On a lazy Sunday morning Denali kept us entertained.... Later today we went to the garden show at the Brisbane convention centre - very cool landscape displays. We got lots of ideas for our own house.
On our way out the door to dinner we saw this cool green tree from sitting on our roof (it was raining at the time...)
#1 Amber
#2 Paris
#3 Penelope
#4 Sunny
#5 Destiny
Today seemed like a good day to just relax with the cats. Had excellent snack of cream cheese on cinnamon graham crackers - thanks Mom! :)
The doc had to cancel my chemotherapy today because my white blood cell count was zero. This is a natural consequence of chemotherapy, but came a bit later for me, so instead they gave me a shot to stimulate the bone marrow to make lots of white blood cells. The count should go up over the weekend, so the chemo is rescheduled for Monday afternoon.
Baked a series of three lamb cakes this Easter weekend. Used white chocolate and raspberry swirl cake mix for that realistic effect of a severed spinal cord when you cut into the cake - guests thought it was funny and yummy! (Except my friend Annette, pictured above, who thought I could be certified nuts...and she could do it, being a psychologist!) :)
Snuck off to the mall today (NOT for the food!). Jersey girls always need their mall fix...
Today I had some great news - I have been promoted to Associate Professor! But Zamboni remains unimpressed.... :)
This weekend was great, just puttering around the house. I slept most of Saturday, but Denali and I helped Tim hang up more art on Sunday...
So today I finally received the first chemotherapy treatment. It is very intimidating when they bring out all these black bags with POISON warnings! The bags also say "Keep out of reach of children...."
Yet MORE flowers and cards and even BROWNIES arrived at the hospital this week - thanks everyone for your terrific support!
This Saturday and Sunday I scored day passes away from the hospital! So we brought some of the flower stash from the hospital home. We mainly puttered around the house. The cats were very happy to see Mommy but now sure of all the weird hospital smells. Our good friends Debbie and Ottmar cooked us a fabulous BBQ on Sunday evening...
Today the final diagnosis was arrived at: Hodgkin's lymphoma (stage 2, because of the big lumpy mass in my chest). This will require 6-8 months of chemotherapy (the ABVD protocol, the cutting edge regime with a 90% cure rate given my circumstances, i.e., relatively young, no other organs involved, no lumps below the diaphragm, intact healthy bone marrow, generally good health, minimal pre-diagnosis weight loss). The chemotherapy treatments are every 14 days. Following chemotherapy, I will receive a course of radiation treatment just on the lump in my chest. I am on medical leave from work until the end of the year; Tim has caregiver's leave as needed to help me with the chemotherapy.
The next few days were filled with tests trying to determine what was the best way to get the fluid out from around my heart. Normally the heart is in a sac (the pericardium) which has a few tablespoons of an oily fluid so it beats smoothly - so about 1 millimeter of fluid around the sac. My heart had 2.7 centimeters of fluid around it, greatly constricting its ability to beat normally. An echocardiogram showed, however, that the heart muscles and valves did not have permanent damage. So, since a large biopsy of a lymph node was required to know which exact sort of lymphoma I had, and since all the enlarged lymph nodes under my collarbones were inaccessible surgically without great risk of permanent nerve damage, the decision was made to place a cardiac drain into my chest. This would also allow the surgeon to take a large biopsy sample from the 10 centimeter lymph node lump which was pressing on my heart and causing most of the trouble. On Monday the 19th they got a good sample and placed the drain into the pericardial space; on Wednesday they removed the drain. (The nurses did this as cardiac surgeons "only put in drains; we don't take them out" - very funny!). Tim watched as they pulled the 10 inches of tubing from my chest - possibly a bad decision in hindsight. I was very sore and used quite a bit of morphine but could breath better almost immediately after they put in the drain. Eventually, over 48 hours 540 mls of fluid drained out from around my heart....
Well, life took a very unexpetced turn for us today. I've been feeling ill for a while - since about December. It started with an innocent looking rash on my leg, which was treated but didn't respond. In January blood tests showed my hemoglobin to be low, so this lack of iron in the blood (and thus lack of oxygen-carrying capacity) explained my growing fatigue, but it was difficult to pinpoint a cause. Blood tests, a gastroscopy (to rule out ulcers and gluten-intolerance) and a colonoscopy (to rule out polyps) turned up nothing. On many tests I looked in excellent health, yet by February my breathing was getting much worse (shortness of breath is another side-effet of anemia). In late February my massage therapist noticed an enlarged lymph node. My GP and I watched it for a few weeks, and she thought it might be getting bigger so she sent me for a biopsy. Although lymphoma is of course a cause of lymph-node enlargement, it was still incredibly upsetting to get the diagnosis of lymphoma - and we did not know which kind. More worying, the CT scan of my chest showed a moderate to severe amount of fluid around my heart. This required immediate inpatient admission. We got to the ER at 8pm, and by midnight I was admitted to the oncology ward of the Royal Brisbane & Women's hospital, the third largest hospital in Australia and a leader in cancer research. Almost immediately, flowers and the odd stuffed penguin began to pour in....
I love it that there are always animals around the house. The water dragons out the back are always curious about the laundry room. Tim was amazed at how well this bearded dragon blended in on the front lawn. The rainbow lorikeets love to sit in pairs in the trees. The pale-headed rosellas really love to eat the figs in our fig tree!
I never tire of feeding the cockatoos. They love eating the seeds off the balcony, and the cats love watching them! Our record number of cockatoos in the yard now stands at 35...
