Weekend

 ✓ chemo on Thursday

✓ chemo on Friday

I am now 1/3 of the way done with chemo!  

Having Olivia there with me was wonderful.  She stayed with us which was also wonderful.  She was 100% an easy keeper + she brought me 12 wrapped gifts for a twelve days of Christmas.

I was at the cancer center for 8 1/2 hours again on Thursday.  I didn't have any big reactions, but they kept it at about half speed.  The nurse reassured me over and over that having reactions again would be "extremely rare" but he also had me move to the section of the room where the chairs are close to the nurse station "just in case."  Mixed message....

We met with the doctor and they hooked me up and we chatted in the morning and then Mark brought us lunch (sandwiches from Jimmy Johns).  In the afternoon we moved to the table on the other side of the room and played Skip Bo (which my mom had bought for the occasion).  One Christmas break when we were in college we played Skip Bo a lot.  And Olivia tried to cheat a lot.

We couldn't remember exactly how to play and we didn't want to read the instructions so we kept glancing at them and handing them back and forth.  We needed Marianne or Adam there.  I think oldest kids are the instruction readers.  Just tell me how to play.

I think we finally figured it out and Olivia did try to cheat, but I stopped her.  We laughed a whole lot and hopefully didn't disturb anyone.  I also told her about the plot to Hot Frosty which Emma and I watched on Netflix last year and we cackled and cried from laughing so much.  Emma and I need to find a new so-bad-it's-good Christmas movie this year.  I wish Olivia could join us.

My friend Misty brought us delicious beef stew for dinner and then we played Qwixx.  I went to bed, but before I did, I ordered Qwixx for Olivia from Amazon and it was on the porch in the morning.  I am a Qwixx evangelist!

I was really tired and also awake for a few hours in the wee hours.  Gotta love the combination of steroids that keep you awake and anti nausea that makes you sleepy!

We stopped by the Lindon temple on the way to chemo.

It is so lovely.

Once I was hooked up, Olivia and I were both on our laptops doing Christmas shopping.  I had Old Navy Super Cash and I didn't need anything so I placed an order for her, delivered to her house and hopefully not to QE accidentally because I have done that several times (she's the main Old Navy person I buy for and sometimes I send her some pants for Mark....)

We also took advantage of some Lands End sales.  The time flew by.  Mark came and I can only have two visitors at a time, so Adam went to sit in the van and work.  He had his phone and computer out and I guess left his backpack on top of his car.

We went to lunch and the backpack flew off his car on North County Blvd.  He didn't realize.

After a lovely lunch at First Watch, we said good-bye to Olivia and Adam and I drove back to the cancer center to see if he'd left his backpack there.  He hadn't.  He had an air tag inside and this could be an ad for air tags, because it let him know that his backpack was on North County Blvd.  It is a very busy road!

His backpack was found as well as the contents scattered about.  Luckily his laptop and phone weren't inside.  He had a pair of sunglasses and a pair of reading glasses that were absolutely shattered.  He had mints and Werther's caramels that he uses as cough drops.  Both were obliterated.  The air tag seemed broken, but he could put it back together.

  The air tag is the hero of the story and there it is, in pieces.

His wallet took a beating too....

I spent the rest of the afternoon resting.  I was napping when Ami and Molly brought me dinner.  Also gifts.  They are so good to me.  They brought the happiest water bottle with pink and red smiley faces all over it.  I told Mark, "When the right person knows your favorite color, it is magic."  They also brought me some socks with books all over them.

I went to bed early, but sleep was a little elusive again.

Saturday was a whole lot more sitting around.  Adam and Mark went on a big grocery shopping trip to get everything for when Braeden and Anna and QE are here this week as well as Thanksgiving.  Adam was going to go to the hospital to visit a man in our ward who just had a kidney transplant.  He asked if I wanted to go with him and it seemed doable.  I just needed to sit in the car and sit at the hospital and he said that he would get a wheelchair so I wouldn't even have to walk in the hall at the hospital.

It all went to plan.  There were three other people from our ward visiting and I talked with everyone and felt fine.  Then, all of the sudden, I didn't feel fine.  I felt like I was going to faint.  I told Adam and we said our good-byes and he wheeled me into the hall.  The next thing I knew, there were about six nurses swarmed around me taking my pulse and putting an oxygen monitor on me and taking my blood pressure and Adam was telling me to breathe.  There were some EMTs there with a gurney and I thought they just happened along but Adam told me later that they were there for me.

I was so out of it! 

Adam explained later that when we left the room, I slumped over and he kept me from falling out of the wheelchair and alerted a nurse for help.  It all felt surreal and I was embarrassed that I was out in the world if I couldn't handle it any better than that.

They kept asking me if I wanted to go to the ER and I didn't know, but Adam said yes.  He wanted to get me some fluids.  So we went.  One of the nurses took command of the chair and we went a back way and bypassed the waiting room and got right in.  They hooked me up to lots of monitors and took some blood and gave me a liter of IV fluid.  I had an EKG, which felt a little like overkill, but I wasn't really in a state to argue.

Finally after a few hours, the doctor returned and said that my bloodwork showed that I was very anemic and compared to the bloodwork the hospital had in their records from August (when I had my bone marrow biopsy I guess?), it was not going well.  She wondered if I had internal bleeding.  I asked if it could be related to my lymphoma or chemo and she didn't seem to think so.  I pulled up my records on my phone from my cancer doctor and she saw that my hematocrit and hemoglobin have been a hot mess for a while so that made her feel a little better.

She asked if I had a wheelchair at home. (No.) She asked if I had stairs. (Yes.)  She was mulling whether to let me leave without a blood transfusion and Adam said, "Our son does the laundry.  She doesn't need to go up and down the stairs."

How desperate were we to get out of the hospital that we thought our son doing the laundry would tip the scales?!?  It cracked me up later when I thought about it.

She finally said I could go if I could prove that I was ambulatory.  They unhooked me from everything, but kept everything attached to me in case I didn't pass the test I guess.  I had to walk up and down the hall and I tried to look as ambulatory as possible.

I passed and we went home.  I told Adam I felt really dumb about all of it.  He said that maybe it was a tender mercy that we were together and in a hospital because if it had happened at home, I could have fallen and hit my head.  Also, I do think the fluids were what I needed.  They revived me quite a bit.  

Sunday I stayed home.  I watched church using the link Adam sent me and tried to do family history, but didn't have much success.  I am definitely more sick this time around.  Emma came over and we played Skip Bo and ate soup and generally enjoyed our time together.

I slept 11 hours last night.

I hope I am up for school tomorrow.