Many Exciting Events!

It's been a long time since I've updated this thing, since I kind of keep forgetting that it exists. Oops. A number of interesting things have happened since my last update. I will describe them here.

I finished chemo over two weeks ago, and got to ring the "I'm done with chemo" bell. It was all very exciting, and I am very glad to never have to return.

A week after finishing chemo, Dave and I got to go to Salt Lake City to visit Ed. We did many exciting things, like go to a dinosaur museum, but the pertinent point from the trip is: Emily kicked butt in miniature golf.

On Friday, I had the "set-up" appointment for radiation. Basically this meant that they had to set it up so that I get radiation in exactly the same place each time I go in. To do this, they dipped a sheet of plastic (with little holes in it) into a tub of hot water. The plastic heated up enough to become stretchy, malleable and slightly sticky. They had me lay on a table, with this weird thing under my neck, and had me tilt my chin back as far as I could. Then they laid the malleable plastic over my face, shoulders and upper chest and squished the plastic around until it was a firmly fitted mask. The little holes in the plastic allowed me to breathe, but not much more than that. The plastic was tight enough that even blinking was difficult. After the plastic had firmed up, they bolted it down to the table I was on. This is NOT an experience for the claustrophobic. After bolting the plastic mask over my face and shoulders, they velcroed my feet together, so this way they can be sure that I am ALWAYS in the same position when I go through the machine. Lovely. I was also told the worst of the side effects that I can expect will be: a lot of skin irritation, a really really really horrible sore throat, and constant, low-level fatigue. I start March 30th and will be going in every weekday for four to four and a half weeks.

On Saturday the 21st I started feeling kind of flu-y, so I called the after hours nurse number. The nurse was alarmed that I had stomach pain and head pain so she told me to go in to the ER. I got there, with Mom, sometime shortly after 3 and was there all afternoon. While I was there my temperature kept going up and up until the doctor decided he was going to make me stay there overnight. The headache was also concerning to him as he thought it maybe meant meningitis, and he briefly considered doing a spinal tap. I am extremely grateful that he decided that it wasn't a necessary procedure. The conclusion in the end was that i probably had a combination of the flu and a delayed reaction to the Neulasta shot I got two weeks before. The hospital room I was in through the night was very nice, but it's difficult to get enough sleep when they wake you up every two hours to take your vitals and some blood samples.

Finally, in a set of completely unrelated news, I officially get to go to Alaska for field work in August!! We will be going here (where the red arrow is pointing):
So, we'll be well into the Arctic Circle, which is very exciting to me! The project involves using airborne ground-penetrating radar (250 MHz at ~15 m in the air) to detect changes in the active layer of the permafrost and to image anomalies associated with thermokarst formation and changes in sedimentation along the Toolik River. To those of you who are not geologists, this means we are using a radar to watch ice melt and ground collapse. It will be very exciting, and my advisor expects that we will get two papers out of it: a field methods paper for AGU, since airborne GPR for permafrost is quite uncommon, and then the final paper discussing the results.

That is all I have to say... I am on spring break now, and am staying home, which is somewhat less exciting than it has been in the past four years (during which I went to the Mojave desert (awesome), Death Valley National Park (awesomer), Mammoth Caverns NP (Hillbilly Hounds!), Cumberland Gap (rainrainrain and hermaphrocalves), Great Smoky Mountains NP (pretty scenery), Congaree NP (mud and pigsign), Charleston (very nice), Houston (excellent Mexican food) and Port Aransas (Gulf of Mexico and a beach resort!).

A Very Long Overdue Post!

Hello all! It's been a super long time since I updated this thing, and people have been nudging me to get to it, so here I am!

For the most part, things have been continuing the same. The past few treatments have been a lot rougher in terms of the fatigue and the nausea, but not so rough that I can't manage it. It's mostly just that I'm really tired for up to a week, and I feel queasy on and off for the three or so days following treatment. I have been noticing a bit of a change in my breathing, which is to be expected from some of the drugs. As a result of that, two weeks ago the doctors/nurses made a decision to reduce the amount of Bleomycin I'm getting by 25%, to prevent any further lung complications.

BUT, I did have some (tentatively!) good news on Friday. Dr. Hodson told me that before my next scheduled treatment (on 2/20) I am going to have the PET scan, CT scan and Pulmonary Function Test repeated; if (IF!) the tests show good progress then I will be allowed to skip my final two treatments entirely, which means that I'll be done with chemo four weeks earlier than anticipated, and that also means that the treatment I just had might have been my last. I won't know for sure for a couple of weeks, because the tests are starting on February 16, but as soon as I find something out, I'll let people know. I'm crossing my fingers!

I will, of course, still have to go through the radiation :(. I am not sure if I will still get the four weeks off between chemo and radiation if I end up skipping the final cycle of chemo, but I'm hopeful. Luckily, I have a fairly light course load. I'm taking the minimum number of credits to allow me to be considered a "full time student." of those 9 credits, 3 of them are seminar/discussion type courses and 6 credits are for actual courses. I am also lucky enough to have gotten one of the easier assistantships... I'm TAing an online course, so I can do a lot of the work from home, especially now that I have a shiny new computer!! Of course, the most important thing about the full time status and the assistantship is that it allows me to keep my tuition waiver, stipend, and health insurance.

I'm a little unsure of what I'll be doing this summer, because it sounds like a lot of people have widely varying responses to the radiation. Some people have very little fatigue, and some people have fatigue that persists weeks or months after they're done with the radiation treatment. Bcause of the potential long-lasting fatigue, I kind of do not want to commit to field work for this summer (hiking around in Alaska and doing field work while completely laid low by the radiation does not sound like fun!), so I'm going to try to come up with another plan. I will probably either stay in Boise for the summer and work on the parts of my thesis that don't require new data (background research, etc) or I will apply for an internship somewhere. Believe it or not, for those of you who have listened to me complain endlessly about ESRI and ArcGIS, I am thinking of applying for one of the ESRI student internships in either northern California, Olympia WA, or St Louis.

I hope everyone had a good holiday season; I know I certainly did! I got to see friends from high school who returned home, and I also got to see most of my college friends (Ed came up to Boise, and then I went to Chicago and St Louis to see Emma, Anne, Laura and Brian). Last weekend I went up to Sun Valley with some friends, which was fun as well. Also, in a few weeks I'm planning on driving down to Salt Lake City with Dave to visit Ed while he's home from grad school for spring break.

Leave a comment and let me know how you're doing, if I haven't talked to you in awhile!