Saturday, April 14 – It’s a new day

As I had hoped yesterday, today is a much better day.  Hubby and I were talking about it last night and decided it was all the activity I’d had over the past few days, doing more than I had been up to this point, including carrying my own laundry basket to and from the garage.  I took two more Advil and went to bed.  I slept like a log for the most part.

This morning when I woke up I was not nearly as achy and full of pains I had yesterday.  Hubby was already in the bathroom getting ready to cut his hair, so I gladly lolled in bed relishing my mostly pain free body, and read a little bit until Hubby was done.  It was perfect timing as my bladder was not going to wait much longer.  Hubby was ready to pull my “plug”, but I told him I wanted to brush my teeth first, he could pull my “plug” when I was ready to get into the shower, and then he could re-stuff my boob once I was done.

He was setting up to file our taxes today.  After I was ready to get the packing tape pulled, Hubby was just starting an update of TurboTax.  So I lay on the bed ready to have my boob leak all over the place, with my Poise pad ready to catch all the drippage.  Hubby came in a few moments later and the laughter of just pulling the tape out began.  As like yesterday, there was a lot of fluid.  We’re getting the hang of getting my boob to drain more, we push on strategic spots and more fluid comes out.  I jumped in the shower and was out pretty quickly.  I did forget to moisturize…  Hubby was ready to start the stuffing.  I did leak a little bit more while I was showering.  Hubby noted as he was stuffing new packing strip into my boob there was very little fluid that came back out this time in the stuffing process.  Noting this, we have decided sitting up and moving around a little bit between the pulling of the tape and re-stuffing of new tape will be the new process going forward.

After I finished my morning routine, I ate some breakfast, did dishes and I made a pot of Ginger Beef Ramen, but I added a few things the recipe didn’t call for.  I added some broccoli and cabbage to the chicken broth base I had made with ginger and lime zest before I added the Ramen noodles.  The Beef was Flank Steak seasoned and seared in a cast iron skillet to medium-rare before sitting and then sliced in half before slicing across the grain into smaller more bite size pieces to be added to the Ramen.  On top of that I added sliced green onions, cilantro, lime juice and soy sauce.  Hubby was not sure he would like this, but it all turned out really good.  He ended up eating three bowls of Ginger Beef Ramen.  Like I would make something that tasted bad.  Wait, I did make a horrible ginormous pot of overly salted chicken stew during chemo…  there is that.  But I had a great excuse.  I had no fricken’ taste buds!  Of course it was over salted.  It was the only way I could taste it.  :/

We’ve started talking about the house remodel again.  More like the house clean up, not necessarily remodel.  It is way past time to clean up this house, and get me an updated kitchen, replace carpeting, fix the hole in the wall and floor from the old floor furnace, things like that.  We’ve talked about the budget and today I think we actually agreed upon our primary budget number, knowing full well there may be overruns as we’re 99.9% positive we need to rewire the house and we’re not counting on that in the main part of the budget we hand off to a designer to start off this process.  This tells me that Hubby is starting to see improvements in my brain as well.  Yea!!!!

All this is boding very well for our first “date” out with others tomorrow morning.  Brunch with friends, and I am beyond excited about this.  Slowly building my stamina back up to speed here.  The radiation therapy looming on the horizon is still bothersome to me as I really don’t want to be taken down again.  Still coming to terms with the fact that I have to do radiation, and it’s only going to be 7 weeks at the most from my understanding.  I know it will make me tired, will probably give me a burn and possibly a rash.  I still don’t know if there is any possibility of this making me feel sick due to my high susceptibility to radiation sickness.  Guess I could peruse the interwebs to see if there is anything written about this.  I am the only one I know so far who got sick from the radioactive isotope I had to take to treat my thyroid cancer.  So, yeah, that is out there hanging over my head.

Today, all in all, has been a nice day, the pain has been under control and I have been feeling well.  I liked that I could have a comprehensive conversation about our “remodel” on the house and I was able to follow along and maintain the conversation for many, many minutes.  I am really, really excited about this!

Life is allowing myself to make plans again