One Less Thing To Worry About

So, on friday, Jason texts me to come home immediately, that he needs me. Upon further proding, I find it's because he's "injured". So I hike my butt home from across campus to find Jason with a melon sized ankle, laying in bed moaning all cute and pathetic like. After 30 minutes of nagging, we spend 45 minutes hobbling him to the car so that I can drive him to urgent care. Did you catch that? Yes, I DROVE. First time in months, and I would like to say that I was more terrified than Jason. Ok, maybe not more than Jason, he was injured AND terrified for his life, so I won't embellish my own fear, just try to describe it semi-accurately. I was actually more scared AFTER the doctor's, because I now I had my packaged and bandaged up parcel, and wanted to deliver him safely to our apartment during rush hour. This is also after missing some of my medicine...1 hour late, not a life and death issue, but definitely enough for me to be paranoid about being safe  for t...

Well, now that the school year has ended things have gotten ridiculously quiet. All that I'm focusing on these days is trying to be a good sport about perpetual nausea, packing up my life in baggage that is small enough that it won't weigh down a gazillion pound airplane (I take a LOT of medication!!). Sadly, last night, while taking my aunt Lisa out to dinner, I had a big ole seizure. Jason and I were in the middle of the "corn" story. This is where I totally freaked out Jason and his entire family at the breakfast table one day while visiting. Jason told me the word for corn in Cantonese, only for me to then repeat it back to him in even better Cantonese than he can speak himself. His poor dad didn't know how to react, and I don't know how I did it, I just did! But no, we didn't practice, we had no idea corn was going to be on the breakfast menu that day. =) It must be rubbing off on me or something! But yeah, I had my first seizure in three weeks, a...

Well, I survived maintenance chemo, and today's bloodwork says that my platelets are doing good, so life returns to... errr... normal? The only lasting symptom of this last round with chemo is what Jason called "grazing." This reminds me of the horses over at Dad's, and Jason is alluding to similar behavior except I'm not gorging like "the boys." I eat a little here, little there, a yogurt,a apple sauce, peanut butter on toast, some honey dew, cereal with soymilk, a few carrots... etc... I don't ever eat a lot at once or an actual meal. Meat, meh. I'll eat imitation crab, that's about it, and I prefer it cold. Anything cooked or greasy just does not seem appetizing at all, and no, I'm not pregnant, I'm too poisonous for childbearing at the moment. It also could be that I actually have time to run and grab this or that, rather than anything to do with symptoms. A whole lotta talkin about nothing probably. Jason bought me a plane ti...

Due to time, this one is gonna be short. Sorry for the hiatus, I'm busy with work and also back on the strict pill schedule because I'm on maintenance chemo now. Let me tell you what, taking a double dose of what I took before for chemo is NO JOKE. I feel like such a whiner about all the stuff before. My first night of maintenance chemo I finally got a true idea of what its like to FIGHT cancer. I'll try to keep this short, I spent from 4am to 6:30am dry heaving every 20 minutes like clockwork, straining so hard I caused a migraine, sobbing, praying to God for forgiveness to every person I may have ever wronged, not served to the best of my ability, etc... because I felt the full force of what I was doing to my body, poisoning it. As a natural reaction, it wanted the poison out, and didn't seem to care if that meant I would need to hack up my entire set of internal organs. I spent all day yesterday trying to get my barrings, they came at 4pm, thankfully. Right in tim...

So, for Cinco de Mayo I got some great news from my doctors. This post is going to be short because everyone is going nuts wanting to hear the details! My dad is probably going to give me more details because he's getting the full report as I only got a one page print-out.... BUT.... The tumor has NOT grown, it has stopped "infiltrating" the surrounding brain tissue, meaning that it's not invading my normal tissue anymore. The normal brain tissue that was swollen post-surgery has now gone down and that leaves a gap between my tissue and the tumor, which is good. (It's like a castle moat!) Then, also, behind my tumor it has receded away from the brain tissue as well. AND.... it SHRUNK! it has decreased a small amount since my post-surgery MRI, meaning that the radiation and chemo did not just make it stop growing, it made it SMALLER! Whoop! This sometimes happens, but it NOT common, and therefore I did BETTER than expected! Whoop! I start my maintenan...

So, I have a LOT to say now that it's been almost a week since I've last written, please do, it's been a mixture of joy and pain this week: On Friday, I went to a "prom"!!!!! It was for graduate students, and it was on a boat. We cruised down the hudson river, had a good dinner, dessert, dancing, and I DRESSED UP! It's the first time I wore mascara since my surgery, which is a huge deal to me because I used to be a person who couldn't go a day without it. Ever since I popped that cherry I can't stop. It's like riding a bicycle, easy-peesy. The prom was with Jason's coworkers, whom I adore. It was fun to tell embarrassing stories about Jason and to share in the jokes he reports from work. This weekend was BUSY. I accompanied Jason to work and then did uber grocery shopping on saturday. On sunday, I went to brunch with my friends here in Albany. 8 of us gathered at Cafe Madison, which we call "Madisons" and we had our favorite break...