Tag: Happy
-
Tuesday was my ninth immunotherapy treatment and the day went pretty much as planned. There was a lot of road construction on the highway this time, but thankfully it didn’t slow traffic enough to be a problem for me. There was no real wait time at the hospital this trip, so that was nice. They even had a treatment room already set up for me as soon as I was done with lab work, so I was able to get in and out of the hospital a little quicker than I have been able to in the past.
Solar Eclipse
I didn’t make a separate post about it, but my family and I were able to see the solar eclipse that occurred recently in our part of the world. It was pretty neat being able to experience totality this time around, and being able to be with my kids and see them experience it too. I had planned to try and use my telescope (with a filter of course) to take some close up pictures, but as it turns out, you need a special and very strong filter for use on a telescope.
A Stern Warning
While preparing to watch the eclipse, I put an extra pair of solar protective glasses over the telescope lens while working slowly (without looking through the telescope) to try and move the telescope around and find the sun. There was NO WAY I was going to be putting any part of my body in front of that telescope lens given what I’ve seen just a simple magnifying glass do when focusing the sun! However, I was hoping to be able to use the solar glasses as a protective layer for a camera lens.
The moment the sun came into the telescope’s view, the solar glasses I was using as a test filter had a hole in them. No smoke, no melting plastic, just an instant hole and a beam of light shooting through them. It was absolutely terrifying how strong that focused light was! The solar glasses were apparently entirely unable to stand up to that amount of energy for even a millisecond. It was basically a “sun laser” shooting through the telescope.
If anyone had been standing in front of that beam, it probably would have hurt them instantly and very badly, even through their clothes. So after the second or two it took me to recover from the shock of the incredible power I had just witnessed, I quickly knocked the telescope out of alignment with the sun to avoid any accidental harm to myself or anyone else around, then put the telescope away just for good measure. 🙂
Just to drive the point home for anyone who might consider a telescope for solar/solar eclipse viewing in the future, you MUST buy a special filter, solar glasses will not work for this!
-
Today was my eighth immunotherapy treatment and this time we decided to make good use of the travel time. My daughter got some of her required driving hours in and some good experience driving on the interstate. Thankfully, it was a nicer day than it has been for the last few trips and traffic on the interstate was not too crazy. I didn’t want to subject her to the big city traffic yet, so we switched out before we got into the city. She did a great job and while she did admit to being nervous, she didn’t overreact to any situations and didn’t give me any reason to fear for our lives! 😀
The nurses were apologizing for the wait time today, even though I didn’t really wait any longer than my average visit. Since I hadn’t waited all that long, I asked one of them if it had been a busy day for them. Apparently, before I arrived for my appointment today, the nurses were so overloaded with patients that some people had been waiting for a couple of hours from their initial appointment time before they got called back. I guess I arrived late enough in the day that they had already worked the queue back down to a pretty short wait time.
In Other News
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it in this blog yet, but for the past several months I have been doing lot of research and sifting through all sorts of laws and legalese at the state and federal level. Why you ask? Well, I’ve been considering starting my own side business. I’m not planning anything too exciting, I’m just looking for a way to try and sell some of my digital creative work as a way to make a little extra money (I hope) to help us out with rising expenses and long term plans. Don’t worry, I’m not quitting my job or anything crazy like that. I’m just planning to try and create some extra income when I’m not at work.
I know you can sell things in person or online without creating a company, but a single member (me) Limited Liability Company (LLC) is a reasonably inexpensive way to be sure you can legally sell your product(s) and at the same time provides you with some legal protection, just in case something goes wrong. So, I think I’m just about ready to give this LLC idea a try. I’ll let you know if and when I do it, and if you happen to have been thinking of doing something similar, feel free to ask me about it. After all that research I now know a decent amount about the rules governing the formation and management of your own LLC, at least in this state, and I’d be happy to try and save you some research time if I can answer a question for you.
-
Well, yesterday was the seventh immunotherapy treatment and as before, I have no treatment related issues or side effects to report. However, I had a bit of a weird experience when they were prepping me for the infusion. The first vein they stuck the needle into didn’t bleed. Apparently that can happen, but it was strange to see the needle come out without even a drop of blood on the puncture wound. It is currently just a little pink bump, kind of like a mosquito bite that doesn’t itch.
This visit, the wait time in the lobby was a bit longer than normal and I overheard a lady and her daughter sitting near me discussing the immunotherapy treatment, what it might be like, and wondering aloud “does it always take this long to get in?” I decided to get their attention and talk to them for a few minutes since we were all waiting, and I let them know that the wait time was normally not this bad. The lady had recently had a biopsy of her melanoma on her leg, almost in the same spot as me, and she and her daughter were there for the first time to talk to the doctors about the immunotherapy treatment option.
I shared what I could with them about the treatments I’d had so far, the lack of side effects up to this point, and I let her know the doctor she/we were seeing was a very pleasant person and easy to talk to. I think I was able to calm their nerves a little bit, at least I hope so. 🙂
Dermatologist Visit
This morning before I went to work I had a follow-up visit with the dermatologist and I was given a good report. The doctor told me there are no new spots to be concerned about and my scar from surgery is healing up nicely. I’ll be going back for another visit in about three months.
-
Well, here I am again, sitting at the “tomorrow that almost never came.” I meant to post about this trip the day after it happened, but that was Valentine’s Day. I kept telling myself I’d write it up “tomorrow,” and now here I am at about two and a half week’s worth of tomorrows, finally getting around to writing this up. So, on February 13th, I went in for my sixth immunotherapy treatment, which, thankfully, was pretty uneventful. The road trip is starting to become familiar and since the weather is beginning to get warmer, I’m looking forward to being able to drive with the windows down, or at least cracked, soon. I don’t know about anyone else, but I enjoy having the wind in the car.
For the past two to three weeks since my last visit, I had been a bit under the weather, so I was glad to be back to a standard healthy state by the 13th because it’s no fun having to figure out how to safely blow your nose while driving, let alone at interstate speeds! 🙂 I was dealing with a lot of sinus drainage, which for me almost always ends up causing chest congestion and coughing that can last long after the drainage has stopped. However, as I said, on the day of the trip, everything finally seemed to clear up.
Valentine’s Day
My wife and I decided to take our daughter and her boyfriend out for Valentine’s Day at the end of that week. We went out to dinner and did some semi-competitive hatchet throwing. We had done this activity before and had a lot of fun, but this was new for the younger two. If you’ve never done this before, I recommend it because it can be a lot of fun. The local business that offers this activity teaches you how to do it and how to be safe while having fun.
You might be surprised to hear that it really doesn’t take a lot of arm strength to throw a hatchet at a target. In fact, it is actually harder to hit the target if you throw the hatchet too hard. If you think you might like to try this too, you can look up the details online or just ask one of us for more information.
This Tuesday is my next treatment day and the day after that I have a follow-up appointment with the dermatologist. I’ll be getting checked over again for any external signs of returning melanoma. I don’t expect any bad news this time around, but either way, I will let you know how things go, and I promise the next post will be more punctual! 🙂
-
Tuesday was the fifth immunotherapy treatment and everything went pretty well. However, I would like to note that driving two hours (both ways) on the interstate, in pretty thick fog, is not exactly my idea of fun… especially after it gets dark and visibility goes down to about 50ft. But, I did manage to make it there and back safe and sound regardless of the weather! 🙂
Whoops!
Due to an absolutely ridiculous accident (my own fault) I actually ended up giving a bit more blood than intended this time around. When I got to the hospital I decided to use the restroom before checking in. As I left the restroom, I hit my hand pretty hard on the latch of the door (the plunger/tongue/”springy thingy”) and yelped, but when I took a look at the damage, it just looked like a deep crease in my finger, so I went on to the desk to check in. When I got there, the lady asked me if I wanted a band aid for my finger and when I looked, my finger had apparently been damaged a little bit more than I realized. Such a dumb way to hurt myself huh? LOL. 🙂
Scan & Result
After checking in, they sent me to radiology to get the ultrasound scan that I mentioned in my last post. After checking in over there, I waited for about 30 minutes before going back to their check in desk to ask if I needed to contact the people that normally do my injection. In another 30 minutes I would be late to that next appointment. Apparently, radiology didn’t realize that things were scheduled so tightly for me, so they got me back right away after they found out. The scan only took a few minutes, may be 10 at most. They took some images of the lymph notes they were interested in and then they got me on my way to my regular appointment.
Once I was back in the part of the hospital where I normally receive the immunotherapy treatments, they did my regular lab blood tests and then sent me on to the treatment room. While I was waiting, one of the doctors came in and told me that the ultrasound scan had not yet been fully reviewed by all of the involved doctors, but they themselves had taken a look already and didn’t see anything concerning. So, it sounds like so far I’m still clear of any cancer in the lymph nodes. That’s welcome news for sure! 🙂
-
New Year’s
I hope everyone had an enjoyable and safe New Year’s. Michelle and the kids went to a friend’s house for a bit on New Year’s eve. I stayed home and worked on figuring out which over-the-air TV station would be showing the “ball drop” for us all to watch together later on when the family got back. I put the TV on “channel scan” (since we don’t normally use over the air channels) and when the process completed, I found out that somewhere in the last several years since TV went digital, we can now pickup over 35 channels with bunny ears!
Wow! I remember when I was younger there were only four, maybe five, channels available to us over the air, so this seems crazy! While I was flipping through these new channels, I found a fun channel that was playing old episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and I ended up watching those for a few hours until the family came home to finish out the last hour of the year with me. 🙂
Medical
Tuesday was my fourth immunotherapy treatment and everything about the process went pretty much as I’ve come to expect now:
- I arrive at the hospital.
- I wait for an indeterminate amount of time.
- I get called back to the lab to get stabbed and give them some blood.
- I get stabbed again to get the IV ready.
- I wait yet again, sometimes for quite a while.
- Someone comes in and hooks up the medicine to my IV and I sit there for about 30 minutes while it trickles into my arm.
- And finally, after they detach me from the equipment, I get to head home! 🙂
It would appear I was mistaken about the scan I mentioned in my last post. Apparently they are going to scan me next time I’m in. They told me they are not very concerned about recurrence at this point in time, so they are going to do an ultrasound scan rather than the more extensive PET/CT scan they had me go in for back in September
-
Last Saturday Michelle and the kids trekked town to Tennessee with her parents to attend the second Christmas gathering of the season with family there while I stayed home for work. Then Monday morning, the day of Christmas, we had our own own family Christmas before her parents joined us for Christmas with them. That was a lot of Christmas! 🙂
This week I’ve been enjoying spending some time off from work with the family. Yesterday, we held a sixteenth birthday party for our daughter. I believe she had a good time and enjoyed getting to spend time with her friends. Gosh, Sixteen already… that went by fast! Now I feel like I’m going to blink and 16 will be here for her brothers too.
I’ll be heading back to the hospital for my fourth treatment early this week so I’ll let you know in a few days how that goes. I may be wrong about this but I think they told me last time that this time they’re going to do some sort of follow up scan on me to make sure everything is still looking good inside of me (e.g. I’m still clear of any cancer cells.) So, I can tell you more on that topic after I find out more myself.
Happy New Year!
-
This morning, I had to get up really early for a security meeting at church. Why does everyone in the world always seem to want to do things super early on Saturday mornings!? Saturday mornings are really the only time I can catch up on the sleep I don’t generally get during the work week. 🙂 It was a good meeting, though. It is important to get everyone on the security team together so we all have a chance to learn more about the job and what is expected of us in the event of a crisis.
After lunch we went to my parents’ house for a little Christmas party. Not everyone attended, but it was still a nice event, and I think the kids really enjoyed it. 🙂
-
Today was my third immunotherapy treatment. It’s a bit of drive to the hospital and then back again, about two hours if there are no delays. It is not really a visually interesting drive either since it is around 98% interstate driving. I think I’m going to have to figure out how to keep myself from getting bored so I don’t accidentally stop paying attention as I drive this several times over the next year. I certainly don’t want to have an accident at interstate speeds. Maybe I’ll pull out some CD’s or audio books to listen to during the drive.
Everything went well again this time. Thankfully I didn’t have to wait around in the treatment room nearly so long as I did last time. They managed to move me around between labs pretty quickly so I didn’t wait long in any one place. However, they did have a bit of a difficult time sticking me in a vein this time, so I ended up with three punctures by the end of it all, ugh. They do their best to be gentle, but repeated attempts are not very much fun for someone who really doesn’t like needles. But, on the bright side, once again I haven’t experienced any noticeable side effects so barring something unforeseen, it appears I should be able to reasonably expect that the remaining treatments next year should go by without me experiencing any negative side effects. 🙂