Ice Cream and Chemo

Hello again.  I am slowly recovering from my surgery.  I feel twinges in my facial nerve.  It's kind of weird like waking up from dental anesthetic.  I still can only manage a half smile.  JoLynne has me on some deal where I have to smile and laugh so much every day.  She says it does something good to the chemistry in my body.  The other day I asked if I would have to smile twice as much since only the left side currently goes up when I smile.  She just laughed and said "Of course"  What a slave driver.  She also has me on a weight gain program.  She is determined to fatten me up prior to chemotherapy.  I'm pretty sure that forcing someone to eat all the time is a form a torture and probably illegal under the Geneva convention.  I need to do a bit more research on that.  Gaining weight has not been easy.  My body just seems to reject the idea.  I think it may relate to post surgical stress.  I know that my heart rate has been almost double what it normally is.  I just seem to burn off everything that I eat.  I wonder if I might be the world's first case of ice cream overdose.  I'm certain that if they haul me to the ER that JoLynne wouldn't let them pump my stomach.



I have been reading about chemotherapy and osteosarcoma.  I feel like I need to know enough to ask the right questions.  Friday I probably read three dozen scholarly papers about Methotrexate, the chemotherapy drug that they are debating about.  It was kind of discouraging.  Osteosarcoma isn't the best kind of cancer to get either.  I didn't like the statistics that they quoted.  Finally I just had to stop reading and tell myself that I had assurances and blessings that tell me that I don't have to worry.  God will take care of me!  A good friend of mine who has been through cancer, wrote me a card that I now carry in my scriptures.  It says "You are not a statistic, you are a survivor!"  We meet tomorrow with the chemotherapy doctors and hopefully will have more information.  High dose Methotrexte sounds like a nasty but effective drug.  In all the papers that I read I haven't yet found a case where they tried it on a person my age.  That is a concern.

Well, after all that scary reading JoLynne came in and said "There is no way that you are going to bed with all that on your mind."  She found an old episode of Giligan's island and we watched that.  She is so wise.   Gilligan's island is always good medicine.  Pretty much no adverse side effects.