Chemo two day Thursday November 14, 2013

First off to teach or learn in class today. Got fully made up with lipstick and a tablespoon of Urban Decay in order to offset the ugly globe of distorted continents that is my head right now. 

I gave my students a quiz today on some readings they did - here are some of the questions if you want to try!

1. What is a meme?

2. Gleick (author of The Meme Pool) said that belief in god is an ancient meme passed on through words and also through two other methods. What are they?

3. Researchers say that because Facebook gives you so many day to day intimate details of everyone else's lives - it's similar to a what?

4. Who started Facebook and where? (This was my easy giveaway question!)

I forgot the rest.

The chemo room is very friendly. A lovely women with a beautiful accent is handing out little Whole Foods ginger candies to help us all with the blech feeling:

Here are pictures of me from this morning after the make up spackle event, first without my hat, and with my skater hat from Zumiez skateboard shop. (Never mind that I'm 35 to 40 years older than the ironic Zumiez target audience):

I think it's a far far better thing with the hat.

Fast forward a couple hours and now I'm in the chemo lab chatting away with Vicki and Kris, who brought me a P. Terry's cheeseburger, french fries and Coke. Remember you're supposed to eat and behave teenageriahly on chemo day.

Attacks of tears dripping in. I typed that wrong but I like it. What I meant was the Taxotere is dripping in. I just learned from my nurse Laverne that when patients used to get this horrorshow drip drug in the 90s the victim/corpse would have to receive it in the ICU because it almost killed them. Now "we can manage the symptoms so much better!" Ha! Oy vey.

My view consists of Vicki, reading a Jeffrey Eugenides story in The New Yorker, after she read the article on pot; and Kris doing another smarticle particle crossword puzzle - she's about to take on the Sunday New York Times. She won't share with me, she doesn't believe in doing crossword puzzles together with other people, because she's too smart. I'm bugging her about leaving me out but she doesn't notice I think. Maybe I'm just jealous she can just fill it in square after square.

Today I have two sweet nurses! Laverne is an Austin native and teller of cool chemo tales. She's a sweetie. And Sabrina is as darling as ever though she worries that her Afro is lopsided so we had to take a few pictures. Both are kind to me.

I found out exactly how much of each drug I'm getting - it's based on the square inches of my skin and my weight! Anyway today's doses are:

Taxotere: 134 mg

Cytoxan: 895 mg

Adriamycin: 89.5 mg

On my last drug now. 4:15 pm. Adria. The red devil. My 89 milligrams of hell. It still gives me the creeps. Sabrina has to crimp the tube every minute or so to stop the flow in, to suck my blood back out and look at it in some magic way to ascertaine whether or not it's going into a vein and not burning my skin or my me, before she then continues to push it in.

Now I'm home with some elves helping - Kris is stirring the dinner, Vicki is fussing around the house beautifying it, and Mona is checking on me - and Mike is next to me on the couch - my home for a while. The kids are shut up in their rooms, and I'm feeling steroidally calm and mostly pretty fair. Feels good to have friends and family. So many sweet messages today thank you all.