There are times when you find out just how many people are part of your life.  This has been one of them.  The routine of life, where you get up, drink you tea, shower, get dressed and go off to work, work, finish work, come home, have dinner, watch TV, answer email, go to bed and see only the few members of your family and the people with whom you work builds a false sense of being part of a very small community.

Then the proverbial fan became struck and my support structure came together with amazing speed and solidity.  I can only say thank you so many times, but consider it a looped messages that will only end when I do.

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This is great news.  This blog has been left to rot while the Chemotherapy was still going and I wasn’t in the mood to update pages one at a time on line.  I am now off chemotherapy for now and am in tri-monthly evaluation mode with a scan every six months instead of every month.

This should decrease my chances of glowing in the dark!!

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R3TWDFH will get you a discount when you purchase the email program Postbox.

Click here to save $10 on Postbox

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Just a quick blog entry at the end of the weekend. We went to New York to see our goddaughter’s art show, almost see another friend’s display of equestrian skill and watched a soccer match.

We also just installed blog desk to see if it would be good alternative to Live Writer. This is a test, the symbol your seeing is being displayed to test the veracity of blogdesk’s publishing skills.

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This is picture of the tin man that welcomed us to our son’s school play on Saturday night.

I thought it reflected very well how I feel after the fifth of six sessions of Chemotherapy. 

Parts out of place.

While I probably should have just taken the weekend totally off, even staid in bed, I refuse to let my life stop especially if the eventual permanent stopping has in anyway be accelerated by this.

During a previous time when I was taken out of the flow of life by a catastrophic event information I had gleaned from a book by Dr. Jonathon Miller, A Body in Question helped me substantially recover.

In the book, Dr. Miller mentions how a person when placed in the medical environment becomes a patient. As a patient they assume they are sick and therefore succumb to what they believe are the inevitable results.

I took that advice to heart and determined through dress and manner to be a guest of the hospital, not a patient.  Using the same perspective, I am determined to be guest of this cancer and not its supporter.

To get to the grit of what is happening today, the effects are worse, more pronounced and extremely annoying.  Now it’s time to get on with living as best I can with what I have.

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Tomorrow is the fifth of the scheduled six chemotherapies.  I can honestly say I do not look forward to this.

From the other side of the coin I do.  This is the only option on the table.  In my considerable experience with the lack of options, I’ve learned it makes no sense to fret.

When the options are do or don’t and don’t is obviously the wrong choice it ceases to be one.  That leaves one thing to do. 

The word options no longer applies.

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For a moment there I thought I was having another hot flash but looked over at the YoWindow display on my Acer monitor and discovered it IS 86 degrees out there and that ambient light is actual sunlight.

If three of the medications I am taking didn’t have the explicit warning to “AVOID EXPOSURE TO DIRECT SUNLIGHT” and there was any hair left on my head, I might be inclined to go outside.

Anyone who knows me would say that would be a stretch even before this whole Lymphoma thing started.

I will admit, it has always been my policy not to go to the beach.  If I do find myself at the beach it is never without an umbrella of any size and a hat with a sizable brim.
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It was when I was this size and wearing that bathing suit, I was left to sleep on a blanket at Rye Beach in upstate New York.  It was under an umbrella but either the sun or I moved allowing my legs to be out in the sun for quite a while. 

Look at those legs!  Should they be exposed for any length of time to solar radiation???

Sun Poisoning or Photodermatitis  is what they called it.  Noxzema is what they put on it.  As I know now, cold water would’ve been a better treatment.  Let’s just say, these legs do not now, nor will they ever, be exposed to the sun for ANY length of time.

TMI, I know, but it’s Sunday afternoon & I’ve some time on my hand while Stephen Fry tweets his way from Heathrow to his London flat.
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Woke up at five and took my temperature again!

97.0 F.

Whew!  That was with Tylenol.  At 0830 it was back up to 98.0 without the Tylenol.  I think we can say the fever episode has passed. 

Now let’s hope the mouth lesions go away soon as well.

Over all, not too bad.

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For the past day or so, I’ve been running a low grade fever, bordering twixt 99.9 & 99.5.  If it goes over 100.5, I get hospitalized, so it’s important to monitor it.  This is in combination with the mouth sores, the last of the Chemo side effects on the list that I haven’t had.

You can say one thing for the chemo therapy, it gives you what it promises, not a good time.  Again, if it works, they it’s worth it.

I can see, however, how some people, especially those with a low tolerance for pain, will put this off until the last possible moment or entirely.

It was the “if you don’t treat this, it will kill you…” part that inspired me to go ahead with the therapy and skip the maybe it will go away dream machine.  It wasn’t going away, that was made obvious by the small potato that was growing under the skin in the back of my neck. 

Alien….

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Totally disconnected to our revival of Grazed.Net as a blog, PowWeb, the URL provider, just notified us the name has automatically been renewed.

We wonder how many times that has happened under out radar.

Good thing.

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