Wednesday, February 13, 2008 8:32 PM, CST

Hi All,
The first round is behind me and I’m ready for rounds two through six. All in all Round 1 was a piece of cake. Aside from some severe fatigue last Tuesday and mild tiredness with body aches on Wednesday-Friday, I felt fine. The neuropathy was minimal and the neuropathy is the side effect I dread the most; it hurts in the weirdest way.
I also decided not to go with the Avastin. Ultimately it comes down to the fact that I’m more afraid of the treatment than I am of the cancer. As I mentioned before, it’s not too late to add Avastin. I can add it in future rounds of FolFox or when that stops working and I have to switch to FolFiri, I can supplement Avastin then. When the day comes that I’m more afraid of the cancer than the medicine, I’ll add it.
Chemotherapy goes to work in your system immediately. From what I understand (and please correct me if I’m wrong—Heather T, Donna H and Faith—you’d be some of the best to do this) the drugs do their magic within the first 72 hours they’re in your body. They go to work and then get processed through your kidneys and then you’re done. You spend the rest of the time between infusions recovering. Now, the interesting thing about that fact is that I developed a cough in December and wasn’t sure if it was related to the cancer. Within the first few days of treatment my cough had appreciably improved. I’m still a little “rattly” and will hope that this also goes away with future treatments. I’ll keep you posted.
I can’t say for sure that the cough was related to the cancer but it’s quite a coincidence that the cough improved shortly after my infusion don’t you think? I’ll take it as a sign that it’s working because it gives me comfort and hope in these long three months between scans.
I go for Round 2 on Monday, February 25; they gave me February vacation off—yay!!!!! We’re usually sick for either Christmas vacation or February vacation. We were healthy over Christmas, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed that we can enjoy next week and be healthy.
For those of you who haven’t heard me complain about this (and I apologize for the redundancy to those who have), I have to tell you that I have been stuck in my house for a week—an entire week. The last time I left my house was last Wednesday. Lauren was sick from Wednesday to Monday and Katie was sick from Saturday to Monday. Then I had my brakes fixed on Tuesday (okay, I was out of the house for 20 minutes on Tuesday to go pick up my car) and then today we were snowed in—or was it iced in? Or was it rained in? Or was it all of the above? J
So I will be like a freed prisoner tomorrow!
I’m going to end the posting by talking about the stupid things people say…..Yesterday, we had a situation with a company with which we do business. The customer service rep and I had quite a terse conversation yesterday (and when I say terse, yes what I really mean is I got a little testy, maybe a little sarcastic and definitely a little snotty—okay a lot snotty) because I felt I was correct in my understanding of the situation and she sounded a little ill-informed and down right ignorant. I ended the conversation by strongly suggesting she do her research and get back to me today. Well she did. And guess who was right? ME!!! To make a long story short (not one of my strong points), she informed me as to how the situation was fixed and then apologized for the mis-confusion. Mis-confusion? Is that a word? Coincidently she used this word on the same day that Roger Clemens accused Andy Petit of mis-remembering! J
Thank you to BJ and Debbie for your visit, the flowers, the shell, the coffee, the munchkins and the laughs.
Thank you to Auntie Jean and Uncle Bob who sent us oranges from Florida (next time can you send the nice weather?? J )
Have a great week and I’ll let you know how Round 2 goes!
Love,
Kim