Moving Forward

This is how my day started yesterday. I was exhausted but managed to change my tire.  I’m a little sore today but using leverage correctly I barely lifted anything.  Bummer was once the spare was on it was a little low and I could not carry the compressor to fill up the spare until Connor got home and helped with the compressor.

I met with Dr. McGregor who is my oncologist yesterday.  Things are going to go forward as planned.  Next Wednesday we will start Chemo. She looked at my wounds and thought we are far enough along that it will be ok. The blood tests from Monday came back pretty good.  My Anemia is better but not great so we will add some Iron transfusions during the Chemotherapy days… which adds about an hour to me being there.  She also looked at the report about "free floating cancer cells" and my numbers are down ... way down from when she last took a look which was in the hospital. All in all a pretty good report.

So with the cancer removed during surgery, technically I am in remission. Why am I going through Chemo? Well the treatment is termed "Adjuvant Chemo".  It is full force standard care as if I was full of cancer but it is more of a protection for reoccurrence. It can help keep the cancer from coming back later and has been shown to help people with stage III colon cancer live longer. It is given after all visible cancer has been removed to lower the chance that it will come back. It works by killing the small number of cancer cells that may have been left behind at surgery because they were too small to see. Adjuvant chemo is also aimed at killing cancer cells that might have escaped from the main tumor and settled in other parts of the body (but are too small to see on imaging tests).

My voice is moving back to normal, for the past month it has sounded kinda raspy and whispery but should be loud by football season. The 2 incubations during the surgeries rubbed my vocal cords and have taken some time to heal.

I’ve stopped dropping weight and managed to put a couple pounds back on.  Mostly water weight.  Gatorade helps me retain water… miracle drink.

Time to switch to work… I am still home but able to get a few ours of work in now… trying to carry my share but my business partners really have been doing double duty.  If you need a business phone system, Phone repair, technology upgrade or telecom consultation you know who to call.... Yup …  Steve or Richard because I can’t quite make it to the phone before it stops ringing.  Leave a message I'll call you back.

Take care,

Dave