Mel thought that I was pretty peppy today all things considered. I think that this treatment cycle actually went fairly well. Most of the issues from previous sessions I was able to deal with. Neuropathy still sucks and I am not sure if it is getting better or not, but it has not been impacting my eating. I can also start to feel the ascites build up so I think that I am going to need to schedule something for Monday if I can. I have chemo on Tuesday so ideally i would like to get this done prior to me having to go into chemo. On Monday I am also seeing my social worker and I had told her that i would write some nice things about Mel. She made a comment on my last entry into my legacy document that I never mentioned love with Mel, which is true. I wrote it from a rather technical point of view which is more my style, highlighting things from afar. She wants me to write things from the point of view of a husband, so I will do that soon.
Tomorrow we will be traveling to Ottawa for a hockey tournament and the really amusing thing is that Olivier did not even know that we were going to be leaving tomorrow. In Toronto i have a ton of different restaurants that I save in the event that we are in the area and we want to eat. I did the same for Spain and I may do that for Ottawa now. Ottawa has some delicious food, but not on the same as Toronto. The Asian food in Ottawa in some areas leans towards Vietnamese, but I am not sure how it is compared to the ones in Toronto. When I have seen the Banh Mi sandwiches they do not seem the same. In Mel’s building there is a new Banh Mi restaurant and she has met with some of the owners in a random chat. She wants to give it a try but I tend to be a bit skeptical of things like this but I think that I am willing to give them a try and see how the food is.
My weight has dropped a couple of pounds but I can feel the ascites a bit more in my stomach so I think that the weight increase that I have seen is due to the ascites and right now my weight drop is due to poor eating the last couple of days. When I get really busy it impacts my eating, though today I managed to eat every couple of hours, yesterday with the fasting it messes things up quite a lot and makes it difficult. Hopefully I do not need to do too much more fasting, i know that when they do some of the things with the port and inserting the tube they sometimes want me to fast. At least when I am getting drained I can eat and drink as I am there for a couple of hours. Fatigue was not much of an issue today so I am quite hopeful for a nice trip to Ottawa this week.
Leaving the refugee camps of Malayasia were not easy. They did not want to house anyone and wanted to ship people over to Western countries. You had to go through interviews and selection was based on whether you had relatives in those countries, political/military ties or education. I am not sure how far my father went with his education because he only went to school because of scholarships. I do not think that he did any sort of college/university or degrees as he was most likely pushed to work as soon as he can. He did well in what he did and the stories that I have heard amuse me, as I was told that he would often smuggle things into the market for other people. I can see where I get my streak of not abiding from rules come from. There were workers there that would organize the information and help people fill out forms to draw interest from countries. I am not sure smuggler was something that most countries were looking for. From what I was told from various people, I think that we may have owned the market and were responsible for stocking it, which makes sense that he would travel and bring in things from other places. He was an importer/exporter, with a side hustle of smuggling. We were lucky that the St. Andrews the Apostle church had a bunch of families rally together to decide to sponsor bringing a family over. We were in touch with the primary family that spearheaded that project for most of my life. I think that I stopped talking to them about 15 years after our marriage. We invited them to our wedding and in an interesting twist the daughter of our sponsor ended up working with Mel’s company for a period of time in some capacity. This church was quite open to everyone and I remember going to it frequently as a child for school. I did a lot of volunteer work here as well as people would request assistance from my best friend’s family who had 3 strapping strong boys. As I was always around them all of the time I went along and did a lot of volunteering. We would be paired with a parishioner and would do various tasks. I actually did not mind helping out and it really opened my eyes to who needed help. We would end up at houses that I did not expect would need help, as I got older I got it though. Sometimes you may go through a rough time and this is how the community rallied around you. The church community can be fantastic at times. There are some priests and deacons that spread a great message, but I have also heard some that leave you scratching your head. I do not mind listening to someone who has a good message and even now some of my friends invite me to events or send me podcasts to listen to. I will listen to the podcasts but going out is not always as easy for me. Whether I am religious or not though, I have a lot to be thankful for all of the people from the church who donated their time and money to help me out.
I am going to go eat my bedtime meal and I am quite looking forward to Ottawa where we are staying downtown and there are a multitude of options for me. There should be especially a lot of options from food trucks or random restaurants tomorrow. Next week we will see if I can replicate the treatment of this week and manage the symptoms. I will have a lot of help from people and need to remember that I have a lot of people that I can lean on for those rougher days.
Q