June 12, 2008 - Shingles Only

First I must say Happy Birthday to Carson, my childhood friend. I love ya like a sister!

Next, I saw the doctor today and he could see that the whopping 800 mg dosage of Acyclovir 3 times per day is working to send those shingles back from whence they came. After 10 days of that heavy dosage schedule, he'll put me on 400 mg once per day until chemo is over. I talked to him about the contagious nature of my shingles because I wanted to take a friend's child home from school. He looked at me and said very seriously, "I wouldn't do it." I asked if it could be spread airborne, and he said it could. So, I had to tell my buddy to find another ride for her kid. That stunk. Once this little 1-inch square of shingles are dried up, I'm no longer contagious.

Nurse Anthony attempted to draw blood. I always hate it when a nurse sticks the needle in and I don't see red, because that means they are gonna wiggle the needle around under my skin. THAT gives me the heebie jeebies. As he was wiggling the needle, Nurse Clarissa walked by, so I said to Anthony in a whining voice, so that Clarissa could hear, "Clarissa always gets it the first time." Ummmmmmmm.... back up ... did I really just say that? I apologized to Anthony. He told me it was ok (but to me it wasn't). He promised to get it right the next time. He kept his promise.

My blood levels were good enough to do chemo this coming Monday. These red and white blood cell booster shots are pretty awesome and allow me to stay on my schedule of being done by July 28.

Hey - remember that cold I got before chemo? Yeah, the one I took antibiotics for? Well, it's STILL here. The antibiotics improved it (no more yellow/green stuff), but I'm still coughing on a daily basis.

I watched a recording of Oprah last night. She featured a story of a young girl, Kris Carr, who has stage four cancer and has found a way to keep her cancer from growing. She wrote a book called Crazy, Sexy, Cancer. She's amazing. I'm going to read that book. I looked at her website today, and it put me in a great mood. http://crazysexycancer.blogspot.com/

The other story on Oprah was about a man, Randy Pausch, from Carnegie Mellon University. He has terminal pancreatic cancer, and although extremely unfortunate, his story is extremely motivational. http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

Thanks for reading!!!