The Coughing is Ridiculous

As expected, the coughing and continued lung inflammation pushed surgery back. Not expected was the three week wait (it's now scheduled for October 17); I'd anticipated it happening a little sooner. But as I've so often said in the past: "Es lo qué hay." At the rate it's going, it will take that whole time to get past the inflammation. I've never had a cough hang on this long, but then I've never been through chemo before and we think my body is just taking longer to bounce back than it normally does because it's been through so much this summer.

My doctor is hitting the inflammation with everything in his arsenal. He upped my steroids: a decreasing dosage wherein I was on 30 mg for five days, then 20 mg for five days, and tomorrow I start with 10 mg for 5 days...This is the third round of steroids in the past five weeks. He prescribed a Nebulizer and I've had a week of 8 breathing treatments a day, now down to 4/day through Tuesday. Yesterday we refilled prescriptions for the heavy duty cough syrup and the cough "pearls", both of which help me sleep better at night. Even so I'm waking up with coughing fits between 2-6 a.m. every.single.morning. Half the time I'm able to get back to sleep and the rest of the time... Let's just say I'm perpetually sleep deprived. He'll reevaluate my progress when I go in for the next Herceptin treatment on Wednesday.

I feel better than I have in months, despite the cough, like I've turned a corner both physically and mentally. I've actually had some energy this week! It's a wonderful feeling and I'm praying it continues.

I'd thought about putting up some freezer meals before my surgery, but then felt so yukky before the original surgery date that I put it right out of my mind. With surgery rescheduled, and feeling more energetic, I revisited the idea. This week I've slowly worked through six recipes and have 16 packages prepped and frozen! Several simply involved chopping meat and vegetables and throwing them in freezer bags, but a couple I precooked in the crockpot and then froze. One was a recipe for Thai chicken curry which I ate for dinner that night and put up the remainder. It was good! Pinterest is a wonderful tool for projects like this. I'm going to put up a few more meals this week, so post surgery meal prep will be a lot easier for Ivan (and/or me).

I even had enough energy one day to clean the apartment (in the five months we've lived here, Ivan's done 90% of the cleaning). It took all day, with lots of breaks between chores, but the apartment is small enough that it was totally doable in a day. While I'd love a second bedroom one of these days, having a small place is definitely advantageous for our current situation.

I feel like I've had more mental clarity, too. Chemo brain turned my brain to mush... concentrating was so difficult, and I often couldn't get through a complete thought, much less a sentence. Not even kidding when I say the last blog post took me three weeks to finish. I had to keep going back and chipping away at it, bit by bit. I'm still not where I was, and by mid-afternoon I'm both mentally and physically exhausted, but having that energy in the morning/early afternoon has been an absolute delight!

One of the books I've read recently made me even more grateful that chemo brain is a temporary thing. "One Hundred Names For Love" by Diane Ackerman is about their experience when her husband had a massive stroke and was left unable to communicate for a long time, and chronicles their strategies for helping him gain back at least some of his speech and writing abilities (he was an author of dozens of books before his stroke). I found it fascinating, but also a little frightening to think how quickly one can lose the ability to do something as vital as communicating.

On the other end of the spectrum, I read "Eat Cake" by Jeanne Ray which was a fun but "fluffy" book... very light reading and oh, so entertaining. While others close their eyes and imagine themselves on a beach or sitting in a café in Vienna, the protagonist in this book pictures herself inside a cake -- like literally inside it! That thought made me smile, and the entire book was just a fun read, because everything piled on at once and she needed a lot of cake to get through it: her husband loses his job, her 16 year old daughter is...well, 16... her mom has been living with them a year and then her dad has to move in after an accident and her parents, who have been divorced for decades, despise one another... It sounds awful but it's actually quite hilarious. It was good to follow up such a serious book like Ackerman's with this lighthearted romp.

It would appear my hair is going to be the same color it was before I lost it: bits are coming in dark and other parts lighter, which is what it was like pre-chemo. It's still really short -- like I said, my hair has always been slow to grow -- but more noticeable day by day. I can't get the nursery rhyme "Fuzzy Wuzzy was a Bear" out of my head. haha!

Ivan is doing great nine days after surgery. His follow-up appointment with the surgeon is Friday and we'll find out if he needs to continue with any restrictions. I think the hardest part for him has been not being able to pick up the grandkids, or play with them in the pool. He can still do other things with them, though, so it's all good. When they were here Tuesday, they spent a good part of their time piled on the recliner with him, reading and talking. Those kids sure love their Papa! And he loves them :)

We'll get to spend some time with the other two grands in a couple of months! Jon, Nat and the girls will be flying in for my birthday week in early December. I'm so excited I want to do the happy dance! I'll be six weeks past surgery by then, but won't have started radiation, so the timing couldn't be more perfect. And I think December in Vegas is going to be fabulous with temperatures in the high 50s/low 60s. Way better than freezing cold, snow and ice like we'd be having in the Midwest.

I didn't think we could have a Christmas tree because this is such a small apartment, but the other day I happened to think of putting it between the TV and rolling library cart. It would have to be a small tree and would make the space feel a little crowded, but it's only for a few weeks... I just love having a tree so much... will have to give it some more thought. Can you believe Christmas is only 87 days away?!

Hopefully I'll feel up to doing some sewing between now and then, because there are a few things I'd like to make the grandkids. To that end we've been on the lookout for a sewing table that would fit in our bedroom; we needed something fairly narrow but long, and I was thrilled when we found one on Facebook marketplace recently. Next up is getting my sewing machine tuned up. It was starting to give me fits last year as I worked on the fabric fort I made for Simon and Betsy for Christmas; I meant to take it in for a tune-up then but got sick... and, well, here we are ten months later.

Christmas... so many memories, thoughts and emotions wrapped up in this one holiday. I know everyone has their favorite holiday, and Christmas has always been mine. I think because it was my mom's and she went all out to make it as magical as possible for my sister and me. Becoming a follower of Christ in my teens, and understanding how His birth affected the world, only added to my love for it. And now, with all that's happened this year, it brings yet another perspective and motivates me to focus on all that it means.