Vote early, vote often, vote Lennys!

Hi all,

Well, last week's post was mostly about that fever scare, so I thought I'd do something a little more light this week. But before I get to that, you probably heard about Patrick Swayze and his battle with pancreatic cancer, and how he was in the hospital on antibiotics this week. That's the same thing we were concerned about. It's all about the immune system.

That said, my numbers were all down this week, as was to be expected for a week after the last chemo treatment. They were actually a little lower than I wanted them to be, so I was sort of bummed about that, but Dr. Stan wasn't concerned and still thinks things are going well, and that I'll be able to start getting back to normal not too long after the last chemo round. I guess that I'm probably just getting more impatient as we're getting towards the end of the scheduled chemo sessions. I don't think I counted on how lousy it all makes you feel with all of the little side effects, and figured I'd be able to be up and around a lot quicker. But one thing this has taught me has been to learn to be more patient, especially in matters I can't control. Like WM.

But enough of all that. I'm feeling better, and it's time for me to share some other things I've learned so far in this whole experience:


THE TOP TEN GOOD THINGS ABOUT HAVING CANCER!

10. Heated blankets are mmmmmnice when you're in for an 8-hour transfusion

9. I'm a shoo-in to win the weight loss challenge

8. Currently learning Japanese through daily Godzilla movie marathons

7. Distinguished company:

6. Home confinement= pants are optional!

5. Finally feel like I'm getting my money's worth from all those years of insurance premiums

4. Saved $9 by not being able to go out to that crummy "Day the Earth Stood Still" remake

3. Hours of fun trying to find something that rhymes with "Macroglobulinemia"

2. No bad hair days

1. Hmmmm. Well, I thought I had ten, but I guess not. Tell you what, send me an email with anything you can come up with, and I'll compile 'em for next time...

And now for some REALLY good news!


The Lennys will be playing our first show of '09 on Saturday, March 14th, at Mad Maggie's in Elgin! This is a brand-new place right downtown with multi-levels of entertainment and a great sound system! We had a date scheduled here for November that we had to postpone/cancel, but we'll definitely make this new date worth the wait!

In the meantime, I'd like to ask for some help! It's time for Suburban Nitelife's 'Best of the Burbs' contest, and we were alerted by one of our friends that we'd been nominated for a bunch of categories! But we've got to keep getting votes to stay in the race, so here's how you can help out:

-Go to their website at nitelife.org

-You'll need to register and set yourself up with a username and password if you don't have one

-Click into the 'Best of the Burbs' menu

-Vote!

The Lennys are nominated in the following categories:
-Best Cover Band
-Best Classic Rock Band
-Best Musician Bass (Dave)
-Best Musician Drummer (Johnny)

Cory was nominated as best guitarist under his other band's name, so rather than split his chances by nominating him with us, we're just voting for him with After the Fight!

Also, John's other band has been nominated for Best New Band and Best Under 21 Band, so check into those categories and vote for "The Takeouts"!

The winners don't actually win anything but bragging rights, but that's good enough for us! But they say that there's daily prizes randomly awarded to voters, so vote every day, and good luck!

That's about it for now. I'll post some new charts next Monday with all the latest numbers- it's always more fun to show charts with improvement, and I'm confident about next week!

Cold Turkey

Hey all-

'Cold Turkey'? What's this, a post about Christmas dinner leftovers? Nah, we finished most of those by New Years. It's more in reference to the 'temperature's rising, fever is high' first line of the song, which is pretty much what happened to me within 48 hours of my last post of how everything was going oh so well.

Now the one thing that these doctors and staff will tell you is to watch out for infection. In fact, I think they want you to worry about that more than the cancer itself. So fevers? Bad, generally speaking. Dr. Stan's rule of thumb warning from the beginning has been that if my temperature got to 100.5, I'd be heading off to the hospital to get hooked up to an IV of antibiotics. So when I was sort of sluggish and out of it on New Year's Eve (not even making it to midnight for the first time in probably 37 years), then woke up with a low fever on New Year's Day, it was not the best way to start 2009.

It was a fairly low fever, usually below 100, but sometimes getting down to normal levels. We checked with the doctor 'on call' for the holiday, and got pretty much the same mantra: nothing to really worry about, give us a call if it gets to 100.5. Friday the fever hung in there, and after calling the office we found that this week's Leukine shots (for boosting the white blood cells) often have the side effect of a low grade fever. Would have been nice to know that in advance! On the other hand, I have had these shots before, and don't seem to have had the fever before. We'll ask more about that Monday. At any rate, Friday was the last of the shots, and Saturday night saw the last of the fever. I can take the fever or the indigestion or the numbness in the fingers, as long as I know it's to be expected or a possibility.

LATER....

The fifth chemo session was Monday; my temperature was 97 degrees, and everything went as fine as it could go. I'm usually pretty alert until they put a shot of Benedryl in the IV, then I'm out for a while. Went home and slept a lot afterwards, but no new fever. We've got more Leukine shots this week, but won't be starting them until Thursday, probably because my white blood cells were up to 6.7 over last week's 2.1. The chemo will knock it back down over the course of the week, so starting a little later makes sense. It'll be interesting to see if the fever comes back when the shots commence. In the meantime, there's the anti-nausea pills (Emend), and the Prednisone and all of its less-than-stellar side effects for 5 days. Bleah. No need to go into details, but it really makes you appreciate the time when you're NOT taking it.

I mentioned numbness earlier on: I started to experience some of that in my fingertips a couple of weeks ago and mentioned it at the next checkup. Dr. Stan says it's not an unusual side effect of one of the drugs in my chemo treatment (Oncovin aka Vincristine). You can look it up in Wikipedia to read about all of the side effects, but the only thing I'm getting so far is a little numbness and weakness in my left hand. To prevent further complications, the Oncovin was not included in Monday's chemo and will be left out for the last one as well, and I'm taking a B complex vitamin daily to correct the problem. It's more of an occasional nuisance than a real problem; it doesn't effect my typing, but it makes using the touchpad unusual sometimes.

But in spite of this new bump in the road all is well, the lines on the graphs are still going the right way, and we're five down, one to go!

Alleluia!

Getting Better All the Time

Yikes! It's been awhile since I've updated, and thanks to all of you who have emailed me about that. It's not that I haven't been well; far from it. In fact, every day in every way I am getting weller and weller. Or gooder and gooder. Something like that. I'm fine.

And I've got proof! I finally assembled all of my 'numbers' into some official-looking graphs for your entertainment. Check 'em out!

So the hemoglobin is the most important number as far as I'm concerned. That's the red blood cells, and if you remember, you get dizzy and fall down if that number gets too low (like 5.3) The increase in hemoglobin also shows that the disease that prevents the production of red blood cells is being wiped out. If there was a pre-chemo chart for this, it would've shown a steady decrease over the last year or more. The norm for me should be 14 or 15, so I've got a ways to go, but 12/29's number of 9.8 was a new high, and the 1/5 number should be over 10!



The white blood cells represent the immune system, or your ability to fight infection and disease. The chemo drugs knock this down a lot, and this is probably what most of the shots Kathy gives me are for, as 'boosts' to keep it up after and between rounds.

The platelets are what you need for blood coagulation. Before I started the chemotherapy treatments, the doctors and staff were cautioning me not to cut or bruise myself. I guess I was about the same as a hemophiliac at that point. We've gotten a few 'do-it-yourself' shots for this as well, although as you can see on the chart the platelets rebound pretty well after about a week.

You might notice the early weeks of the charts are missing some data; that's either because we didn't get a copy at the doctor's office, or perhaps because it got lost in the shuffle in the early days of all of this.

And that's one of the reasons why I think it took me so long to start posting again: the weekly checkups, shots, chemo rounds, etc, have all become the new Normal for me, and as such the whole routine just seemed kind of repetitive and well, boring.

But things are going well, so that's news enough I guess. And I'll be posting more and keep updating the charts from week to week, as well as any other info that seems interesting.

Like this: sharp eyed TV viewer and my nephew Tyler was watching a rerun of the doctor comedy 'Scrubs' and one of the subplots concerned a guy who seemed to be a hypochondriac who kept coming in and complaining that he didn't feel right in one way or another. In order to get him to stop coming to the hospital and taking up valuable doctor time, they threaten to give him a bone marrow test, which consists of 'sticking an enormous needle all the way through your hip, and it's very, very, very, excruciatingly painful' Of course the guy agrees to the test, and it turns out he has: Waldenstrom's Macroglobulinemia! So if everybody had been paying more attention to this show six years ago it would have been obvious what was wrong with me. Or maybe not; they did even admit on the show that there are almost no symptoms for WM. Anyway, it seems like there's reruns of Scrubs on every other hour, and it's Season 2, episode 12- watch for it! Good catch , Ty!

If anyone else out there hears anything about WM out there anywherer let me know and I'll post it here!