Catching Up

As you may have guessed by the sparcity of my posts in the last month, it has gotten increasingly more difficult to balance life and chemotherapy. Going to work uses up most of my energy, and there is not a whole lot left over. Since my last post, I’ve celebrated my 29th birthday, flown to D.C. (and got stuck there an extra night with all the bad weather), contracted some crazy stomach thing called the “norovirus” (which eventually caused the Arlington public health department to close the Hilton where I had been staying – I thought I just had food poisoning from eating bad airport food), successfully made it through round 3 of chemo, and shaved Cary's head.

Going into my third chemo treatment was difficult to say the least (the 24 hour stomach virus two days prior did not help!). Garrett popped his head into the room where Cary and I were waiting to ask how I was and I burst into tears. Round two made me really sick; I didn’t take enough time off afterwards, and I just got nailed. This, of course, only made me dread this round more. I was nauseas before the i.v. started to drip. Even Cary's stomach hurt.

Thankfully, I finally got a new nausea medication (yeah Emend!) and actually got through the weekend with very little nausea and no throwing up (whooeee!). This also allowed me to eat better and have a bit more energy. Unfortunately, I was plagued by five days of persistent heart burn and what I will call “burning of the esophagus.” I still wasn’t feeling great on Monday, so I took Tuesday off too. I worked two days and kept my usual Friday off. (I finally got it right!) After going out for breakfast and doing laundry, I spent the second half of Friday in bed pretty wiped out, but this allowed me to feel good this weekend, relatively speaking. I can’t wait for chemotherapy to be over! Only one more round of AC to go (March 22nd).

Next week I go in to see Garrett to get my monthly shot of lupron (for ovarian suppression) and to have blood drawn for genetic testing—BRCA 1 and BRCA 2—both of which we hope I will test negative for.

If you're interested, the following is a link to an article in the Washington Post on the Young Survival Conference I just attended. The bald girl in the middle of the photo (Annie) is one of the other awesome young women I met.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/27/AR2007022701360.html?referrer=emailarticle