Good Day

Dave really gave me a scare last night with the abdominal pain at bedtime. Today he says it was probably having eaten too much at one time. His appetite is coming back but is unreliable and he occasionally is famished. He is trying to space out his meals and keep the volume low at each one. That's a good idea for anyone, but he's always been a one-big-meal-a-day kind of guy with small snacks in between; he will have to have more snacks and avoid that big meal at least for now. I understand that suddenly famished feeling while healing; I've had plenty of that myself. But I am now over 2 weeks past surgery, and hopefully can normalize my eating pretty soon, as I continue to want to nip the post treatment weight gain in the bud.

We are currently in the middle of a deep freeze, with highs around freezing and lows well below. I would have liked to go in to my clinic today as there was a holiday pot-luck for members and patients, Roland White's Bluegrass band performing and an opportunity for me to sit in, but of course Dave's followup appointment was scheduled for about the same time and there was no way he was in shape to go from clinic to clinic; it was enough to just get to his appointment. But his doctors were satisfied with his progress and removed his staples, exchanging them for steri-strips, and pronounced his wound healing to be right on schedule. I still feel that we need to come up with a nutritional strategy for the future, but for the time being, he just needs to eat his AMCAP diet-as many calories as possible. Lots of smoothies, peanut butter, juice, and anything that appeals to him basically.

I am feeling fairly well. I'm able to sleep on my right side for a while at night, which is huge for me, taking a lot of pressure off of my back. And I'm down to far less medication, thinking I may try to sleep without the narcotics tonight as my Salicin B, the herbal anti-inflammitant, has arrived. It worked well for me after my bout of shingles last year. Of course that pain was not as serious as what I'm experiencing now, so it remains to be seen how the stuff will do.  In the meantime, I've got what I need to sleep well and warmly; I still feel like a lucky girl even if outrageous fortune keeps on slinging those arrows.

Saturday I will get my first haircut since the chemo began. It will be a trim; I still don't have a whole heck of a lot of hair, but what I have is kind of messy. I like the look of the boy-cut, and am comfortable keeping that style, but it's shaggy around the ears and on the back of my neck. To some degree, I hate to lose even a fraction of an inch of it; my head is no longer cold all of the time, but still not warm, and  I'd love to be able to feel okay about my grooming without losing any of the precious growth, but it will grow on, I know it will. Some say that cutting hair increases its growth rate so I'm going to hope for that-I sure as heck hope that's true. I'm so grateful to have eyebrows again that I've been hesitant to have them shaped and trimmed, but I'm due for that too. It will have to wait a bit because I'm not sure who should do it, but the young woman who cuts Dave's hair does a great job for him, and I'm sure will do well for me.