2nd chemo down, 6 more to go

I'm starting on a positive note today! My hair has been growing back slowly and I'm pondering when to reveal my new hairdo. Most of the hair is pretty short which really reveals how egg-like my head is and then I have some longer pieces mixed in which are the wispy hairs that never fell out when I was shedding earlier. I am thinking of shaving those off so I have one consistent length of hair. But it takes guts to reveal this extremely short hair. Maybe I'll go out later today on some errands and see if anyone stares at me. Of course, now that I am growing hair, I guess I'll have to change my Mii in Wii which is a baldheaded girl with glasses. It's so funny looking though, I think I'll keep it anyway!

So, I had my second chemo on Thursday. I again had low blood cell counts but not as bad as the previous week so I had a lower dosage of the chemo drugs. Unfortunately, I had to endure three tries before they got the IV in this week. The first two times they hit scar tissue in the vein and they just couldn't get it to work right. It is upsetting to me because the IV has to be perfect or you can get major tissue damage from one of the chemo drugs. They have to continually check the IV placement by pulling back to check for bloodflow as they give you the drug to make sure it's going into the vein properly. So for the third try (and they only have one arm to work with now that I've had my lymph node surgery), they pulled over the expert and phew, it was in.

It's only Saturday morning but I feel pretty good so far. Of course, the side effects will probably kick in just as I sign off from the blog ;-) My fingernails are growing in normally and almost all of the weirdness is grown out except for top third of the my nail.

I haven't had anything going on in the chest area and since I just had chemo, I pushed off my first expander filling to Feb 1 so my body is in the best shape (blood cell-wise). Unfortunately, that means I have to wait one more week for them to take the tape off and find out if I have healed OK, which pushes back any chance of swimming as well.... I can sleep on my sides ok but honestly, it still feels like I have plastic under my chest. I mean I can really feel the expanders under there and it's pretty gross. When I say feel, I don't mean by touching with my hands, I mean when I move, I can feel them there up against the muscle. Ick. I just try not to think about it much. One of the women at my support group meeting said she felt claustrophobic with the expanders... I hope I don't get to that.

I still can't exercise much because of the sciatica in my leg. I can't stand for more than about 2 minutes before it becomes terribly painful. The physio is coming along but I am not seeing much improvement. I guess I have to be patient. I have been told that I can go to the gym and do 12 minutes of riding a recumbant bike. 12 minutes! and I guess I can do some boring ball exercises too... sigh. That's it. I am dying to get out but even walking hurts.

Ok enough complaining. In the grand scheme of things, I am doing OK. Apart from my leg, I do feel pretty good but I have to avoid sick people to stay this way.

Hope you all have a great weekend. The sun has come out, we can stop building our Arks here in California ;-)