Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Back on Track

Barbara has told me that I should do a blog update even though there is not much to report. She says that my loyal readers might not realize that "no news is good news".

Anyway, the good news is that I am back on my "normal" chemo schedule - which means I am on a 21 day cycle. I go into Dana Farber on Days 1 and 8 (Wednesdays) and then I have a week off. All I do when I am in there is get poked and prodded and they give me a shot of Velcade. Seems like a lot of effort to spend 5 seconds getting a shot. They also draw some blood. I looked up "Bloodletting" on the internet and this seems pretty close to what they do to me. It claimed that this went out with the the Middle Ages. Apparently not.

Anyway, it seems that I am back on a regular schedule.

You may recall that I had a small stroke back at the end of October. They took me off of chemo for a while, and put me on blood thinners. No problem until mid-December when I banged my leg and apparently triggered some sort of internal bruise. My leg started to swell up. I talked to two doctors who both told me to continue with the blood thinners. My leg continued to swell. I went for my previously scheduled chemo appointment. The oncologist looked at my purple leg and said, "You/re not still taking blood thinners are you? So, I stopped taking the blood thinners for a few weeks and they suspended chemo. It took several weeks for the leg to get back close to normal.

So now I am back on a regular schedule. The difference from before the stroke is a daily shot of a blood thinner and a couple of additional pills. The pills are small enough that I hardly notice. Also, I am no longer taking Revlimid - which was one of the primary chemo drugs. It remains to be seen how well this regimen will work. My numbers went up when they took me off of chemo. This was expected, but I was hoping that they would come back down faster than they have been. We'll see what happens over the next few cycles.

Meanwhile, and unrelated to my disease, the device we use for video streaming had been giving us trouble. I ordered one of those Amazon Fire TV Sticks. We have been using it to watch a series where one of the main characters is named Alexis - which is very close to the activation word on our Amazon Echo. So, now we have the characters on the TV calling out and we have our Amazon Echo responding. It is like we have our computerized machines talking to each other. I am not sure what they need us for. 

1 comment:

  1. Love your image of your Amaxon Fire Stick talking to Alexa:)
    Happy for any and all news - good, bad, boring, interesting - though I suppose if you ever published a boring blog we would all wonder who had abducted the real you - and where they took you, and was it fun, and did you drive them nuts until they released you - haha...

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