Up, Up and Away

Today is a good day. I can tell. It will be a good day. Reports on my friend Kelly are good and things are turning around on the other side of the country.

Out here, surgery #1 is finally sorting itself out in the right direction. The surgery went well, I guess. I was put on the table and the next thing I knew a male nurse was feeding me ice chips. So what's to know? And the recovery seemed to be going okay, but I kept getting nose bleeds. That's not good. But the mother and the cousin/roommate said they also had some dry insides, so I didn't worry. Then the red spots showed up and the bruising turned ugly. By then I was going in to see the blood doctor anyway and, as somewhat predicted, the platelets were really low.

They were at 19. (Normal, for those keeping track, is 180.)

In fact, the doctor was more worried about my ITP than the cancer. That's a bad sign. He put me on steroids for the weekend and as of yesterday I'm up to 58. That means I can cut myself shaving in the shower, but I still can't be hit in the head without worry. It also means I have to stay on steroids for another 2 weeks and get my blood checked next Monday and the Monday after that. By then the euphoria will have worn off and I'll be fat and depressed, but no longer bruising. hooray.

Yesterday was also the first day of the bone treatment called Aredia. This is to keep my bones from breaking while the drugs try to shrink the cancer on them. This is good, since 2 spots are on my spine and I kind of want to keep that stable. It's an IV drip, so I spent about 2 hours in the chemo room watching Scrubs and reading The Man With the Golden Gun. Not a bad afternoon. Aredia has some nasty side-effects, which they say I won't get, but I'm done with assuming everything will turn out okay. It all falls apart when I think that, so assume the worst and maybe it'll be okay.

Today it's back to the office and I miss my mom, but I don't miss the couch. I kind of missed my cubicle and the crazy phone calls, although not so much the political discussions that go on behind me. Meh. It's a Zen thing. It can't be all good, yeah?

I do miss watching Bollywood all day. That was fun.

Red Prisoner piping and polka dots and he still looks good

Oh, Amitabh...