A Long Week Past

Sorry for the skimpy week, there. I'm getting the hint now that if I don't keep this updated people will start calling my phone to see if I'm still alive! Rest assured, it's not that bad yet. Last week was my roughest one yet. Maybe a better way to put it is that last week was the second best week of chemo treatment so far. Anyway, it hit me pretty hard so I just laid up much of the time. We had several visitors, too, so the "up" time I had was spent on face time rather than on working in the blogosphere. (Yes, that's a real word.)

Side effects included more fatigue, a genuinely painful cold sensitivity (Monday only) and night sweats a couple of times a night. A mild fever and slight cough could have been either nothing much at all or harbingers of terrible things such as pulmonary fibrosis. (Don't click on that unless you're just into horrible images. --shudder--) Today at my lab visit I asked the nurse about it and she reassured me that I'm not there yet, this is something to treat with Robitussin and bed rest. No problem. None of these effects is worth complaining about, but all together they kept me huddled pretty close to the fire last week. Once again, if this is as bad as it gets then I'll be smiling all the time.

Saturday night Pam and I had a bit of a meltdown. This is all hard on her, harder than it is on me. She feels helpless and frustrated and angry (to name but a very few of a very long list) while I'm just tired. After a bit of "anger management therapy" involving an embarassing row in front of a friend, tossing furniture and dishes off the porch, and crashing cars, and things are a little bit better. So far the house is still standing and we're both gunshot free, so we'll take that in stride and go bravely forward, into the fog.

On the "plus" side, we are getting a ton of things done around here. When you own a house, it comes with a never-ending and always-growing list of things demanding repair, replacement, painting, caulking, and re-arranging. This week, we hope to finish moving my junk into the damn-near-finished new room, the "Man Pad." It will feel SO good to have my books, my precious books, back at hand. I feel like I've been lobotomized without all that reference material to tap into. Of course, almost all of the things on the list have been checked off by Pam, working nearly alone. I had a hope that such frantic labor would keep her occupied and keep her mind focused, but it just made her tired and sore and mean sweetly attentive. This week, my "up" week, I plan on letting her work in her art studio while I make up for lost time on the task list.