cancer chronicles Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Ashley Hackshaw / Lil Blue Boo

Photo of the Day: Note to Self

December 28, 2011 by Ashley Hackshaw

I went in for my Neulesta shot today and I shouldn’t have worn this shirt. In order to give me a shot in the arm I would have had to strip. Note to self, don’t wear a tight shirt that has thumb holes on shot day.

So…..they gave me the shot in the stomach……right next to my now-off-center bellybutton. I told the nurse her hands were going to be on the internet….it looks like she’s doing an extra careful job with this shot. I’m going to use that to my advantage from this point forward.

The nurse was trying to convince an elderly woman sitting across from me to get her shot in her stomach too. She was adamant against it…..so I told her I’d go first and she could watch. It wasn’t that bad…..but it didn’t work…..I think she would have fought them to the bitter end.

My white blood cell counts are really good right now….(6,800 and anything between 4,100 and 10,900 is normal) so it looks like they’ll be able to hit me with another round of chemo in another week. The sooner the better personally.

This Is ONLY a Test

December 19, 2011 by Ashley Hackshaw

I’m trying to prepare Boo for the reality that I most likely will lose my hair in the next 2 two weeks. It’s not going so well. If anyone has another technique they think I should use I’m all ears.

I guess it will be traumatic for her right at the beginning but she’ll get used to it. I don’t want her to be scared of me or embarrassed. I think about myself at that age and how embarrassed I’d get of my mother for the littlest things…..it’s not that I was unkind, it’s just that age range when you are just trying to figure out where you fit in. The last thing you want as a kid is a bald mom.

On another note my boob looks as big as a cantaloupe in this photo! I look like I might topple over….too bad it’s just an illusion.

I’ve got my little bag packed for tomorrow with some magazines and my laptop. The nurses say that most people try to sleep through their treatment….um, I never sleep. Hello, I’m new here….and I can’t stay still. I’m not worried or scared about the IVs, drugs or needles…..I’m worried about getting claustrophobic and restless. I’m the patient that unhooked herself from everything after being rushed to the hospital JUST to get out of there. I’m the patient that tried to negotiate being discharged at 12:30am after being admitted for internal bleeding.

I still have a “super cough”….so I’ll spend most of the day trying not to cough which will just make me cough more. I had to take more pain medicine this morning because I pulled a few muscles where my surgery was just from coughing. Most normal people might have anxiety about having cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. I just have anxiety about having to sit in a chair for 6 to 8 hours and coughing all over everyone while they sleep peacefully next to me. And how I’m going to get lunch delivered to the infusion center so I don’t starve to death.

Activity Radiating From An Atom

December 15, 2011 by Ashley Hackshaw

I had my PET scan this afternoon. They had to sedate me so I wouldn’t mess it up with my horrible cough. I had to sit for 45 minutes with a warm blanket in a “quiet room” as the isotope traveled through my body. I think it was the best part of my day. As I sat there all I could think about was the radiation symbol on the wall and I wondered how it came about. Turns out it is supposed to represent activity radiating from an atom……that makes sense. Anyways, I made it through without coughing until they got to my upper thigh…..then I felt like I was going to pass out from a coughing fit…….a few minutes longer and I would have unstrapped myself and crawled out of the machine.

The radiologist Dr. B came out and talked to us right away and basically there’s more questions than there were before I went in for the scan. The good part is that now we have a full scan to use as a baseline going forward to compare to. I’ll talk to Dr. L tomorrow to see what he thinks. Here’s what I took away from the meeting (and why I could never be a doctor):

So…I’m still on track for my new treatment (called EMA-CO) on Tuesday. etoposide, methotrexate, actinomycin D, cyclophosphamide, vincristine. Don’t those ingredients sound lovely?

Lisa brought me this nice, warm blanket as a present so I won’t freeze when I’m there next week…..then Diesel promptly claimed it as his own:

I’m obsessed with scans…..looking at my body one little layer at a time. The 3-D images I have are hilarious….you can totally tell I was wearing a push up bra because of the shape of my boobs. I can only imagine what radiologists see all day…..all different body types, boob sizes, maybe a butt implant here and there. We had some friends over tonight and I had a good time showing them every layer of my body on the computer…..we had no idea what we were looking at……I failed anatomy.