I'm not shouting! Ok, I am shouting!

Rich said that he was upset but he wasn't sure if he should be. We had just walked out the front door of the office to take a stroll around the parking lot. He said that after trying several times to reach Dr. Hausner, some woman from his office called this afternoon. She said that she had talked to Hausner and was calling to tell Rich that we should go ahead with the chemotherapy and when could he come into the office to start treatment.

What. The. I don't even know how to respond to you because what you've said is so crazy.

Rich tells her that we were waiting to hear from Hausner and he had emailed us and we wanted to know if the plan was still to try to get a K-Ras test result. We thought antibody treatment was the plan still and we live four hours away so we were hoping to have treatment local to us. That's why we had tried reaching Hausner so that he could give the right information to our local oncologist.

She casually said, "well, I can text Dr. Hausner and ask him to call you. He probably meant antibody treatment instead of chemotherapy and I just misunderstood him."

To quote Mrs. White, "flames ... on the sides of my face."

So I told Rich he was quite justified in being grumpy since I wanted to smack this woman. And now we're watching YouTube clips from a 27 year old classic movie.

Stuck in the middle with you

This weekend, I had a zit on my chin that was so deep and intense and painful that I pulled a Tobias Funke in the shower. The only way I was able to get Ian to fall asleep for a nap Sunday was to put him in the van and drive around for 20 minutes, refusing to speak to him. Because he napped so late, he was still wide awake when we got home from our company Christmas party at 10:30pm. I finally got him to give in and fall asleep at 12:21am after we had all said some things we later regretted. I also got my lab results back from Friday and my HbA1C is a miserable 7.5. Even typing that makes my stomach hurt. But I haven't had much time to dwell on that number because the last few days I've been wrestling with blood sugars like 342, 288, 63, 362, 55, and one 99. It's been the "30 or 300?" game all weekend and I feel like I'm hungover. Oh, and I gained about five pounds in the last week.

We finally heard back from Dr. Hausner after I sent him a note saying I was going to call him if I didn't get an email back. For all his adorable Czech accent in person, he has a slightly less adorable sense of written English grammar so it can make reading a note from him confusing at best. We either are going to start antibody treatment soon or he just offered to refinance our home for us.

The K-Ras evaluation that we've been waiting on has still not happened. The lab refused to do the test because there were so few cells in the mucin and they can't find a commercial lab that will do the laser capture microscopy. We're not exactly sure what is happening next. We may "bite the bullet" as Hausner said and start antibody treatment without the test result but we don't know if that's bad. Then again, we don't know if it's more bad than chemotherapy is bad which is our only other option. That or we could roll initiative and see if someone has a daily power they can use. I'm not sure, his email was very confusing.

The vague email from Hausner plus finding out he still had about seven more days of Lovenox to take (that I totally would have thrown away but he's not me) have knocked the proverbial wind out of Rich's sails. He was feeling pretty good and could see definitive progress, but last night and today he's just been incredibly discouraged. We're not in the thick of things anymore. He's going to work and driving a car. But he's not comfortable being alone with Ian and he's still physically weak in a lot of ways. We're a lot better than we were four weeks ago, but we're not back to normal by any means.

This middle part is tough. We could use some cheering up. Fart jokes, cute animals, anything like that. I'll start ...

Back in the swing of things

I'm happy to report that Rich is doing very well. Saturday we went to Richmond to attend a few meetings at Unevent and see a few friends. It was good to see folks. Rich impressed me by driving the entire 90 minutes to his folks' house on the south side and then again driving to site about 30 minutes away. But he is the world's worst passenger so this is a wonderful milestone.

We discussed medieval stuff for a few hours and then headed back to retrieve our kid that had spent the day frolicking at the Childrens Museum and not napping (which I figured). I was concerned our son might come apart at the seams at 6:45pm but he held it together and we had a lovely dinner. I learned from Ian that dipping Doritos in ketchup is actually kind of tasty.

We pulled away from the restaurant and I think both he and Rich were asleep before I got on the highway. I had a very nice drive listening to whatever I wanted on the radio. The excitement of the day tuckered Rich out a bit, but he rallied to co-chill with the Smiths as they returned from their own festivities to our house.

Saturday's fun left Rich to recover for most of Sunday but he still was pretty active and has been eating really well. He's gained about five pounds so far, so we're heading in the right direction.

Today he went to work and drove himself. He lasted all day, only taking a brief nap in his office after lunch (he noted that going out to lunch was more tiring than his entire morning of working at his desk). And he's had a pretty mellow evening of dinner (thank you, Terri!), football on the TV and a good book. Ian and I went to Target to research Christmas decorations and that led to a late bedtime, but we all did okay overall.

So now we're just hanging out. This may be a boring update, but it pleases me that we can have such a mundane set of days so soon after surgery. It was only three weeks ago that I was looking at cell phone pictures of my husband's intestines only hours after they had been taken. Today has been much easier to handle.