest before the scan.

My oncologist is hopeful that the results of the scan will be good, and that this is the end of chemo for me.  I'm hopeful too.  And while we haven't discussed all of the details of various "what if" scenarios, that bottom line is that if that's not the case, it's really kind of bad news.  So I'm just trying not to spend too much energy worrying about that.