Tuesday was my tenth immunotherapy treatment. I’m getting closer to the end of these treatments (the one year mark) or at least what I hope is the end. I was told I would need to be treated for a year, which would be about seventeen treatments, then they’ll reevaluate at that point. So, I had to leave a lot earlier this time. They had me scheduled to go in for an early morning CT scan before my regular treatment appointment. The scan was quick, but waiting for the special dye to absorb into me first took about an hour.

After the CT scan, the doctors I normally see for the immunotherapy treatment came by the treatment room. They let me know they had seen the immediate results of the scan, and didn’t see anything they were concerned about. However, the official “reviewed” scan report will not be available for several days. I guess I’m waiting for that final report to get confirmation of the initial analysis I was given.

Other Updates

I’ve finally officially registered my business and have filed all the required state and federal paperwork. Insurance, taxes, and accounting are now in order too. Yay! Now onward to the next objective — create the public facing portion of the business and get to work on selling what products I’ve already created. After that I’ll be working on creating more, and selling those too. That may sound simple when reduced to a few sentences, but there’s still a lot to do before I can actually start making any money from this endeavor. I’ll keep you posted. 🙂

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, I’d like to apologize to any of you who may have been using this blog as a main source of information regarding my health. I just realized today that it has been a whole month since I posted anything. I got busy and kept saying to myself “I’ll post tomorrow” until tomorrow wound up being today and I realized this evening that you would probably like to know what’s been going on! So, I’ll try to catch you up without being too long-winded. 😀

Now to recap November 2023… Well, in my last two posts I left you with some serious information and then gave you something silly for dessert! So, my dad is now doing much better and is back at home again. My temporary symptoms after that first injection subsided quickly and I was back to normal after a few days. Michelle got to have a fun girls night out with some of her friends and they all painted their own ceramic Christmas trees, the kind with little colored plastic lights stuck into them. Michelle and the kids attended an Ice Hockey game (the local team) and from what I heard later that evening, they all had a good time.

A few weeks ago we had a friend take some family pictures for this year. I haven’t seen any of them yet but I’m sure they’re great. 🙂 On the 21^st I went in for my second immunotherapy treatment. This time things went a little more smoothly since I knew what to expect, though I think they may have forgotten about me for bit because they left me waiting in a treatment room (with no IV) for quite some time. In fact, it was about one and a half “Hallmark channel movie’s” long! 😀 Thankfully, this time I didn’t experience any noticeable side effects, so I’m hopeful that means the first time will be the only time I have any side effects to report.

Michelle and I both had birthdays this month. That makes us both one year closer to AMAZING! Right? Right?… No? Well, anyway. 😉 So the dealership we bought that Toyota from, in October, finally sent us the Tennessee title, in December, so now I can get it titled here. Apparently things in the Tennessee B.M.V. just move a bit slower than here. I didn’t know how good we had it!

Last Wednesday was our church’s Christmas dinner, which is always a nice time. Then the very next night was Madrigal dinner at U.S.I. If you don’t know this already, I was in choir in college and was a part of this production/fundraiser back then. Essentially it’s a nice catered dinner and a Christmas music choir concert all wrapped up into one medieval Irish themed setting. It can be a lot of fun, especially if the court jesters decide to come and pick on you or someone sitting close to you! I would recommend trying it next year if that sounds interesting to you.

Our church also held a “Ladies Christmas Tea” this weekend and it was quite well attended. I think I heard that there were upward of three hundred attendees. We volunteered to help out, though I’m not sure I really ended up being much help! 🙂 The youth group acted as the servers and after seeing how things went in previous years, I must say this year was a marked improvement. I didn’t spot any big mishaps, the kids were well behaved, and everything went out to the tables accurately and in a quick and organized fashion. Great job guys!

Well, in spite of my best efforts, this did turn out to be longer than I had intended. But, I’m almost done! Tomorrow, I have a follow-up appointment with the dermatologist, which I believe is just to give me another once-over to verify there are no new concerning spots showing up. Also, next Tuesday I’ll be going in for the third immunotherapy treatment, so if not before then, I’ll at least make sure to post a more timely update for you after that appointment.