Stomach rolling to much to figure out a clever title...

Good afternoon.

Right now I'm sitting in the chemo ward on Gonda 10 having chemo...again. I just finished my Avastin infusion a couple minutes ago and now I'm receiving an anti-nauseous infusion to prepare me for CPT-11. I can't say that it's helping much. My stomach has been rolling all morning since I had time to fret about coming here after I woke up. The goal had been to get up early and head to RCTC so I could develop a roll of film. That didn't happen, however, since I decided I can finish everything I need to get done tomorrow after class.

Saturday provided the only nice day this week for me to finish my film for my photography assignment. Half the assignment was about taking a picture of a place under two different light settings. I had a problem with that since the light outside hasn't been too variable for the past ten days. But Saturday there was sun, so I finished that half of the picture taking and then added my element that "changes the meaning of the place" to meet all the requirements of the assignment. I decided to gather every umbrella we owned (which is a lot of umbrellas) and set them on the ground beneath the trees in our yard. I'm not quite sure how seven or so umbrellas changes the meaning of a wooded space, but at least it looked cool. While I had all the umbrellas sitting out, a couple of Boy Scouts came up our drive to sell popcorn; they probably thought I was insane because it was nice and sunny and I was running around in a jacket and taking weird pictures of umbrellas. =P

My face rather hurts from the new chemo drug, Erbitux. The acne rash annoys me: there is no compromise between trying to treat the acne and keep my face moisturized. Not only that, but I'm pretty sure the rash has spread to the rest of my head, which makes my head sore in an itchy way. I had been given a prescription to help the acne, and therefore reduce the pain, but after a few days of taking it, I started getting sick to my stomach. At first Mom and I had no clue why I was getting sick: Was it the flu? Something I ate? A bad combo of drugs? We didn't know until we finally read the back of the informational sheet about the acne medication and found its side effects included nausea and vomiting. So I stopped taking it: bad acne is better than the type of sore stomach the medicine gave me. It wasn't only the side effects of the drug that bothered me, but how finicky it was too. I couldn't take food with it and actually was supposed to avoid food for two or three hours before and after I took it. This is a really dumb requirement when chemo has switched you from eating regular meals to grazing throughout the day. I guess we'll have to figure out something else to help with the acne.

Greg came home this weekend. It was fun having him home. On Saturday we drove to Eyota in his Ford Mustang, one last cruise before it gets put away for the winter. It was fun to just drive around for a little while and hang-out.

Meh. My stomach is really starting to hurt, so I'm going to cut this post short.

Hope everyone has a good week.

~Cheryl