Blogging in B Minor

Just a quick post here tonight.  I had my infusion on Wednesday – my lymphocytes were up around 1500 (they only need to be above 400 to use the vaccine) and my absolute neutrophil count was up at 1400 which is great.  So my counts are doing great.  As far as how I’m doing – ok but the nausea this time around is worse and I’ve had a pretty severe headache.  The fatigue, interestingly enough, hasn’t been quite as bad as it was after the last infusion.  Infusion – isn’t that a strange term?!  I just came back from the kitchen after brewing a cup of loose leaf green tea using a great self-contained, all in one cup and infuser.  This particular tea, called Green Tea Heaven (you should get some from Teavana if you like green tea – it’s really good!) can be used over three infusions.  Nice!  I’d much rather deal with tea infusions than infusions of Irinotecan.  Anyway – random tangent there…

The headache has been pretty constant.  I spoke to my doc about it and she said she’s not really worried about it.  Headaches are always a concern with these drugs though – particularly Avastin.  A really severe headache can signal a bleed so you just need to keep an eye on things. Nausea of course is par for the course with most chemo – some Zofran helps with that.  The fatigue isn’t as bad because I decided to follow orders (and took my wife’s advice) and just rest.  I contemplated working for “just a few hours” today but I couldn’t do it.  I sat down at the keys at around 10am to play just to relax - I have a song started, the acoustic guitar is layed down on a track and I have tracks set up and loaded with full string sections of Cellos, Violins, Violas and Basses that I put together last night but I couldn’t move on it at all.  Songwriting on chemotherapy doesn’t work.  So far, songwriting with a brain tumor has worked so well.  I burned out the last CD in 5 months in terms of writing but I can’t get things going.  Oh well – it will come.  I guess I’m being hard on myself considering all that is going on.

So, the day has been mostly filled with sleep.  The headache is a bit better – I decided to take a pain med after it was really pounding away.  But, this will pass.  It’s temporary.

That’s it for now.  This should be the last Avastin + Irinotecan infusion as we are tentatively to begin the vaccine on the 16th.  We will see…

Cheers,

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