This is the third session of Chemo and things are a bit better today compared to my first two sessions. The port seems to be getting better as there was less discomfort when they inserted the needle into the port. I could feel the needle being inserted, but the sensation of the fluid going into my body does not seem as bad right now. I will see later on when I have the bottle attached and will determine if there is an impact from that. It seems that the height of the treatment is the biggest factor. My feet are tingling more however and they feel cold even though I am covered with 3 blankets. I do not feel much fatigue right now, as that only hits after a couple of hours of exposure to the drugs. This evening Xavier has his team dinner and I am not sure if I will be able to go at 6:30 or not. Right now I feel that I am going to get fatigued by this and I may end up being asleep at that time. They took a bit longer to get the drugs from the pharmacy today so I think that I started approximately 45 minutes behind what they normally do. Chatting with the nurses we told them that we may need to shift our appointment since we will be coming back from Spain. They did not seem to think that it would be much of an issue because there are cancellations all of the time and they are not all tightly scheduled.
I had a visitor come visit me today, an old colleague from when we use to work together at the hospital. She was someone that I grew quite close with as we would come into the office at 6am to do work. It would be her and I sharing the office until people showed up at approximately 8am or so. She would arrive around 7am and it was a quiet time that we could do a lot of the administrative and paper work that we had to do. We would discuss philosophies and different approaches to work. I appreciated the chats we had because she had a different background than I did and we would bounce ideas off each other. We have kept in touch even though we have not worked together in the last 8 years. Even though we do not interact as often as we did in the past it is always nice seeing an old friend. I have a lot of friends here at the hospital still and it is always nice to see them. I remember that when I was on one of the floors after a surgery, the manager had wanted to come see me but she was not sure if I would want that or not. I told her that I would always welcome my friends and would be happy to see them. I am open to sharing my journey with others, especially when people come with good intentions. If they were to come to get me to participate in some sort of a pyramid scheme I think I would not enjoy that as much as I can not escape them.
We will start to plan our itineraries and get the boys ready for travel. Mel likes to get them to practice boarding and understand what the process is as she does not want them to be in awe and slow down others from boarding. We will probably be one of the first to board though if we have a wheelchair as they always tell those people to come and board first. The wheelchair will need to be stored somewhere that it is easy to access when we get off the plane. We will give updates as best as we an while we are in Spain. I think that I will be able to post daily still, but depending upon surgery and when I come out I am not sure how cognizant I will be. I need to arrive at 10am to start the intake procedure and I think that my procedure is either at 1 or 2pm. It is not too lengthy of a procedure so I should be out by dinner time and I know from past experience that I will be quite groggy. I hope that they do not give me instructions or tell me anything then as I have never remembered what they tell me.
A quick update on the GoFundMe. It was interesting as they had paused the transfers to validate information to make sure that the fundraiser was legitimate. It amuses me because I had to explain why we were doing the fundraiser and what the money was going to be used for. I am not sure if all fundraisers are flagged for this or not, but we had raised a considerable amount of money in a short time. Mel wants to provide everyone an update on Friday and we will also give some updates while we are in Barcelona and share some photos as well. We appreciate everything that everyone has done for us and how they continue to provide support for us.
Q