Archive April 10, 2014

Well we are on week ten. Next week we will be half way thru the cancer treatment. It’s working, Coffee is in total clinical remission. Her lymph nodes are normal sized and continue to be normal size. She is experiencing nausea today. I gave her nausea medication today but she still didn’t want to eat. We will buy her whatever she wants and today she only wanted a soft milk bone, so she gets whatever she wans to eat. I feel bad that chemo makes her sick. Every chemo she’s had before seem to bring more symptoms of side effect sickness………

Anyway……we have two more rounds of each chemo type so I guess not feeling good is something Coffee and I will have to get used to.

Weather
We have went thru lots of weather to Madison, and we have gotten so much help with the clinic trying to work out us driving 200 miles a trip for Coffee….but yesterday we almost crashed. Perfectly good weather and almost ….. BOOM. It was O.K., we avoided CRASHING but it ruined our ride to Madison. How can I be so careless sometimes?

Creamy is so tired waiting for Coffee’s chemo she decided to rest!

Coffee’s blue hospital name tag . It’s Coffee check in neck band

I spent the day with my best friend June today. She wanted to go shopping for a dress for her son’s wedding. She needs a dress and she is so picky….hahaha. We haven’t been mall shopping in a long time. It was so fun. She got to shop Victoria Secrets, we looked at purses, picked out tops, pilfered through sale racks, tried on shoes….it was fun.

I was in a dressing room and a family was there and a group of friends trying to find the right prom dress and the girls were laughing, and being silly, and texting boys….it was so fun to hear them do that. To listen to them critique dresses, talk about boys, mother joking about trying to find the right dress. I have such great memories of mom doing that with me, and Tracy and June making me try on every dress in the store! I forgot what a great time that was and I am so grateful for that moment in time.

June, me, Lucy, Tracy, and Pam

I am missing my Chocolate Chip today. My little Chip man was so sweet and he came to live with me because his family was too busy to take care of him. He had a bad valve that couldn’t be replaced. First they didn’t have small enough valves for little dogs. After some time they did make the valves but small dogs don’t do well on heart lung machines. So we couldn’t have his heart fixed. But he did prove Vetmedin was a wonder medication for dogs with heart problems. Thanks to Vetmedin, fourisimide,and benazapyl… He lived five years with a bad heart, instead of one. I miss him though, a lot.

Coffee’s Cancer. By wendy

We sit and wait for tests and counts.
We sit and wait to see,
if white cells are high enough
To get chemo in me.

My family is here,
they won’t leave me alone.
They wait for my chemo too….
Maybe today the cancer, will be gone

Wendy stays right by my side
She tells me it’s OK
She gives me to the doctor
And tells me not to bite her today

The chemo makes me feel tired and sick
It takes the bounce out of me
I have to rest and eat little bites
Anything that tastes good, you see.

I hate the needles and the pokes
They make big bruises on my bunny feet
I just wish the cancer would go away
And life would again be sweet.

I was re-arranging today my attic room in the garage. I call it the loft. With some help of a friend, I went thru a lot of bins and have a pile to give away. The furniture is rearranged and think my plans were good. I double stacked the shelves, in front of each other. This system will be a pain but it will work the best. If the shelves were on wheels it would be easier. I put the desk by the window so I can have more light. (that would be David’s idea). My friend June said she would do the insulation but I still have to pay the electrician to upgrade the electric and I need venting and I can’t do that either. When I got the new estimate it was $5000 more than the first estimate so that was a big jump.

Now to figure out what to do. It would be a perfect art studio but I can’t pull money out of a hat. Wouldn’t that be nice…money out of the hat.

Planning is hard for me since the brain injury. I have to write everything down and make sure I follow the plan I wrote. If something interferes with what I am doing, it totally disrupts what I was thinking or planning. I hate that.

So I will make a few more idea notes and see if I can take a load to goodwill.

It’s week nine and nothing is every easy. We have an appointment tomorrow at 10:30 but my sister checked the weather and it’s suppose to be freezing rain. So I called our local clinic to see if Coffee could have chemo here. This week it’s a pill. UW Madison doesn’t do chemo on Fridays. Driving 200 miles in freezing rain doesn’t not sound appealing, but today it is a beautiful day! So I called and UW Madison, had the Oncology Unit call me back. I had a neurologist appointment at 11, the cancer unit said they would take me anytime I could come. So we went right after the neurology appointment. Usually we are prepared, breakfast and lunch prepacked, drinks and paperwork. But we went just started driving. Hi way here we come.

Chemo today was good and fast. Blood count today was 2000. So she got her chemo pill. We had a little trouble getting the pill down her, but a little liver sausage goes a long way. Glands are normal size, cancer still in total remission. They adjusted this chemo because it took her blood count really low last time she had it.

On the way home David called, he’s on his way to the emergency room. He fell and popped his knee, so who knows what I will find when I get home.

Sometimes the weathers nice …sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s cold…..up north it’s getting 10 inches of snow……so …..welcome to Wisconsin weather. You never get bored because the weather is never the same 2 days in a row.

So I have been making plan spring plans. It will show up sooner or later. I don’t know if I can afford the remodeling of the garage room into my art studio. So I am making plans to finish the school items I want to give away and the items I want to keep for awhile. The other thing is rearranging all the shelves and the furniture. So I have been making plans to rearrange the furniture and make it a more workable area with more airflow. When I first built the room it was just for storage. So I had shelves in the middle of the room but because there is only one window (my mistake, I thought it would be more secure that way) that means the shelves block the light and air. So shelves getting moved! The only really bad thing is the room is a triangle so the middle of the room is the only tall part. On the sides, it gets smaller and smaller.

My things will be sorted and given away by spring.

The surreal flowers of door county

My very favorite April Fools dinner, cupcake that are not really cupcakes but are actually meal loafs baked in cupcake pans then taken out put in cupcake papers and then frosted? Yes…. frosted with colored mash potatoes and pea decorations! I loved making them.

These are from the Internet, my potatoes were never this fancy.