Catchy Name Needed

Hope you all are having a good Labor Day, and that you're not actually having to labor much today. I definitely am not. I'm watching the Astros game and farting around with various online things, and I thought I would come and update now that I'm starting to feel a little more human again.

(As usual lately, possible TMI if you have delicate feelings about medical stuff. But mostly not too much detail necessary, I think.)

I have been having radiation treatments since the middle of July and I am finally, FINALLY all done, yay! I had 30 treatments, and remember that I had already had three treatments before they had to stop because of the damn staph infection, so I've actually had 33 altogether.

Mostly it wasn't too bad but there were several weeks in there where I was just totally exhausted all the time. I worked the whole way through, never missed a day (except for when I was in the hospital before, of course, not much I could do about that one!) I was late a few times but I always got there, during the radiation phase. (Really I would like to have taken at least a few days off but we have been - still are - seriously short-staffed so I just kept on coming in.)

Most of the time they have been treating my whole breast - that's the part that made me so tired, eventually - and then this past week they switched to doing treatments that concentrated on the area where the original tumor was, which helped with the tiredness but caused the bottom side of my breast to look somewhat like raw meat. It wasn't super-painful but it's pretty icky to look at. It's starting to heal already, though. (Think of a bad sunburn with some blistering, that's basically what it is like. Also my whole right breast is weirdly tanned. Back around 1980 it would have been right in fashion, if the rest of me was tanned to match!)

Going in every day (5 days a week, that is) was a pain but they try to get you in and out really fast, and mostly they do. On a good day you're in and out of there in like 30 minutes. Park, check in, go put a gown on, wait for them to call you, go back in the back and lay just so on a table and get protons or whatever beamed at you - the arranging-just-so part usually takes longer than the actual treatment - get dressed again and you're done. Once a week you see the RadOnc doctor but that's usually really quick also. And hey, at least it's on my way to work.

When I was done Friday, one of the techs said, "So, do you want to ring the bell or do you want to leave quietly?" Because apparently it's a tradition, when you finish. People had told me about it, and I said, "I need to ring the bell" - and I did. It's a pretty noisy bell, too. The techs applauded and the waiting room applauded too, when I came out - so I can see why some people might want to leave quietly, but it felt good to make some noise. (I'm pretty sure I said, "I'm free!" to the people in the waiting room.)

 I finally started radiation treatments yesterday. I'm kind of fascinated by the equipment - it has all these pieces that move around and paint laser targets on you and stuff. The clinic where I go is brand-new so I'm sure it's the most state of the art equipment - I keep wanting to ask a bunch of questions but they make a big deal about getting you in & out of there in half an hour or so, so you can go about your life. And I grant that that's important, so I can't really demand a full tour or anything. And you're supposed to stay very still - of course - but I keep wanting to look around. (You can't really do that much, either, though.)

So far the main symptom has been a slight sunburn. But I'm only on #2 of 20. We'll see how it goes.


In other news, we had a little fun a couple of weeks ago when Houston got all that rain. We work 'til midnight, remember - and we drove home in pouring rain, and then when we got to the freeway exit everything was flooded. We drove carefully around for a while trying to see if we could get where we needed to go, and basically we couldn't. After some time, the feeder roads cleared up, and we got a little further along. But then the road home was completely flooded - they were fishing cars out of it. They said it was only passable with a very large truck, which we definitely do not have. The emergency people that were out in the road, whoever they were, showed us a place where it was high ground and said we could wait it out if we wanted to. And we tried that for a while. I even fell asleep for a while, and when I woke up it was 2am and Rob was watching the road and it pretty clearly wasn't cleared yet. And Rob had to be back at 1pm on Friday. So I said, "I wonder if we can get back on the freeway," and it turned out we could - and we drove back to Galveston and checked into a hotel. We still didn't get a whole lot of sleep but we got some, and we got a shower and breakfast. And our local city government's e-mail list announced later in the morning that the roads were clear and that (amazingly) no houses had flooded.


And the only other thing I have to say is that I did drag Rob back to Endgame this past weekend, so that's three times now. Actually I noticed a lot of stuff this time that I'd missed in the overload the first two times. (I told Rob, "Thank you for giving this nine hours of your life.")

We just got back from seeing Shazam! - we didn't go last week because Rob wanted to see Pet Sematary, and I figured there'd be less kids this weekend anyway. It was really quite good - even though I knew the Rotten Tomatoes scores was good and stuff (currently at 90% on RT, I just checked), I was still surprised how much I liked it. Other than Wonder Woman, I can't think of any other DC moves of recent years that I've liked as much. Since we got home I've been watching Easter-Egg-type videos and running periodically into the bedroom to treat Rob to especially good bits of DC trivia.

(Rob likes to spend some time on the laptop before he goes to bed. He watches YouTube stuff about movies, too - mostly not the same movies - and also a bunch of workout stuff, of course.)

Here's the updated list of movies I've seen this year, which I have been chunking into the bottom of my movie posts recently. Here it's getting moved up because I want to talk about it - mostly about why it's not longer.


Actually that's not a terribly slow pace by my recent standards - we're basically 3-1/2 months into 2019 and I've been to a movie at a movie theater six times. I think a couple of movies a month is more or less my normal pace in recent years. Some years less - but further in the past we used to go pretty much every week. In Galveston we lived really close to the movie theater for many years, and I think that made a difference. (Rob used to walk, some of the time. It was maybe a mile and a half, so I don't remember ever actually doing that, but it was a little quick jog down the Seawall in the car, anyway - five minutes, tops. We had it timed where we would leave about the time the schedule said the movie started, and we never missed the beginning of the movie.)

Rob goes to see horror movies without me, because we long ago established that I don't go to those, and sometimes he also goes without me to various other things I don't feel like seeing. I wouldn't go to Hotel Mumbai because it just sounded depressing, and I wouldn't go to Us because I watched the trailer and went, Hell no, that's a horror movie! (I did go see Get Out after being assured that it wasn't *really* a horror movie.). I think I mentioned before that I wouldn't go see Glass because I hadn't seen Split, but actually I don't think I missed anything on that one, anyway.

I used to go to movies alone, too, but I hardly ever do any more. I think partly it's because the window before things come out on video has gotten so short that I don't bother, in general. The only movie I can remember going to alone in recent years is Doctor Strange, and that was mostly because it was on a weekend when Rob was out of town. I mostly care about going to the theater to see superhero movies and other big-spectacle kinds of things - Star Wars, etc - otherwise I just figure I can wait and watch them on TV in a month or two. (On the movies I really like, of course, I do both - I go see them two or three times at the theater and then see them more times at home, as well. I watched Infinity War twice in one night, recently. But then I'm in ramp-up-to-Endgame mode at the moment. Barely more than a week away now! We have our tickets and everything.)


In non-movie news, I was going to do a medical update but really there's not a whole lot new to say, anyway. Quick version: I've had a consult at MDAnderson, and I have another one with the RadOnc doctor in a week or so, so the radiation treatments will get underway before too long, I guess. I can't say I'm feeling a great hurry about that, but I know it needs doing.

Spreaking of which, right now I gotta go do my taxes. Ugh.

 I've either been sleeping a lot or not at all - basically I'm swinging back and forth between those two - which is partly why I haven't gotten around to posting again. I am fine, though, just recovering. The pathology reports came back and they were good - not a very invasive form of cancer, and they think they got it all. I still have to have radiation treatments though. The way the surgeon put it was "a lumpectomy plus radiation equals a mastectomy" - I assume that she meant that the outcomes are comparable.

I did have to go back to the ER last weekend (I mean a week ago, right after the surgery, not this past weekend) because one of my incisions started getting infected. But I had a week of Bactrim and that's resolved itself. I apologized to Rob for making him come with me because we were there for hours, and really I could have gone by myself, as it turns out. But we didn't know that in advance, of course. Rob sat in the lobby and kicked his heels for a couple of hours - I kept calling him periodically and giving him updates - and finally I had them bring him back to the room so at least he could talk to me. They weren't really that busy - the reason it took so long was that they felt like they had to get hold of the surgeon, or at least somebody from the surgery department, and make sure they approved of what the ER was doing. And it was Sunday afternoon and naturally everybody was scattered to hell & gone. But eventually they gave me the antibiotic prescription and let me go.

The surgeon called me on Friday about the path reports, and then I went in to see her today, and she seemed surprised that I didn't have appointments with Radiation Oncology already. As far as I knew we were waiting on the pathology stuff - I love it when doctors think you're supposed to read their minds. (But I liked the surgeon a lot, overall.) And between Friday afternoon and Monday noon there's not a lot of working time for RadOnc to have called me! Anyway, I assume this will get sorted soon.

Lumpectomy is Thursday. We've already paid our estimated chunk of it - in fact, the estimated total for the lumpectomy is only slightly more than the actual total for the biopsy was. Somehow that made me feel obscurely better. Like that means it won't be any worse than the biopsy was. Actually the worst part of the biopsy was I had to keep my arm up over my head the whole time, but this time I'll be asleep so I won't have that problem. Anyway, I'm okay so far. I'll report back afterwards, but don't expect that to happen too quickly. Full anesthesia takes a while to recover from, as I recall.