J is for jumping for joy!

Well, not literally because I might break a hip (I'm not joking!) but mentally I am very excited... going to pick Caela up in about 45 mins... yippee! So my sister is coming and this time I'm feeling fit, healthy and not anticipating any hospital visits this weekend. I'm thinking ...a wander around Utrecht, maybe a bit of shopping (though we both have a limited attention span for that) so it will be the type of shopping that involves looking in a few shops and at a certain point abandoning the pretence and going for lunch/drinks/a break - any purchases are a bonus! In addition to that, bit of 'Twilight' watching, a few drinks, maybe a trip to the beach, dinner out, Roti, and generally relaxing and all of the above with lots of silliness and giggles.

So the last couple of days I have been back to hospital again... Thursday I had my regular check-up which involves a blood test, x-ray and appointment with the Dr or Chemo nurse. I have been feeling fine overall, so much better than previous chemo treatments so I was expecting everything to be normal... well, I mean within normal range for chemo patients. However, apparently my Haemoglobin level was far too low and so I needed to have a couple of bags of blood....why not?! According to the nurse I should have been feeling exhausted, not able to function or do my normal daily activities and be sleeping a lot. Well, I've been feeling fine, went to the gym on Wednesday under supervision of the physio and since it was the first session I had a fitness level test which was also quite good. The nurse was quite stunned, but impressed and I was just surprised to hear it was so low. Well, that's really good because if I feel like that with low levels, imagine how I feel now.....drum roll...... actually I don't feel that much different!...I suppose I do feel like I have a bit more energy and I have noticed that I am not out of breath climbing stairs now, so that must be the effect of the transfusion.

I think I ought to say thanks to everyone who donates blood; I know I didn't get 'your blood' literally but if people didn't give blood, where would we be?! (I'd still be out of breath climbing stairs!) I did have to wait a couple of hours as they had to 'order in' ... it was like waiting for a take-away, only I wouldn't have given the courier a tip because it took quite a while! So I was in hospital until 21.00 on Thursday, had to sacrifice a curry night with Dave, Iain and Paula, which I was gutted about...but anyway, we can reschedule.

The good news is that I went for a blood test yesterday to check levels and the HB level has gone up 2 points.. which is good, and the tumor cell count in my blood is down again, to 84. (It was 120 before Christmas). We asked the chemo nurse what this figure actually means and apparently people without cancer should have a count under 10. In certain types of cancer... like lung cancer, it isn't really a very strong indication of the size or state of the tumor, you still need CT scans for that, but obviously the lower it is, the better and since I started in September with 1,100, going down to 84 can only be a positive outcome.

While I was there yesterday I thought I would have an X-ray on my left hip... again, just for fun really. Just to throw a spanner in the works, I was awake in the night on Thursday because of really bad pain in my left hip. The main problem I have had before is with my right hip, so I was really thinking 'Great.. what now?'... it was so bad that I was hobbling around and was painful to walk or even sit in certain positions. With Caela's visit and the weekend approaching, I thought I should get it checked out while I was there anyway. I went up to the cancer ward and told the secretary the problem and she went to get a Dr, I saw someone within 10 mins, she sent me for the X-ray - essentially to check for breaks! When she said that, she was just vocalising the concerns that I had.. bugger! Well, anyway, within half an hour I'd had the X-ray and the results were fine - big sigh of relief. She said it could just be the after effects of doing sport on Wednesday, but if it didn't get better within the next few days to go back. I'm really relieved to say that it feels so much better today already, I didn't wake and have to take any painkillers in the night and I'm sure it must have been something I did at the gym. Phew... and note to self: I can't do as much as I used to.. or at least, I need to build up slowly.

Right, time to get my socks on, literally, and get ready to start scraping ice off the car... brrr. Whoop whoop, Caela's arrival in the lowlands is imminent!