Day 14: Waking Up A Little!

It has been hard getting posts out this last week between exhibiting new symptoms, then being part of the "symptom demolition derby."

Dr. Jagasia told me once, "We try to control everything we can prior to transplant because after transplant, we have no more control! After transplant, we can only react."

So they've been reacting.

My short term memory was already terrible, and radiation and chemo has made it worse (though possibly only temporarily). So while I can promise anything I write about today really did happen, it may not have happened in the order or on the day to which I attributed it.

Strained an Eyeball While Vomiting

After they pulled the central line from my chest because it as infected, and put the PICC line, they knew they may need me to take more meds orally because there might not be as much room on the IV pole. One medicine they began to give orally was Zofran.

Zofran by IV works great for me, and I've been almost nausea-free through all of chemo and radition ... almost. Orally? Not so much.

So, early that morning I woke and raced to the sink, where there's a basin for me to throw up in and hoped that any noises I made there would wake my wife to call the nurse. Of course, I soon saw that there was nothing to worry about. I could have called the nurse. My body used every muscle from my pinkie toes to my scalp to wrench something out of my completely empty stomach, but I got nary a drop.

Interesting exercise program, though. Picture a lovely woman's voice with some light jazz in the background. "Squeeze every muscle in your body ... now harder ... don't worry about what contortions you're thrown into ... now harder ... now ... release."

"Repeat 20 times."

You know, I think when I'm done, I'm going to complain about some of the methods used by the trainers in this weight loss/dietary training regimen I've checked into.

Still, I lost 10 pounds the first month. Have you stuck to your New Year's resolution?

All kidding aside, at the end of that, I looked at my left eye and saw what you see in the picture above.

No one seemed concerned. They said, "Let's just watch it", but in about 4 hours the swelling was gone, and it was almost back to normal. In the two pictures above, you can see the difference.

What is really odd is that last week a friend back home had the same thing happen to her when she sneezed while she was cooking dinner. It's the only other time in my life that I've heard such a thing. Imagine that. In the 2637th and 2638th weeks of my life I see something happen twice that I've never seen before.