Yesterday night I sweat through 3 sets of scrubs and a whole set of bedsheets all before 2am. It’s never not annoying to be shocked awake in your own puddle of sweat. When I woke up at 4:30 I noticed my pillow had a few hairs on it which was a little unusual consider they had just changed my bedsheets 2 hours before. I reached to the top of my head, lightly pulled on my hair, and easily removed several strands of hair with no effort. It has been 12 days from my first day of chemo and I was right on time to start losing my hair.
While I clearly prepared myself for the situation by dying my hair a few weeks back, I couldn’t help get into a slight panic with my heart racing a little bit. I asked myself “How bad is this going to get before I shave it all off?” It is interesting seeing the length of blonde hair connected to the 1cm length of black hair that just ends. There’s no root, the hair just stops.
Just in the morning alone, I lost half my pubic hair. See if Hollywood movies will tell you THAT bit of information. At least I’m fortunate to get to experience a Brazilian wax without having to go to Brazil… that’s how it works right?
I don’t really have any deep thoughts about the hair loss. I think it would be more of an impact for women but to me right now, it’s just part of the healing process. Maybe I’ll have different feelings when it’s all gone, but for now I’m looking forward to giving my friend crochet designs to make me a cool hat.
I kept pulling my hair out for people throughout the day as a party trick to show people until mom yelled at me to stop.
My classmate Eric who moved out to Cali last year was back in town for the 4th of July week visiting his family so Sandy and Chris were nice enough to pick him up and bring him to the hospital for a quick visit. Chris brought me corned beef hash, eggs, and toast from my favorite breakfast joint, Good Day Cafe in Golden Valley.
Today was day 2 of using Naproxen, the meds that were meant to keep my fever in check. I took it at 6am and braced myself for the 11am fever which never came. Yes!
4pm rolled around and my temperature went up just like clockwork to 102.8f. The nurses weren’t sure what to do and I wasn’t sure what to tell them. At 5pm my dad forced me to walk the halls for my daily exercise and we ran into Dr. Chen. I told her that my fever is back, she looked at my chart and became very angry that the system did not adjust my medication timings for me to take Naproxen again in the early afternoon. Therefore it wore off from the morning and allowed my temp to go up again.
She told me that the staff is confident that they have my fever in check now, clearly the Naproxen works if I didn’t get a fever in the morning and got the 4pm one on the dot so I’ll be discharged the following day, Wednesday.
One of the things I don’t think I’ve talked too much about my daily experience is how much fluid I cough up throughout the day. One moment I’m breathing normally, the next I’m coughing with gurgling sounds coming out of my lungs. I’m thankful that at least my tumor and chest pain isn’t as bad as it was before where I can now cough freely to get rid of what’s called sputum or phlem from my lungs. Here’s an educational video that I made 🙂
Judging by what was in the sink, it was 90% lung fluid, 10% stomach contents. But yah I get to have fun like that about 8 times a day and have been for the last month and a half.
Walking up and down the halls several times a day you get a sense for the patients that are in the rooms. After a patient has been discharged they put a sign up on the door.
The staff will open all the doors of the room including cabinets and closet doors. Then they put a cool looking R2 unit droid in the middle of the patient room.
They close the room door and the robot goes to work by blowing air around the room and disinfecting it via UV rays. SUPER cool, thing I witnessed yesterday on how they clean the rooms, figured I’d share with you on how they do it.
Since Joanna has the next day off from work she decided to pick up some dinner on her way to the hospital from work. She got us Nong’s Thai Cuisine, one of our favorite neighborhood Thai restaurants. We had a little date night with chicken pad thai, squash curry, and chicken satay. All food that’s way better than what the hospital could provide. After that she took me on a walk to get my steps in. We went down to the 4th floor to see if they’ve fixed the air conditioning yet. Unfortunately they had not. There were several portable AC units and fans blowing but it was still very humid and sticky. I guess I should feel lucky that they prioritized moving me since I had such high fevers.
We got popsicles from the patient fridge and thoroughly used hand sanitizer before we held hands.
I did my last round of Mountain Dew antibiotics last night which lasted about an hour and a half. At the end, Nurse Megan tried flushing my IV with saline but it really hurt. She wasn’t able to get any fluid in it and said that she would have to pull the IV out. I was slightly upset at the idea of having to put ANOTHER IV in but I didn’t have any more scheduled IV related medication from now until I get discharged so I let her yank it out of me. My skin was slightly swollen and red from the irritation.
Few housekeeping things. I finally got my Instagram feed working again on the bottom of my site. It existed before when I would travel and eat food, I’d tag the location of the food, description, and the price paid. Since I’ve been sampling quite the hospital cuisine for last 2 weeks, expect me to catch up on old posts. It’s hilarious to me that if you go to the Methodist Hospital Instagram feed, you see all these pictures of new families and successful surgeries. Then you see my post about how shitty their pizza is.
Several people have reached out wanting to send cards which I LOVE. I’m not comfortable posting my parents address in the wide open web here since I’m averaging about 300 uniqe visitors daily (humble brag). Just email me at [email protected] and I’ll give you the address. I tried setting up a form, but I wasn’t able to get it working yet.
It does feel odd to mark today as my 1 month anniversary of finding out about Derek, my tumor. I was admitted to the ER on 6/4 and did the CT scan which discovered the massive tumor in my chest. 1 month later I’m well on my way to recovery. I’m very thankful that I started my blog when I did because I was able to track all the crazy stuff that’s happened literally on a day to day basis. I don’t think you as a reader would stick around for long if I didn’t have new information or events to share daily. It’s hard enough to tell the days apart, I’m glad I have this a a way to record what happens inside and outside of my head.
In the course of this last month I’ve managed to inspire at least 4 different people to change their lifestyle habits for the better, tons of doctors and nurses have come on this blog to better understand how cancer treatment is from the patient’s perspective, and I’ve been given a platform to share who I am to the world. Seriously it’s been a crazy ride so far and I’m only 3 weeks into it. I hope my work will continue to inspire others to be better and to provide hope and understanding to those who are going through a similar situation. At this point, I’m going to have to go through treatment where there are good moments and bad, I might as well recognize them for what they are and keep a positive attitude about it.
I took this picture by myself the other day and haven’t found a good use for it. I just think the lighting was really good even though I look like I’ve been living in a hospital for a week so we’ll end my 1 month blogaversary with that.
