No More Flaming Tortillas Allowed

Three weeks of work complete and counting!  Sorry it has been so long since I've written another entry.  Being back at work does take up all the free/boredom time I had before.

I feel that probably my biggest accomplishment since my brain surgery in November is that I have managed to make it through the last three weeks of work without hitting what my husband calls "crash mode".  (I have a feeling he gathered that saying from one of his destructive X Box games).  I have also had my first round of chemo after my six week straight of treatment, and let me tell you . . . double the chemo dosage is certainly a new experience.  Before my major food repulsion was blueberry yogurt, thanks to my double dosage, it now seems to be ALL yogurt.  I had a hope that the nasty/gross/vomit/overall-eww feeling of this would pass after I finished that week of treatment, but unfortunately it has not chosen to leave.  After my next six months of chemo treatment end I am going to have to create some real courage to attempt to try yogurt again.  Or, if you have someone you really don't care for, give me some yogurt (preferably blueberry), and tell me where to aim.

Right now my life has changed from staring at the inside of our house all day to a very predictable schedule.  Now it is work, doctor, sleep . . . work, doctor, sleep . . . work, doctor, sleep, etc.  To help with this I have set a time limit on myself; my goal is to leave work every day by at least five o'clock.  For my first week back, my goal was 5:30, but I've learned that while I don't feel the tiredness at the time, I do feel it when I hit the bed that night.  My husband has been pretty nifty though and has begun cooking dinner during the week so there is dinner there and waiting for me when I get home . . . and this time he hasn't set fire to anything!  (To make a long story short, he once left tortillas in the oven and forget they were there.  You can probably predict what happened after about twenty minutes of tortilla-oven-cooking).

Last Thursday I had my first appointment with Dr. Stilles post-radiation.  It was good and bad.  First of all the good:  They did not feel a need to do the scheduled CT Scan since my MRI a couple weeks before showed absolutely no tumor regrowth or brain tissue damage from the radiation treatment.  Whew!  That was the good news.  Now the not so good news:  My left ear appeared to have an infection, but it was not a normal infection.  It apparently looks a lot like swimmer's ear since it is before my ear drum; but the problem is that the medication they had me take has had zero impact.  That leave my special left radiation-filled ear with two options; one is that it is an odd fungal infection.  The second option is that it is permanent damage as a result of the radiation being fired at the area for six weeks.  I will be meeting with Dr. Stilles this Thursday again to discuss options.  If nothing else, one amusing thing about this is that everyone sounds very odd in my left ear, while very normal in my right.  When I woke up this morning I let my husband know that he sounded a bit like a koala (No, I have no idea what that sounds like, I was half asleep and clearly in the middle of some really weird dream).  My hope is that I can figure out a way for my husband to sound like Leonardo DiCaprio.  Wish me luck! ;)