Each time you visit the cancer center you get a bracelet to wear. If you kept it from the day before they do not print you a new one. Mel wanted me to get rid of it this weekend and wondered why I kept it on. Whenever I get new clothes, for fun I like to leave on all of the tags and it angers her so much that she will eventually remove them. I do not see what the issue is, I will sometimes try to discretely hide them if i am in the mood. She hates it when I go out in public with it. She did not see the purpose as she likes to waste tax payer dollars and have them print a new one each day for me. Conservation is important to me and I do not like to waste tax payers money. This morning it was an interesting experience at the hospital. I arrived and the parking lot was rather full. Some people do not bother paying for parking and just go in. I am not sure how diligent they are at ticketing people in the cancer center and Mel does not think that they would do it often. People who go are going there for treatment should be cut some slack. It was freezing out this morning and I just want to try and get the ticket as fast as I can and then inside. Occasionally there are people trying to use the machine and they face some difficulties. The woman in front of me was trying to pay and her credit card was not working properly. In my desire to get in as quickly as possible I paid for her ticket. She thanked me and said that I did not have to and pulled out a $20 to give it to me. I find it amusing that she was willing to overpay me by $12 when I only paid $8. She said she tried to pay the max but she was struggling so she will need to come back out after and pay again. Hopefully she will not struggle with the machine and it will work for her. When I see old people struggle at the machine with getting their card to work a lot of times I will just pay for them. They are going through enough problems without having to deal with parking issues. But really, I am just cold and just want to get inside and paying a bit extra to help someone out is just a bonus.
Once I got inside there were some people registering and registration realized the the wrist band machine was not printing out properly. The two people before me did not have a wrist band on so she had to write it out by hand. When I got up to her she told me that the machine was not fixed and she was going to call and see if she could get someone to come and take a look. I told her that I had my wrist band still and she was happy and said she would contact them afterwards. See what happens when you keep it on and do not take it off. You save precious seconds. I think that I am going to try and keep it on for the whole length of the treatment and allow it to get destroyed. Mel is going to love a battered wrist band on my wrist. It is starting to look a bit rough around the egdes now so I want to see how long I can keep it on for. Hopefully it will last until the first week of January. If I would have listened to Mel I would have added so much more stress to the poor girl behind the counter. By ignoring Mel I saved the person time and extra effort.
When I got into the treatment, something that I noticed was that every Monday there is no music playing. I asked the tech why there was no music and he laughed and said it was because since I as the first patient of the day he normally does not turn on the music and one of his colleagues does it. He was amused that I had noticed that. He asked me if there was music I wanted to listen to. I wonder if I can make any requests and have a playlist for my treatment. That would be awesome. I can change it up every day to confuse people about my musical tastes. The other tech remembered me from 5 years ago and she had mentioned that I had lost quite a bit of weight from then and we chatted a bit. If I see her tomorrow I will ask her if she treated me at the end of my treatment. I remembered being wheeled into the treatment sessions at that time as I was extremely dehydrated by then and had to have someone take me all of the time.
I am still a bit tired from the effects of the weekend. I need to be careful and rest a bit today as the effects are cumulative and we are only at the start of the week. That being said at this point in the day I am tired, but not moreso than I was last Monday. If anything I feel a bit better than I was last week. The good news is that right now I am slowly increasing weight and I broke the 140 barrier, so there is the possibility that I hit 145 by Christmas. It will be difficult, but I do want to try and gain weight each week of treatment as opposedt to losing weight like everyone else. Day by day it seems that I can eat a bit more each day. I am getting to know what it feels like prior to me being full. The added challenge now is the nausea and knowing how much can I push while fighting the nausea. Mel thinks that I should not suffer and just take some of the meds or do something to make it easier for myself. As she has not gone through cancer treatment she clearly has not experienced the joy of trying to do it the hard way. Why take a simple path when you can keep on throwing unnecessary barriers up for yourself. The nausea pills make my head a bit fuzzy and I try not to take pills unless I really need to. I do not want to rely on them and I am not against taking the easy route. Today I do not have much mental fog, just fatigue. I am not sure if it is because of the weekend or the treatment. The baseline we established though is that I am capable of being out and about for a whole day, the result however is fatigue that takes a couple of days to recover.
When we travel and we arrived home if it has snowed I always shoveled prior to us parking the vehicle in the driveway. I have gratitude that Mel and Xavier upheld this tradition and shoveled right away. I am sure that Mel was exhausted and just wanted to relax but she shoveled while I put away groceries. A vehicle had come into the driveway and packed down some snow as well. If the delivery vehicle had not entered our driveway then shoveling the driveway could have been done in under 10 minutes by Xavier. What I do when something like this happens is I take out the ice scraper and I scrape away the hard packed snow. If you leave it, then it turns into an icy mess making it hard to get traction to get up our driveway. I appreciate that Xavier and Melanie took the time to shovel the driveway properly and to adhere to the standards that have been set. Hopefully in January I can shovel again and help Mel out with that. I think that this time instead of trying to conserve energy I am going to try and figure out how do I build muscle mass and consume more energy. I will see what supplements I can take to help build mass. I will have a workout partner with Xavier and he is probably much stronger than I am. When I said that we will be getting the 80lb dumb bells and that I will not be able to lift them, he said that it would be easy and that he would carry them in. Since they are adjustable I can use them on the lighter setting for now and hopefully start to build up some mass. Mel had to do a lot yesterday and I am quite grateful for all of the things that she does for the family and for me.
Q