Well, the first day of the new chemo treatment, I had to walk my little IV over to the next building and meet with a doctor from the bone marrow team at Indiana University-Indianapolis. He asked me tons and tons of questions and I should get some answers back sometime next week. It looks like we'll be doing an autologous bone marrow transplant (and, I think, stem-cell rescue) sometime near the beginning to middle of May.

The bone marrow doctor agreed that if everything goes well with this round of chemo, that we could put off the bone marrow transplant by a couple of weeks so that I can finish teaching this semester and get the students' finals graded. Since I tolerated the first week of chemo so well and it seems that my symptoms are responding to the treatment as well, I'm sure we'll be able to wait.

More on this when I hear back from Indianapolis!

Meanwhile, the first chemo round went just fine. I was tired out by about Thursday of the week o'chemo and slept most of that weekend, but was back to normal about Wednesday.

Then, the week after I was recovered, something evil happened: I finally started losing my hair. Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm fighting cancer, the big C and all I'm worried about is my hair???

Yup.

It came out rather patchy on the top, but not too much on the sides. However, being super ADHD-child as well as superchemogirl, I couldn't stop pulling it out. I'd sit there, watching tv and pull my hair out a little at a time. I couldn't stop. So, I finally just got it all cut to a bit under half an inch long. I don't pull it out quite so much now. *sigh* I was hoping not to have to wear all those baseball caps my sister sent me for Christmas the first time around.

The second round of chemo was a little more wearing than the first. I didn't really bring as much to do and it's just as well as I slept most of that week. By Wednesday of that week, I couldn't even read! What do people do when they can't read? I tried everything. I tried reading fun books, books I'd read before and even one of my favorite comic books (a couple of back issues that I'd missed when they first came out and was *really* curious about). No dice. I had the attention span of a gnat. If I could concentrate on anything longer than about three minutes, it was a stellar achievement. So, I slept a lot.

Once again, by Wednesday I was pretty much back to normal again. I had to have some Procrit shots this time around, to increase my hemoglobin, but I only had to give myself 7 Neupagen shots instead of 10. My white cells seem to be doing just fine. And while I still tire easily (and, I feel so good that I keep forgetting this!), but that's been about it for side effects. Except, of course, that I'm at that same point in the cycle as last time: what's left of my hair is coming out again. Grrrrrrrr.

Getting ready for the bone marrow >>