Happy first day of summer! It's a beautiful day here in the Bay Area - perfect for the longest day of the year. School's out ... I almost feel like I did at the beginning of summer when I was a kid, when it felt like there would be days and days ahead of playing, riding bikes, exploring, picking wild blackberries, knowing it would be forever before you had to worry about school again .... okay, now I've gone overboard. I'm feeling great, though it was a bit of a treck to get here. As a matter of fact, it started the day after I wrote my last chronicle. I have radiation Monday through Friday at 8:30 in the morning. That Tuesday after radiation I had an appointment with my oncologist. Everything is in the same building - all of the radiological stuff, one treatment room, the acupuncture room and a pheresis unit are in the basement. The first floor has the doctor's offices, the big treatment room, the places where you get blood drawn, and a lab to analyze all the samples. When I was done with radiation, I went upstairs and had my blood drawn. They used my port to draw the blood, but didn't leave the needle in, since I'm not getting chemo right now. Then I went to an exam room to wait for my doc. Lab results are usually up within 15 - 30 minutes. We were just past the half hour mark when I started to get dizzy and nauseated. I'd just stuck my head between my knees when my doc walked into the room. I jumped out of my chair and ran to the little sink in the room and started vomiting. She ran to the phone and asked someone to bring in an emesis basin. I assumed it would be one of those kidney-shaped plastic things that they give you in the hospital. As I was leaning over the sink, a hand reached in with what looked like a small paper desert dish that had blue saran wrap on it. I lifted my head, looked at the nurse and said, "Is this some kind of a joke?" She grabbed the end of the blue "saran wrap" and pulled down - voila - creating what my friend Andrea aptly described as "a barf tube." [Okay, if I'm giving you too much information I apologize.] You put your face in it and have at it ... it really does hold much more and work much better than those kidney-shaped things. I ended up spending he rest of that day and half the next in one of the treatment rooms (where they had to re-access my port) getting IV fluids, electrolytes (some of mine were way off), anti-emetics and some steroids, just to round out the cocktail. We're not really sure what was going on. I had some kind of infection - along with a wicked cough. It could be the radiation, my doc says, since I've been so sensitive to everything else they've given me. It could have been the combo of meds I was on to try to deal with the "herpetic neuropathic pain" - the pain left over from the shingles. Who knows. But we changed a whole bunch of things around, and I'm doing a whole lot better. I take a little something every morning an hour before radiation, and I don't have nausea anymore. We switched just about everything we were doing for the pain, and it's working. Sometimes I look at the number of pills I take and I wonder how I'm walking, talking and driving - but it's all good. So good, as a matter of fact, that next week I get to start Herceptin. I'm finding that the negative side-effects from radiation, like everything else in this cancer treatment array, are cumulative. I start the week with quite a bit of energy - by Thursday and Friday, I'm pretty zapped. Last Friday after radiation I went to my office for about an hour and a half. Then I went home and spent almost the rest of the day in bed; not really sleeping, but not really awake. Having the weekend off, though, was great, because I really had quite a bit of energy on Monday. I'm assuming it will sort of stay that way - always feeling more energized on Mondays - though I understand that as treatment progresses, it all becomes relative. Next Monday I won't have quite as much energy as this Monday, and so on. No big deal - 4 more weeks and I'll be done with radiation. Then we can start the Herceptin count-down - 52 weeks. My plan, once I'm over the fatigue of radiation, is to go back to work and just take off my Herceptin days. Avi and Rom are good. Rom finally got over what ever virus decided to camp out in his body, and he's working a lot. He actually has the day off tomorrow, and I'm going to try to remember to get him to take a picture of my growing-in hair and put it on the blog. Avi has the week off this week. He's at baseball practice right now, gearing up for the TOC (Tournament of Champions). Within the next couple of weeks I'm going to visit with an old friend from high school who found me by searching on the internet. We haven't seen each other in over 35 years, and I can't even begin to tell you how weird it feels saying that. I'm also going to visit with a friend from college, but even though she lives in Pennsylvania, I get to see her a couple of times a year because some of her kids live here in the Bay Area. Things here are good. I hope they are for you, too. Love, Debby