A Fine Balance

Hi Team,

This week has been nice having dad around, he has worked on a few "fix it" projects for me - I forget how nice it is to have someone around that knows how to fix stuff. It is much more economical than just throwing things away and replacing them, as I usually do. He also brought along with him a hard drive of hundreds of legally downloaded movies (of course!) which has been fun to peruse through.

This week I had my oncology appointment on Thursday - just the regular checkup before my next chemo. My port site is still not fully healed and was looking a little inflamed with some gross yellow guck on the scab, and sore to the touch, so he gave me a pretty strong oral antibiotic to try to knock out the infection before it gets me really sick. Luckily I'm on the upswing of my immune system ability, so hopefully I will knock this one out before my next chemo and not have to worry about any escalation. He also had me do an EKG to just make sure everything is normal since I did feel a few irregular palpatations this past time around, and with my dad's family's history of heart disease, it's a little concerning. EKG looked normal, as it normally would unless you happened to do the EKG in the middle of an irregular beat, so we will probably just monitor that one this time around and hope it doesn't get any worse. My heart function was pretty good at the beginning of this whole deal, but my blood pressure has been up, and of course my immune system was good before this thing, and the chemo wiped that out totally... such a fine balance of everything!

It's amazing to me how reactive the human body is to everything, it makes me realize how little we pay attention to what we put in our bodies normally. I have started looking at the ingredients on my body soap, deodarant, lotion, etc etc. Probably to an unhealthy level, but seriously - if you put something on your skin or in your mouth on a regular basis, all those chemicals are going right into your body! I'm not going to go without deodarant or anything dramatic like that, but it definitely makes me think a little harder about what I put in my body. Some of my choices are to get as much of my protein and fat from plant based foods (although I do eat meat still), choose as many non-genetically modified foods as possible, and meats that do not contain antibiotics. You would be surprised at how much of our meat is processed with antibiotics and even has dangerous chemicals added to keep e.coli from being developed during processing. I will get off my soap box now, and just highly recommend that everyone watch the movie Food Inc. scary/real stuff.

On a lighter note, Mom arrived today and we had a nice lunch at the Ferry Plaza Building. It was a bit cold today in San Francisco, starting to get windier - hopefully it dies off this week. My chemo has been shifted to Tuesday since I missed Monday when we had memorial day weekend, so it kind of feels like I have an extra day this time around.

I will leave you guys with a hilarious video my dad shared with me - a spoof on our friends over at BP. Can't seem to post the video embedded in the blog so click here to see "BP Spills Coffee."

Love,
Amy