I didn't realize it had been a whole week since posting. While I will in general try to blog a little more frequently than once a week, please don't assume that no news is bad news.
The rest of week 1 was kind of all over the place with respect to energy. Like on Saturday I was way, way lethargic, and then on Sunday I had a ton of energy, and then on Monday I was somewhere in between.
On Tuesday I had another private yoga session, which we kept pretty mellow. I really should make the time to do more yoga, I think my body really needs it. Although I'm not quite sure if I'm yet up for a normal yoga class, even a fairly beginning one.
Wednesday was my ENT appointment. The summary is that there's nothing to worry about currently, but also nothing to do. The somewhat longer answer is that my left vocal chord is being sluggish, and my right one is compensating so when they close together, it's not in the middle like it normally is. It's all more likely a consequence of the tumor than a side effect of chemo. It might even be present now but now before because of how it's reacting to the tumor shrinking. She told me to come back when I was done treatment and she'd have another look, or if it got significantly worse. The good news is that I think my voice, although not perfect, has actually improved somewhat. But it's hard to say, because like so many other things, it's not really just a question of on a trajectory of getting worse or better. It varies substantially from day to day, and within a day.
Thursday was Bike To Work Day. It was also a day that Lorien flew to Orange County for a meeting. Since I viewed my main job for the day as taking care of Dylan, and since I was up way early anyway for that, I biked him around in the morning to a number of the Energizer Stations. It was the first time I've pulled him in the trailer in a significant amount of time. With his growing weight, and the weight of the trailer, it's probably coming close to towing 50 pounds. It wasn't that hard in the flats, but we did go up slightly into the foothills in search of a station that was actually giving out the promised local coupon books as part of the free schwag. We never did actually find a physical book -- the best we did was a canvas bag with a code for the smartphone app version. Dylan did get plenty of admirers -- he does look pretty damn cute in his bike helmet (sorry, I didn't actually get any pics on BTWD).
I also met up with a number of folks from work who I convinced to bike to lunch in Berkeley. It was good to see some people from the office. It had been a while.
My Wednesday appointment caused my weekly checkup that's normally on Wednesday to get pushed to today (Friday). To a first order, it was fairly uneventful, in that my blood work continues to go well. The annoying part of the day was that what was essentially mostly an approximately 5 minute doctor appointment turned into about 2.5 hours, for various reasons. Oh well, I guess I just need to accept that that kind of crap is going to happen sometimes.
Next week I have a PET scan scheduled. Organizing various logistics of this is part of the reason today's appointment took so long. I had one of these before treatment, and I'll have one after chemo as well. This is the midway scan, to see how I'm doing. I'm kind of excited and nervous and scared all at the same time.
So far week 2 has been going smoother than expected. Last round I felt kind of crappy from late Wednesday through Saturday. It's Friday night now, and while I haven't felt completely well for week 2 so far, the chemo side effects have been fairly minimal, and I've been eating relatively normally.
My weight continues to follow it's up and down trajectory, in a way that I'm starting to be able to predict fairly well. It shoots way up right after chemo, b/c of all of the fluids they pump into me. Then it stays up through most of week 1, likely a side effect of the Prednisone. Then it drops a significant amount over the next few days. So it gets comfortably into the low 140s at its peak, but once I'm solidly into week 2, my morning weight is closer to 135#. Which is still a nice solid 10 pound gain over where I bottomed out, and a level that has me looking reasonably thin, but not emaciated. Still way below where I started before I got sick, which was close to 150#. I guess the bottom line is that I can continue to enjoy my homemade ice cream without worry. :)
On that note, I mentioned a few blog posts back that I made a basic chocolate. It was pretty good, but a bit too rich I think by itself. However, we discovered that it paired absolutely amazingly with strawberry sauce, esp. given how good the strawberries have been lately. There's still a tiny bit left. The next batch (mixed up tonite, in the fridge now, will freeze it tomorrow morning) is banana ice cream with granola. (Thank you Jeff Loiter for your granola recipe -- I finally made it and it's both quite tasty as well as surprisingly easy to make.) I'm getting enough into this whole homemade ice cream thing that we're pondering buying another of the rectangular pyrex containers that we use for storing the ice cream so that the lack of a suitable vessel is never the thing holding me back from making a second batch.
So once again, I'll put out a request that if anyone is reading this and local and hungry for sweets, please stop by and help us eat ice cream. Seriously. The faster it gets eaten, the sooner I can experiment with new flavors.
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