This is only the second cycle, and my third cycle starts in two days and then i get a break. My doctors in Spain had said that I should wait for a couple of cycles to see how I react to the treatment before going bak to Spain. At the time I was thinking, this is easy. I seem to have forgot that the effects of chemo are cumulative. I am fatigued today, but I am not 100% if this is self-induced from the weekend and me exerting myself. What I do realize is that by 4 or 5pm I am tired now and it is difficult for me to work in the evening. Cognitively I am a bit fatigued and thinking is a bit strained. The neuropathy is much better in the sense that I can handle cold and hot is much better now, but I still have tingling and my whole body is still very cold. I need to keep the room at around 26 or 28 and I am comfortable. We brought my small portable heater to the hotel and I had put it next to the bed on a chair and it worked wonders. i do the same in the bedroom and it makes things more bearable. I am not sure if this fatigue is due to myself pushing myself for two weekends for treatment day or whether it is the treatment. By the second cycle I think that I will have a better understanding of it.
Last night we watched a YouTuber called Emmy and she and her brother were eating some food from their childhood to see if it was as good as they had remembered. A couple of weeks ago I had purchased the handi-snacks and what I found was missing was the red stick. I think that they removed it to reduce waste, but the crackers break when you dip it in there directly. I should probably buy myself a 3D printer now so that I can 3D print my own small red sticks. It seems like the economical choice to make to relive my childhood. I had spent years trying to find it. It was called Jimmy’s Chinese Style Beef Jerky, the parents retired and the kids did not want to take over the business. It was a staple and every Asian kid I know, even the ones in the US were familiar with this beef jerky. It is by far my favorite and it has been decades since they have closed. I remember the taste of it, but no place has been able to replicate the thin nature of it or the flavour. Online you can see so many people reminisce about it and try to find something similar but no one has been able to find a replacement for them. I went on a bit of a tagent and I think that I am going to try and make it myself because I have a bit of a craving for it. If it is successful then I am going to launch my own beef jerky company for all the Asians in the world. I will call it Jim’s beef jerkey from Sudbury Ontario. When we were in North Bay I had wanted to eat Greco’s pizza because when I was in high school and University I would travel to North Bay and eat it. It is like I remember and I enjoyed it, and there are some food that I like to eat for nostalgic that I have discussed recently like Burger King, or Deluxe hamburger. The Jimmy’s beef jerky though is one of the most iconic food that we ate. Some of the other ones are hawflakes, Vietnamese spicy tamarind candy and white rabbit candy. When Olivier was young, he convinced my parents that he liked the tamarind fruit in the pods and that we bought it for him. My parents bought it for him and he did not like it. An interesting thing with Olivier is that his first bite of something that he says he likes he is alwasy mmmhhmm! this is delicious and then as he eats it he realizes that he does not like it. For dinner tonight I had roasted some cherry bomb peppers in a bit of oil, we let it cool down and then stuffed it with boursin cheese. I had forgotten to tell Mel to make a breadcrumb crumble to add some crunch to it. They were hot, and it was a slow building hot, but it dissipated quickly. I warned Mel but she ate it anway after we got Xavier to try it. Initially he had said it was not spicy and then he changed his mind. I was right. I wonder what food memories the kids will remember from us. They remember dumplings and pho from my parents. My mother in law makes them a lot of desserts and macaroni and cheese. I am not sure what the kids would say that her staple dish is though.
When my body feels cold and I am at home, I have been taking hot baths to help warm up my core temperature. It helps and then I turn on the heater in my room and everything is good. I think that we will be getting our washroom downstairs renovated soon, so we will have the steam shower back in there. I have not yet convinced Mel to allow me to purchse a Japanese bidet, with a heated seat. I think that they would be wonderful, but I am not sure if they are harder to clean or anything. Seeing as I do not do much cleaning these days it is hard for me to give Mel additional work. I have suggested that we hire someone to come clean our house but she seems against that idea. I think she likes to enjoy the suffering instead of getting judged for having a messy house. In the past I would be responsible for cleaning the washroom and the kitchen, but now I am just responsible for cleaning myself, and sometimes Mel helps me with that. I won the jackpot at the wedding vows when we had said for better or worse. I have things so much better and she has me. Mel has decided on the aesthetics that she wants for the bathroom now and I think that the look she is going for in the shower is a bamboo tiled wall. I can not remember if it is textured or not, and the floor is grey and she has not decided whether she will go with the pebblestone look or not. We were discussing getting the floor heated but I am not sure if we will do that or not. That would need to come out of pocket. It seems that the falls are very expensive and it will be again as we refurnish our basement after the flood. This should be a fun experience.
Q