My eyebrows have never been so thin before! Chemo hair. You can see mine is growing. It never all fell out; it just thinned out a lot. I had a nice lunch with a good friend today and a great energy/manual therapy session afterwards. In between I hung out with the cool trees by the lighthouse. I stayed a while under one whose limbs streched out horizantally like great big arms that came up to about my chest level. I took my shoes off and sort of hugged on the tree for a while. Ha ha ha. Besides my noisy mind, it was nice. Ah, it is what it is.
I was able to do some crying. It was a good release.
This evening my heart started pounding and then every so often I would feel a sharp, quick, startling pain around the area of my heart. It only happened like 4 or 5 times tonight. It happens every so often. Pooka was whimpering, whining, and wouldn't settle down. I just laid in bed very still and relaxed. And prayed for courage and peace. And for the ability to handle pain. That it won't hurt too bad.
Tomorrow I'm going with my mom and dad to the Florida Proton Therapy Insititute in Jacksonville, FL. I read up on it a little bit tonight. Get this, they use a particle accelerator. There is one of those in "Angels and Demons." I wonder if this place also has a tunnel underground that is miles and miles long. Anyway, it sounds like if I could do Proton Therapy rather than radiation therapy, if it will work for my situation, it causes much less damage to the healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. This would be a really good thing, as the surrounding tissue that would be in the field of normal radiation therapy, includes at least that of my lungs, heart, breasts, esophogus, and thyroid. From what I understand, the protons are relatively large and "scatter" less when they hit the tissue. Both therapies work by damaging the DNA of cells.
My oncologist doesn't know much about proton therapy, and is also sort of on a "team" with the radiotion department at the local hospital here. So they tend to recommend eachother. With a tumor that began so large as mine did, it is common practice to follow up 6-8 cycles of ABVD chemo with "rads." I have already met the woman who would do my rads if I end up doing them here, in town. We will see what the proton institute has to say about my case tomorrow. Bright and early. (leaving at 6:45 A.M. -whoa!) It is neat that it is only forty-five minutes away, there are not that many places to have this kind of treatment done. It will be interesting to learn about in any case!
In the world of reading, I finished "The Golden Compass" - (cool! I loved the shape-shifting daemons!). I am now reading a Jodi Picoult novel my mom loaned me called "Second Glance."
Till Next Time.
x's and o's.
P.S. Do any of you fellow bloggers know how to get the blog to hold a freaking format, like spaces in between paragraphs? I'm kind of a perfectionist about some things, e.g, my writing, and this big long messy paragraph thing over and over again is kind of driving me crazy. I'm going to go bang my head against the wall now. Jk, of course. Advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks =).
