First day back home

At home now, sitting outside on the front porch.  Trying to enjoy some of the beautiful weather we're blessed with.  It feels really good to be able to be outside after having been stuck in the hospital for a few days, even if the hospital experience was relatively short.  Spent some time earlier relaxing on our back lawn.  Yes, we have a lawn now!  It's tiny (like so much around here), but Lorien and I spent Labor Day weekend digging up our old (mostly weeds) lawn, installing subsurface irrigation, putting in freshly delivered soil, and seeding a new lawn.  We did it all by ourselves, all by hand, and it was a crazy amount of work.  (And in retrospect, I probably had cancer at the time.)  And I was kind of disappointed, because it came in kinda spotty, and our attempt at eliminating all of the weeds by removing the top 4" or so of existing soil was, shall we say, less than successful.  Nevertheless, in the interim when I've been feeling too crappy to worry about the lawn, it has filled quite in a bit [in the American sense, not the British sense, thank you Roger I believe for pointing out the difference].  And Lorien mowed last weekend, which has removed some of the most visible remnants of the weeds.  And as long as we can keep the dandelions in check and pull them before they flower and go to seed, even the clover ought to be dormant come summertime.  So I'm willing to call it a qualified success.

I'm feeling kind of tired now.  Still kind of bloated with water weight, hopefully that will diminish soon and I can start worrying about putting on some real calories.  I really ought to buy a scale for home so that I can track this.

[... long pause, various visits from friends, it's evening now, Dylan is getting ready for bed ...]

I kind of lost my train of thought, although sometimes it's more of a clouded fog.  Maybe this is chemo-brain, or just plain old tiredness.

Feelings are kind of up and down.  I may have given an overly optimistic view of my condition in some of my earlier posts, esp. "I'm happy".  I am doing in general very well, and as good as can be expected given the circumstances.  But now that I examine the past few days from a bit of a distance, and with some more objectivity, the happiness may have also been a little manic.  And I suppose I tend to blog more when I'm feeling more like that.  Some of it is genuinely feeling better, but some of it is probably the drugs.  And not just the morphine (which I'm trying to cut back on, so far just 1 dose today).  Most of the chemo drugs are given in one long IV session (did I already cover this?  I'm not sure), but I'm still on Prednisone (in pills) for a couple of more days, and it's very likely that I will feel not nearly as well and may have more side effects once that stops.

I'd also like to once again thank you all for the wonderful wishes that we continue to receive.  I do read each and every comment on the blog, and each and every personal email.  But please understand that I just can't respond to each and every one personally, at least not right now, and please don't take it personally.  I started to mark emails that I wanted to personally reply to, but I realized that the list is getting longer even as I do respond to some, so it may take me quite some time to make it through the queue.  And even if I specifically say to you that I will email or chat or call on some particular day, you probably shouldn't hold me to that.  It was quite a relief to have a whole day today with no medical appointments or discussions with doctors.  My initial thought was that I could devote the day to communications.  Lorien reminded me that perhaps I should primarily devote the day to getting some rest and taking care of myself.  And yes, even for my immediate family members, I'm sorry that I'm not able to get back to you all as promptly as I would like.

In terms of what people can do to help, still the main thing we've set up organization wise so far is the mealtrain mentioned in another post.  Although we're starting to get a little bit of a backlog, and my mother will be coming to help out soon, so we may do a little management with that tonite to try to spread out the effort over time.  As someone else (forget now who) said, this isn't a sprint, it's a marathon.

As far as other things that we need help with, so far we've been kind of dealing with it on an ad hoc basis, but I'm thinking of setting up something a little more formal (maybe a wiki, maybe a google doc, hopefully something that non-tech people can deal with without too much trouble).  Nothing yet, I'll post here if something like that happens.

And finally, I'd like to single out my loving wife Lorien who is working so hard to take care of me and take care of Dylan and take care of the house and hold everything together.  Besides me, she's really one who needs a lot of support, because I couldn't be doing this without her.  Thank you Lorien, and I love you very much.