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!