Morning update

Although it could easily drag into the afternoon before the interruptions stop and I can actually get this posted.

It looks like I'm not taking on too much more water weight gain, still around 17# total.  But at least it's leveled off.  I slept okay last night but did need to pee a lot which kept waking me up.  I should be off the IV fluids very soon, so without so much going on, maybe I'll start to get a net loss.

I am indeed still on target to leave today.  It's just contingent on the MRI, which is still allegedly scheduled at noon.  Although I'm mildly nervous about my oncologist's comment last night that I managed to piss off the MRI people (which he found somewhat amusing).  The story is that the MRI was originally supposed to happen on Thursday, my first full day here.  But it didn't, so it got rescheduled until Friday.  After the experience of the chemo all night Thurs eve / Fri morn (which I will try to get back to), I desperately wanted my sleep, so my request was for as few interruptions during the day as possible, and scheduling the MRI as late as possible.  Well by that time, the MRI had already been scheduled for noon.  I said no way.  I think they are used to being in the position of power and were shocked that anyone would have the nerve to tell them no, so they're pissed off at me.  Although as it turns out in retrospect I don't think it was just my stubbornness that ultimately would have mattered here.  The chemo went on for much longer than planned (also more on that later), and my memory (which admittedly was somewhat groggy and fuzzy at this point) is that the chemo didn't even end until around that point (after going on for something like 14 hours).  And I HIGHLY doubt that the oncologist would have authorized me to stop and then resume the chemo just so that I could get an MRI which was not particularly time sensitive.

The other possible question here is the report.  It's Saturday now, so staff is reduced and things move a bit slower, so it could take a little while for the radiologist to look at the results of the scan and generate a preliminary report.  I was initially led to believe that I couldn't be discharged until the report was generated (assuming the results looked okay).  And I even called Lorien and told her to postpone her arrival here today based on that.  But now I'm being told that the discharge orders are only contingent on the scan itself happening, and I can go home even if the report doesn't get generated today.  I'm not really sure who to believe.  For the time being I'm not going to tell Lorien to rearrange her schedule yet again, and just do my best to press for the report being generated today, just in case.

And as far as my wondering how much the short term drugs are indeed helping with how I'm feeling, I do think that is partly responsible.  My most recent morphine dose ended up getting delayed about an hour, and indeed things did start to get somewhat worse (but still not too bad) within that time range.  The good news is that somehow as a result of that I ended up getting my dose upped from 2 mg to 4 mg.  And is now what I'm at until I leave.  Which I'm somewhat happy about, b/c I was kind of curious to see what 4 was like.  No, I'm not a junkie, but I suppose I do have bit of a curiosity about narcotics.  As Lorien noted with my experience with Vicodan after some relatively minor outpatient surgery a few years back (where a couple hours after being discharged I was bouncing around at home and wondering if we had ingredients so that I could bake chocolate chip cookies), it's probably a good thing that narcotics generally lead to constipation (which I really don't like), or I might be more tempted to explore them more.  (Am I venturing a bit into TMI here, esp. in a public forum?  Oh well, blame the morphine.  And my general disgust at the DEA and War on [some] Drugs.)  Now I'm pondering a graph correlating length of blog posts, or maybe words per minute, or perhaps just general verbosity and frequency of tangents and/or parenthetical expressions and run on sentences, vs. the amount of drugs in my system...  But I digress.  Yet again.

One more comment wrt chemo and side effects and the drugs...  While the side effects continue to be extremely minimal (the hiccuping being the most annoying, which really isn't something I feel I can complain too strongly about), I'm still not technically done with the first round yet.  The all night IV marathon is done, but I continue to receive Prednisone (the P part of RCHOP) daily in pill form for a few more days.  And that is likely contributing to my overall feeling of well being, and I've been warned that when that stops, my general emotional and physical state could take a significant drop.  So I'm prepared for that, and I guess I ought to just enjoy each day for what it is, and take things one day at a time.

Wow, another huge post.  And I still feel like I have a backlog of things to ramble about.  I hope I'm not starting to bore my readership.  Time to take a bit of a break, and hopefully they'll be here soon to take me to the MRI.  [They're here now...]