I keep on walking over 3000 steps in a day and going up and down the stairs repeatedly and it is taking a toll on my legs now allowing me to recover quickly. I thought that today that I could relax a bit more in terms of moving but for some reason, I am not sure why or how I ended up walking a lot. A couple of weeks ago I had purchased one of those frozen burritos that were supposed to be good and it was subpar at best. I decided that I could make my own at home and we had bought the meat on Saturday, I cooked the meat yesterday and today I got to wrapping burritos with various toppings. I started at 8pm and quickly realized that for the amount of meat that I had cooked that I would not have enough tortillas. Xavier’s kickboxing and jujitsu classes are close to Food Basics, so I left a bit early to go pick up some things. I ended up walking through the store a bit more than I had anticipated and by the end I was a bit tired. Earlier today I made some grilled cheese and tomato soup for dinner. I knew that we had bought some cans of tomato soup for quick dinners when I did not feel like making it from scratch. I sent down Xavier and he could not find any. I proceeded to go downstairs afterwards and surprisingly I found cans of Campbell Tomato. He did not know that they were cans of soup. Xavier had an athletic therapy appointment today and on the way we home we bought some shaved black forest as well as some various cheeses for the sandwich. We ended up walking through the whole store, so my two visits to the store lead to me walking 3000 steps today. Food wise I think that i have managed to eat enough but I was a bit concerned with my weight yesterday as I weighed in at 144. Rapid increases like that are normally due to ascites and not weight gain, but it is only 1 or 2 lbs above what I was before. If I drop weight I think that I will be more comfortable that it is not ascites and it is real weight gain. You can see the gain on my face and body, so I suspect it is real and not fake.
Mel has gotten in touch with some new people in Spain and she has been corresponding with them. They said that they will review the scans and talk to the doctors and get back to us. Right now I will finish my current cycle and Mel is worried that our trip to Spain might coincide either with Olivier’s birthday at the beginning of October of when her cousin from Miami comes for her yearly visit with her newborn baby. We have a bit of control for when we go though so we would need to arrange that. They want either a 2 or 3 week window from my previous treatment and I will stay in the hospital an extra day or two. Hopefully they will not put me on the crappy diet initially to make sure that things are ok. If they do then I can get the doctors to change it back fairly easily I think. Mel plans on bringing more things back this time as she underestimated how much oils and things she wanted to bring back. Her family has requested various things and I can think of things that I would want to bring back as well. I think that it is more than likely that we will try and schedule to go back and see if that provides me a bigger improvement then the treatment that I am getting here. We will need to think of what sort of treats we will bring them over this time. Butter tarts might be interesting as that is a Canadian thing, but they are damn sweet. I think that we can bring them over with us. We have already brought them some maple syrup, so we can also supplement that with a pancake mix.
Right now the TV is upstairs and I am watching Olivier play Spider-Man. He is rather good at some games and the types of games that the two boys play is quite distinct. Olivier likes games that have a good story or lore to it. Xavier spends most of his time playing sports games, but he did complete Breath of the Wild and some other ARPG games. Growing up when we first got the Atari there was a huge influx of knock off games that worked for the machines and you could get them dirt cheap. When my grandmother from Vancouver would visit she would always buy me a bunch of video games. A really atrocious game that I remember playing and completing was ET. It is probably one of the worst video games ever made, but I would play it along with the other games that we had. Ice hockey was another game that i really remembered playing as well. The game involved a 2 on 2 game and I loved playing hockey so this was something that I enjoyed playing. My mother would play the video games with us as well and she as amazing at two games that I remember, Frostbite which was a game where you hopped around on ice bergs to get to the top into your home. She was amazing at the game and could get quite far in it. The speed of the game increased over time and she could easily defeat levels that we struggled at. I was quite good at video games, but I have fond memories of her getting scores that I thought were crazy. Of course this may also be a result of me seeing this through the lens of a child at the time and being easily impressionable. The other game that I remember her being really good at was Columns for the Sega Genesis. At this time I was older and sometimes my mom and I would play against each other and she would decimate me and just keep on going. I do not remember how or why she would start playing the games with us, but it is a memory that I cherish. We have gotten Mel to play some games with us as a family. Diablo IV as well as cooked or other co-op games. Controllers these days are more advanced and instead of having 1 button like the Atari days or 3 buttons on the Genesis, now you have 8+ buttons that you need to know what they do. We have not played video games as a family for quite some time now though. Mel enjoys some games, but only if they are simple enough and we get to play as a team in co-op. We inevitably never do super well because Mel’s skills at video games is nowhere close to what my mom’s was. Of course my mom is full on Asian and as the kids use to say, Mel is a little bit Asian. That all started when the kids were super young and we were teaching them all of the various languages of the world. They were learning, French, English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Latin, Sanskrit and all sorts of dead languages. Since Mel knew a bit of chinese, they use to say that she was a little bit Chinese. We joke about that still now and it always amuses me what these kids think of. I would also like to report that I have received my super powered chicken from the family member we gave it to. I now have in my possession the supwer powered chicken of instant death. If the kids ever want to relive their childhood we can play again.
QHM