Yay to week 3

My friend Heather sent me this link from a blog post a few days ago at the Huffington Post, The Things I Wish I Were Told When I Was Diagnosed With Cancer.  It was an interesting read.  Not everything completely matches what I'm going through, but there's a lot of commonality.  Thinking back over the past few weeks, the point of "You will be determined to have more energy than you do." especially resonates.

But right now it's well into week 3, and I'm feeling sort of close to normal.  I don't quite have the energy level I've had at some points in the past, but I've definitely moved beyond the feeling like crap stage.  And some of those past energy peaks were bordering on pseudo-manic behavior anyway, so maybe it's okay not to repeat that.

I went for another bike ride up into the hills today.  I think it's the third time I've done that.  It would be nice if I could keep it up and do it at least once during week 3 of each cycle.  Although it was a bit harder this time than the last time I did it (during cycle 4 I think?), it still felt pretty amazing.  And I'm not trying to brag, but I did feel just a tad bit cocky as I'm zipping along on Wildcat Canyon Road and flew past several other bikers.  Who likely didn't have cancer.  (Unless perhaps they did, for all I know.)

After a bit of a lull when I was feeling crappy, my appetite has returned with full force, and I'm taking advantage of that and its intersection with summer fruit season.  More strawberry sauce to finish up the chocolate ice cream.  The raspberry/blackberry pie that I brought to work ("Friday is Pie Day" was the slogan) -- which was cool, I ended up staying and hanging out for a few hours, chatting with a bunch of people that I haven't seen too much in the past few months.  A strawberry sorbet -- which is sadly a bit sweeter than I would have liked.  The recipe probably doesn't anticipate strawberries as sweet and amazing as what we can get right now.  Likely either no added sugar, or just a tiny little bit, would have been a better idea.  Somewhat sad, and mildly ironic given the opposite result from my previous raspberry/lime sorbet attempt a while back that was way too sour.  A peach/nectarine crisp (because I need to get more shortening before making another pie crust, and I didn't really have the time to deal with another pie right now anyway) -- which is very tasty, although a bit runnier than I would have liked (I probably should've drained the juice from slicing the peaches, but I didn't want to toss such a sweet and yummy part).  We've decided to just shift the target and think of it as a peach/nectarine pudding instead.  Plenty of stone fruit and berries just for eating.  As well as berries for scones.  And on top of homemade granola.  Did I mention I've started making my own granola?  OMG it's so much better than store bought.  Thanks to Jeff Loiter for the recipe.  And as topping for waffles, although I think I like good old maple syrup (Grade B, that is) better.  Oh yeah, waffles -- after a few tries, I think we've perfected (or Lorien has, at least), the recipe (yeasted waffles) and technique with our new waffle maker, an anniversary present from Lorien's parents.  We've also beeen putting the anniversary present from my parents to good use -- it was a new food processor to replace our old one that died, and I think we've already used it perhaps 4 times in the first week.  It's good to be caring about food again, and cooking and baking.

Neal and Genevieve are in SF for a few weeks, and they stopped by to visit on Sunday with their son Teddy, who's 9 months older than Dylan.  We went to the Steam Trains in Tilden.  Which Dylan loved -- he was way more interested than he was the other time we went, which was about 5 months ago.  I guess that's a long time developmentally for him.  It's interesting to see how much older Teddy seems (like talking in sentences!), even though it's less than a year difference.  Teddy was somewhat less excited by the trains -- the noise from the steam whistle was a bit much for him.  The two of them were quite a racket together once we got back to our house.

I've also had the time/energy to finally start working somewhat through my backlog of processing of pictures.  I'm still not entirely up to date (and haven't yet done anything from our trip to Monterey; and I still need sometime to go through and process pics of our hike on Mt. Tam from before I even got diagnosed), but there are finally a bunch of new pictures up on flickr.  Sorry, I need to get to bed soon, no time for inline pics here right now, but see http://www.flickr.com/photos/dingdingwikki/sets/ if you want to see some pics.  Which is in general where you'll find most of my pics anyway -- add me as a contact!

After 2 weeks, the rash has faded significantly, and is mostly no longer bothering me.  It's still not completely gone, and still sometimes feels a tiny bit itchy, but it's well on it's way to going away.  I suppose it might take a while to completely go away, just like it took a lot longer than usual for my cold to fully dissipate.

Oh yeah, another bit of news about my crazy body -- I'm starting to get hair again!  Well, first, an observation about what's gone.  A while back I expressed surprise that most of my hair other than what was on my head still seemed intact, whereas I had expected it to all kind of fall away with some kind of exponential decay.  I was kind of right in my initial prediction, but it just all happened at a slower rate than I had expected.  And slow enough that it was harder to notice.  A lot of my hair is gone.  That includes a lot of what had lingered on the top of my head.  And a lot of all sorts of random body hair, like eyebrows, eyelashes, nose hairs, etc.  But I'm definitely starting to get new growth on the top of my head.  It's extremely light and fine and peach fuzzy, but there's something there.  And my beard hair is still kind of peach fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure it's coming in faster than before, and more densely too.  I'm not really keeping close track of it, but my gut feel is that I'm having to shave more often than the recent past, although still not as often as before chemo.

That's about it for now.  Chemo #7 is delayed by a day due to July 4.  So I get a bonus day of week 3 this time.  Which is kind of nice, although the flip side of that is that the weekend of week 2 comes one day earlier in the cycle than normal.  Which perhaps won't make that much of a difference.  Unless it does.  I'm trying to make plans and try to squeeze in fun things when I'm feeling well, but it's getting a bit harder to plan things in advance, esp. given the way the first half of the cycles have been progressing.  We just found out that Lorien's mother is going to be in town during the entire week 3 of my next cycle, so maybe we'll be able to take advantage of free babysitting and do something nice together.  Lorien vetoed my initial thought of skipping town for a week and heading down to Baja to go scuba diving.  ;)