I hope that this message reaches you in good health, and in the midst of enjoying the warm tidings of the Holiday Season.
I have been wanting to updates all has been going on here, but each week has brought with it more Dr. visits, and more waiting.
We have been through a lot of, "Well, NEXT week we will know more about “X ...". Then, the next week they tell you "X", but then you need to wait because all that hinges on finding out"Y", and well you cannot find out about "Y" until the week after that....
The stress and waiting game with this is simply exhausting.
Because I want to try to keep people somewhat current, I am going to send you what I have at the moment...
My bilateral mastectomy was Dec. 2nd, I was fortunate that I got to stay 2 days in the hospital. Apparently some folks go home the next day. Yeah, WHATEVER. I would have tried it stay and additional day, but my roommate was insane, and her uncle (Denny) was wasted on some sort of pills. I learned his name, and of his particular predilection for popping pain pills as he and his post-op niece, were playing cards, and shouting at each other over their oh-so-annoyingly-jaunty, LOUD, and never ending, ring tones. I decided it was time for me to go when Uncle Denny kept stumbling through the room at all hours of the night, using the privacy curtain at the foot of my bed as some kind of suspended crutch. He would shuffle into the room, and grasp onto it to steady himself an kind of glide-walk across the room -- dragging the whole length of the curtain to the end of it’s track, leaving the whole length of the curtain gathered up at the end of it’s track RIGHT. IN. FRONT. OF. MY. TV. One would think that if he were that high, that he would have had the capability to just float right on through ... had I not been snapped up on Morphine, and scratching at myself like a drug-addict myself, I would have asked him to fix the curtain. I decided it best to stay to myself, punch that Morphine button and call the nurse to fix my curtain again.
I will be having out-patient surgery on December 23rd, to have a main-line port put in. Hopefully, I will not run into my pill popping pal again.
My chemotherapy treatments will start Thursday, Jan 6th. We will be meeting with the Oncologist next week, and at that time we will be deciding between two chemotherapy's (FEC or AC/T); the longest of which will involve about 20 weeks of treatment. We do not yet know the weekly frequencies of the treatments, nor the names of all of the wonderful anti-nausea drugs that I am going to be taking during that time frame. This we will know in the next few weeks.
Something I learned over the past 2 weeks?
1) Morphine makes it almost IMPOSSIBLE to pee and it makes you itch like you would not believe.
2) Going straight from Morphine to High doses of Vicodin effectively STOPS your bowels in their tracks.
3) Pain killers totally remove your short term memory.
Oh, and did I tell you that pain killers totally remove your short term memory?
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!
