Postby ginabeewell » Tue Nov 26, 2019 7:48 pm
It’s now been six weeks since surgery. I wish I could say I’m feeling so much better but this is the longest recovery ever. My red blood counts are still low, and I’m losing my breath climbing a set of stairs.
My drains, which were putting out 40/50 ml a day suddenly jumped to 170-185. No idea what’s going on. I had a CT scan the other day to prepare for a drain replacement.
In other words, these drains aren’t coming out any time soon. And chemo can’t restart until the drains come out. It feels like a terrible holding pattern.
We are trying to move things forward. I might just go to work next week, even if I still feel like hell. And we bought those tickets to Istanbul. I’m so mad at and bored with myself, maybe a little adventure will help?
My cancer buddy, who has stage 2 or 3 pancreatic cancer had surgery last week and it went super well. So well that she’s basically done - no mop up chemo or anything. On the one hand, I’m joyous for her. And on the other, totally jealous. Which isn’t helping my bad mood.
I’m looking forward to the holiday weekend to provide a little break in routine. We will head to Milwaukee to my parents’ place for Thanksgiving. Then on Friday, to a lake cottage we bought and just finished renovating. It will be our first night there! We don’t have all the furniture up there yet, and the range needs to be repaired, but we will camp and have a good time, I hope.
We bought this place before my diagnosis, and hired a contractor right away - he took a deposit, demoed the place, and then disappeared, which we discovered right before my diagnosis. (“How awful!” people would say when they heard, and we would respond, “Well, it’s not the WORST thing to happen to us this year.”)
It took a while to find another and get going. By then we were like, hey I don’t know how much time we have, let’s do it all and do it all right away. Kind of a budget buster for the modest purchase we thought we were making, but it’s going to be a beautiful place to spend time with friends and family. My mom is an interior designer so it’s all to her credit it turned out as lovely as it did!