leaping the wall of treatment #11

Treatment #11 happened yesterday. It was moved from Monday to Wednesday due to our Senior High Spring Banquet at Disneyland.
For all of my fellow-hodgkins friends who are reading this, don’t worry—it was awesome! It was like a five course dinner at a fine dining establishment, including an amazing desert. I wished I could have stayed longer and had seconds. 🙂

Ok—now the truth. We were at Kaiser from noon until 6pm. My nurse tried every possible trick in the book to keep me from getting sick.  It was to no avail. My body has definitively decided it does not like these chemicals, and there’s nothing we can to do convince it otherwise. Even after getting sick at Kaiser, I fought it off another few hours at home.
One trick that helps is to cover my face with a mask and place a piece of Big Red gum in the mask. I look funny, but the smell blocks a lot of the noxious medical smells that kick in the nausea.
The best news to report is that the wall is behind me—the treatment is done and now it’s just a matter of taking a lot of pills, enduring the “feeling-cruddy-ride” over the next seven days or so, and waiting to emerge from chemo-cave.
There’s one treatment left—I wish I could go get it today! I’ll have to wait until May 16. I have waited for that day for seven months. As soon as possible after that, we will go in for PET scan and CT scan, and an appointment with the radiologist. Please pray that the radiologist will decide that I don’t need radiation. Avoiding radiation would be a huge answer to prayer. It’s a month long and has a lot of long-term concerns—especially when it’s happening near major organs like heart and lungs. Without radiation, I could be feeling healthy again by late August. That would be awesome!
Thanks again for your prayers. I’m brainstorming a bit today about what would make this day-in-bed easier—I’m thinking cinnamon roles will be a part of that for sure!