Tuesday, January 23, 2007

We're Exhausted~

This photo is to show you just how tired we are. Ugh!

What a day it's been. Rick and I left the house before 7:00am. We arrived in Seattle around 8:20 (the traffic was terrible) and the girls met us shortly after. Although the day was very overwhelming, we learned a great deal about what we should expect from Rick's treatments. He will most likely feel sick/nausea (but they have great meds for this), his white count will probably drop, he might lose his hair (but not everyone does with this chemo cocktail), mouth sores are almost a guarantee and he'll have a diminished appetite. Nothing here seems impossible to overcome. Remember, you've gotta DREAM BIG.

The Port-A-Cath that was installed in Rick's chest today is a pretty neat apparatus. It is implanted completely under the skin and it has a tube that has been fed down a major artery and into his heart area. (I know that didn't sound very professional but I couldn't remember everything...trust me, it's going to work great) We have an ointment to rub on the area before his treatment each time to numb the skin and he'll never even know he's having poision pumped into him. Ok, that might have been stretching it a bit, but it will help with pain during his treatments.

He had a PET scan today to check out his whole body (hey, hey, get your minds out of the gutter ladies), and a CT scan so they have some baselines to compare his IMPROVEMENTS to. I'm a firm believer that 2 months from now we will have great news to share with our family and friends.

We were going to take Amy and Angie out for dinner tonight after all the tests were complete, but they decided to come back to our house early (after they told us he would be in the PET scan for at least 3 hours) to start a fire and load the garage with more firewood. I'm telling you...they are keepers...and NO they are not for sale or rent! Since we didn't take the girls out for dinner and Rick hadn't eaten since dinner last night (which by the way was a wonderful pot of soup prepared by our friend and neighbor, Erika) he chose none other than DICK's for dinner. It made him happy and that's all I cared about.

Until tomorrow, keep dreaming big!
Doreen

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We had heard through the grapevine that all Rick wanted during his surgery at Xmas was a cheeseburger... so we are glad he finally got one. We hope he had lots of fries and a milkshake! We read your blogs often and it helps keep us updated. Thanks for you candor! We are thinking about you!
Love, Russ and Varian