A bright note...

Hard to believe but I have some good news. Oh my, that sounds terribly self absorbed. Well, I have been rather self absorbed lately. After a summer of delightful travel interspersed with trips to the hospital I've been feeling crappy and worried about my health.

My saddlebags that I wear on my saddlebags, that would be the bags of pee I clip to my underwear at my hips for those of you needing more explanation, haven't been cooperating. I went in recently to have the nephrostomies converted to internal stents so I can pee like a normal person instead of drenching the bed, or my leg periodically (yep, it happened at work). They are very nice in the Interventional Radiology suite, especially a nurse named Andrew. He's some kind of dope dealer. I got some sedation and pain medicine during the procedure but was still in pain after so he got me 2 vicodin. One of those usually has me slurring my words but I was still a little gorked from the procedure and didn't think about the dose. Vicodin being an oral medication doesn't work right away. Andrew's solution was some intravenous dilaudid as a chaser. That makes a grand total of fentanyl, versed, vicodin and dilaudid in about 90 minutes. Holy cow, it took me three days to detox.

I had a cocktail party the following night. If Happy Hal and Granny Franny hadn't been there to help we'd have had to turn people away at the door. After tanking on fluids all day I rallied about an hour after the party started. It was a fun little soiree.

Ok, so what's the good news? The internal stents aren't working. I still gotta saddle up with my bags. My tumor marker took a jump the last round of chemo. I'm not eating well and am losing weight. Worsening disease was on everyone's mind. The good news is a CT scan last week shows disease that is stable to slightly improved. There's actually not a whole lot of bad stuff in there. You can all stop coveting my road bike now. The chemo is working and we're going to stick with the current treatment plan.

I'm so relieved. It's taken almost a week to really feel it. It feels good, real good.

I'll sign off now. In the next installment I think I shall right about my hero.

Dr. Bif