cancer – day 22
WOW! I can’t believe how many people wrote back to my e-mail letting them know about my surgery. 89 people wrote to me at just my primary e-mail account alone, so that’s not counting any of the SacTango community or Chainalytics people who have been wishing me well throughout all of this. Amazing! I don’t actually know how many people I sent that surgery e-mail to, I think it was maybe 20% of my Outlook Contacts. I just looked on my blackberry, and there are 1546 contacts in my address book, can you believe it? Holy cow. I didn’t know I knew that many people! I just saw I have a lot of voicemails to catch up on since the surgery too, wow, a lot of people have really been sending me a lot of good thoughts and intentions this week. Thank you, everyone!
I don’t know when I’ll catch up on all this e-mail. Today has been my most alert day so far (least nap time) but still I’ve been in bed five of the six hours I’ve been awake. I was up for a while chatting with Mom & Dad and we made plans for dinner and to take me to the milonga for a little while tonight, and after making the dinner reservations and getting the addresses of where we’re going tonight into my GPS I was pretty tired! So now I’m getting ready for a pre-wine-time nap. Mom and Dad have one glass of wine at 5PM most evenings before dinner, it’s part of their enjoying retirement ritual. We have a glass of wine and chat, and when I’m at their house we watch Jeopardy, which my dad is pretty darn good at and I can guess the answers to sometimes. Out here though Jeopardy isn’t on until 6:30PM, and we certainly don’t want to delay wine time to be that late!
I’m planning on working on Monday, we’ll see how that goes. My head has been less foggy each day, so maybe by Monday I’ll be able to stay awake AND think, wouldn’t that be nice!
On Monday we also have the post-surgery follow up appointment with my cancer surgeon, Dr. Thayer, and he may have a pre-report of the pathologies on the lymph nodes and/or the atypical tissue he removed. He’s planning on taking out the stitches from my last not-so-smooth couldn’t-stop-the-bleeding leave-her-with-a-nastily-painful-hematoma biopsy, but I don’t know if he’ll remove any of the surgery stitches just yet. Mom and I were a little concerned about the stitches over one of the lymph node incisions . . . it doesn’t look very secure (the skin puckers out a lot compared to any of the other stitches) and it’s really, really red. But it’s not bleeding and it doesn’t look any worse today than last night, so we’ll probably leave it for Thayer to check out on Monday.
I don’t see the medical oncologist, Dr. Soe, until May 27, which seems foreverably (like my new word?) far away at this point, since finding out my chemo schedule will basically determine what my life will be like for the next six months. That’s the current frustration. Not being able to determine how much I’m going to be able to work when I DO know for a fact that I’ll start chemo in two or three weeks from now bothers me. I hate to suddenly disappear and leave Chain in the lurch of trying to get a report out without me. On the other hand, I want to take as much time as possible to focus on the treatments and healing, rather than stressing about the typical work issues of rereunning reports because so-and-so gave us bad data, or chasing down renewals or writing agreements for new consortiums I don’t have time to manage. Now that the surgery is over, I should be focused first on healing and recovery. But just because I’m sick doesn’t mean the company won’t still have deadlines, and we don’t know what I’ll be able to do and what I need to train other people to do, until I meet with the medical oncologist and find out about the chemotherapthy plan. Ah, look, I’ve come full circle, back to the original frustration. That means it’s time to stop complaining, right? 🙂