Hello everyone.  I have been away from this blog for a while as I had company for the last week.  My sister and her daughter and her granddaughter were here for a visit since Jan 30.  I took them back to the airport yesterday, and took the rest of the day off to recuperate.  I was not used to that much activity or the early hours waking up, but when there is a 15 month old baby here, that is what you do.  Their visit was so much fun, my great-niece was just precious and was extremely well-mannered the whole visit.  I miss them already. They arrived back to Chicago last night in the midst of a snowstorm, but all got home intact.

Since I last wrote, I saw my cardiologist on the 29th.  She said my vitals were OK, and increased one of my meds to the maximum she wanted me to take.  She started me out on a low milligram prescription and has been upping it slowly since I started taking it.  Since I was not having any bad side effects, she put me on the maximum dosage she had been working up to.  In three months she wants to do another EKG to see how my heart is doing on the two medications I take, one for blood pressure and one for blood pressure and to help my heart to not work so hard during my chemo treatments.

I also had my full body scan on the 29th, but would have to wait til the 3rd to hear how it came out.
On February 3rd, I saw my oncologist.  He said my blood work looks great at this halfway mark of my treatments.  My platelets are pretty high considering how low they were when I started, 25,000 at the lowest point to almost 200,000 currently.  My red and white blood cells look normal at this point in my treatment. Then I asked him how my scan came out.  He wanted to see the results at the same time I did, so he pulled up the report then and there and here are the results:

1.  The lymph node in my upper body had shrunk from 16mm to 12mm
2.  The lumph node near my belly had shrunk from 26mm to 11mm

Woohoo I said.  That sounds like my treatments are working.  Then he said there was one more improvement:

3.  My spleen, which had enlarged to 23.2cm, was now down to 13.8cm.

The doctor was ecstatic about that, as was I.  My liver had not gone down much but he wasn't too worried about that, the spleen was a huge improvement.  He said my bone marrow had been full of cancer when he did the biopsy, but was now producing healthy blood.

So I and all my company went to Courtney and Andrea's house for a celebratory dinner of grilled steak and salad.  It was a lovely way for my company to end their vacation and celebrate with me on my great results from the cat scan.

I started a new chemo cap right before my company arrived so have not worked on it since.  But I will be back at it tomorrow.  I have the scarves I ordered, so I now have to go to the yarn store and get some yarn to match the scarves, then I will start making more of those.

My darling girls came over for dinner one night and had a surprise for me.  They planted a bunch of lovely spring flowers in my pots, which were full of dead flowers from last year.  Courtney rearranged the pots into a more symmetrical pattern, and they look awesome.  I just hope I can keep them alive till summer.  I did not inherit my mother's green thumb!