You Must Be At Least This Tall To Ride The Emotional Roller Coaster

Boy, Howdy.  What a week!  The title of this week's blog says it all.  I like this amusement park sign, but I'm not sure it would ever be possible to enjoy this ride, no matter how tall a person was.  You'll forgive me if I seem a little loopy and/or my perverse sense of humor emerges today. 

When we reported last, Roger had just been diagnosed with relapsed AML Leukemia.  The good news is that it is the same leukemia and not a new type, which would have been really bad.  The same old leukemia is bad enough, thank you.

They didn't waste a single day.  He was whisked in to surgery the day he was diagnosed, had a port put into his chest and started chemo as soon as the port site had healed enough to be accessed - two days later.  For the next 2-3 days he hobbled around the house in pain, clutching the furniture to support himself.  Dr. Nichols told us "you have to expect bone pain with leukemia"  like we should have known that after all these years.  We didn't know and we weren't expecting it; it had never happened before.  That kind of pain produces anxiety for the person that's suffering as well as everyone around him.  Those few days seemed endless.  But now the good news:  The chemo started working right away -- faster than any chemo Roger has had before.  When the growth of leukemia cells stopped, the pain went away.

It is a drag to have to attend to cancer on the weekends. Shouldn't he get weekends off?  Because the cancer center is closed, Roger has to go to the hospital today.  Hospital staff are not as familiar and comfortable with cancer treatment, and try though they might, they always take too long, fumble too much and sometimes forget things.  It hardly inspires confidence.  But Roger is going there this afternoon to have his chemo pump unhooked.  He's done with the first round.  Hopefully this will be a quick and efficient visit.

Now Roger gets to have a week or so off treatment to recover.  His white blood cell counts are almost non-existent so he can't go to the movies or the grocery store.  He has no immune system, and it is cold and flu season, so we have to be careful.  We are grateful that the learning curve is not so steep this time; we know how to do this.

But, hey!  The first week of treatment is over.  We're up.  We're down.  We're down.  We're UP!  It's a wild ride.