Memnison Journal

Yesterday was my first day out with both feet in REAL shoes; it was snowing in Chicago, and I had to go downtown to have my monthly all-day session with the leukemia docs and get my IVIG treatment.  The two dogs had torn up my sleep a lot the night before with getting up and [...]

*snifl* Went to bed around 8:45, and woke up at 10:30 when Susan came to bed - partly because I was stuffed up and couldn’t breathe well through the CPAP, and partly because of the fuss of Susan getting into place and the dog trying to get next to MOMMY for the night.  Looked around [...]

Well, if you’d never heard of our Governor before, you have now.    My reflections on this inside.

Having a much less immediately lethal form of leukemia and being an adoptive dad of a Chinese girl, this story hits home: a kid in Ohio adopted from China has a nasty version of leukemia, and is in desperate need of a bone-marrow transplant.  There’s this little problem, however, about finding a genetic match from [...]

I’m noticing that a lot of my friends-list and others online - and the few I talk to on the phone (man, I am so housebound) - are going to take the holidays easy, cheap and local this year.  Our household will, as usual, trot out to Susan’s aunt Marlyce’s house and do the holiday [...]

When I get the mail, I open up the bills, and of course, there’s always a bunch of statements from Blue Cross / Blue Shield on The Bills.  Having a damned expensive year on health costs, due to your Humble Narrator’s health problems, has been also damned painful.  And a LOT of paperwork.  At this [...]

Went in for my IVIG treatment; tried to bring along the house laptop, but the stuff they give me to reduce the reactions to the high-speed IVIG made me sleepy, and I didn’t get much done.  There’s no internet, the wireless phone can’t get through, so I’m pretty isolated and I sleep a lot.
On the [...]

Vertigo.  Bad case of it over the weekend, woke up with it on Saturday morning, two major attacks that left me losing my stomach and so on.  Tried some meclizine that was left over from a similar attack when I had an ear infection a while back, and it didn’t cut it.  Susan ran me [...]

I’ve been somewhat out of it for the last few days with a bad boil on my head - more or less where the other one was earlier this year.  It broke over the weekend, which the other one never really did, and I went in to the doctor and got the thing looked at [...]

For the last several weeks, I’ve been undergoing a special treatment for my foot wound that had been seemingly working to heal the thing up; it’s been problematic for six months, and required two operations and a lot of IV and otherwise antibiotics.  But last week, my podiatrist said that he didn’t like what he [...]

Still tired from the con; the entire family went minus Grandma Connie but including my visiting niece Kelbi, who decided to volunteer for the childcare room, and worked her butt off there! ( I think she racked up 15 hours…very dedicated.) She didn’t want the con, she wanted the kids!
Well, chacun a [...]

A quick update to the general run of things.
The doctors visits have slowed down somewhat.  Northwestern’s Infectious Disease people want to go digging to see if there’s bone involvement in the old foot wound, but it’s not because they think there’s something there, but because they’re covering all the bases.  The wound isn’t healing very [...]

Back from the meeting with the leukemia doc, and Susan’s totally worn out and has stumbled upstairs to bed to crash.  Her leg’s been really bad today; the doc says that it’s a type of knee problem, where you aggravate the knee and a cyst with excess fluid forms in the back; in her [...]

…tomorrow scares the hell out of me with the visit to discuss the pathology report.  Just deep down terrifies me.  What I’m hanging on to is the leukemia doc’s Probably It’s This And It’s Treatable and Beatable.   Not to mention losing the weight rapidly to get on that radiation table…
I think I’m taking one of [...]

I have the path report, but I really don’t know how to read it all that well.  The short version is that I’ve been handed back off to the CLL doctor, as the path report *sounds* like his guess of a localized blowup of the CLL was correct, and that I’ll have to do the [...]