Happy Halfway Done Day!

     So Round #3 is officially finished, which leaves me only 3 more rounds to go!  Totally doable, right?  And even more so now, because they have been able to speed up the Rituxin drip (since I am tolerating it well now):  I was finished in 4 hours!!  Only four!!  Whoo hoo!  I'll take 4 over 7 any day!  It is a little comical because my mind was saying, "Oh cool, I just gained all this time to go do...um...well, nothing, I guess.  Go home and put on jammies and sleep."  But mentally it is still a boost! 
     I had well-meaning messages from people concerned that I may go to my treatment and find, horror of horrors, no Cheetos.  I can't say that thought hadn't been in the back of my mind as well.  So no worries, I brought in my own bag, and good thing I did!  The Drug Den was crowded yesterday, and if there had been any Cheetos waiting for me, they were long gone.  Snacks were hoovered by the masses in short order, leaving a lowly and sad bag of pretzels that no one wanted.  Isn't that always the way with the poor pretzel?  Last man standing.  Valiant pretzel, most underappreciated of all bagged snack food.
     I had a different nurse in chemo, although I did see and get to talk to Wendy Wonder Woman.  So the experience was just fine, although Wendy is the best in my book.
     The oncologist agrees that physical signs look good.  She looks at swelling in the chest, neck, and face:  better.  She listens to lungs when I'm sitting up, but then when I'm laying down as well (because the tumor, when I am laying down, is sitting on top of my upper lung...prior treatment it would make me wheeze when I was laying on my back).  All sounds like she would expect if the tumor is shrinking. 
     In 15% of cases of mediastinal large B cell lymphoma, patients can actually worsen on this porkchop protocol--so the doctor needs to have documentation, not just observation, that we are doing what is best.  To that end I will have another PET scan done a few days before my next chemo.  If my tumor is responding, we stay the course and finish the 6 treatments.  If my tumor is not responding or has worsened (which, given my physical signs, seems highly unlikely), then the course of treatment would be changed. 
     I digress here to talk about pronunciation:  I finally had to resort to looking up just how to pronounce "mediastinal", which means the space between the lungs (I'm a layperson, cut me some slack).  I kept wanting to say "meaty-ASS-tin-al", like "this cancer is really a pain in the ass."  But it turns out it's "meaty-uh-STY-nul."  Like a sty in your eye.  It was making me feel lame to be unable to reliably pronounce what kind of cancer I have.  They might boot me out of the cancer club. 
     My head was not entirely in the game the last few days leading up to chemo.  I was depressed about feeling so tired--just so out of the loop, out of my regular life and activities, kind of feeling like that ripped-out page on the bookshelf I had talked about.  And then I stumbled across something on the Internet which I thought was going to be good for me and it turned out to be a bad place for me to be:  a message board for people with mediastinal large B cell lymphoma.  Yeah, no, that is what I didn't need to see.  Because every person who posted had listed, under their name, a whole paragraph of medical acronyms related to their diagnosis and treatment.  Now I can recognize when it says "R-Chop x 6"--okay, I got it, me too, cool.  But I had to look up all kinds of other acronyms which were related to really crappy permanent side effects of the tumor and scar tissue, and then, where I read some random month/year and NED--when I would think "Hooray, No Evidence of Disease (because they will never say you are "cured", just that you are NED), great news, you are home free", there would follow what seemed to my mind to be an endless list of months and years saying "recurrence, recurrence recurrence."  Lots of different years.  And I bailed out and wished I had never landed on that site.  It just derailed my positive mindset in a way that I hadn't been anticipating.  It just broadsided me. 
     And that is what you get when you are trying to learn how to pronounce something medical.  The dangers of Google education.
     But I am back in the positive frame of mind that I need to be in--family and friends again have come through in so many ways to bolster me emotionally and physically, and I got propped back up in no time.  So no worries--Andrea's got her groove back! 
     Honeymoon will be ending sometime early tomorrow, maybe?  So there will be a lapse in updates until I am over the hump.  I will be spending the time trying to sleep, trying to get comfortable, wearing cute pajamas (Christmas gifts--I have upgraded!), drinking lots of water, setting alarms for antinausea meds, trying to put on enough lotion to keep my fingers from cracking, and wandering around restlessly and driving my family crazy, and looking forward to when I am finally able to drive again.  The ability to drive myself somewhere is my official benchmark for when the chemo aftereffects have left me--Johnny Law will not cut you slack on a ticket if you say, "But officer, I have Chemo Brain." 
     Be well everyone!  Thinking of you and sending good thoughts to all!

Almost forgot:  Chemo Jams:    "Live and Die" by The Avett Brothers, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by The Rolling Stones, "No One Is To Blame (Acoustic)" by Howard Jones, "Simple Song" by The Shins, "Iridescent" by Linkin Park, "Supermassive Black Hole" by Muse...little background on that song...for years I've told my kids that this is my imaginary superhero theme song; the opening riff is what you would hear in the background as I swoop in wearing some really badass superhero outfit (and of course, having the awesome superhero bod) and then I start decimating scores of bad guys with slow-motion martial arts/parkour moves...yep, I've got it allllll figured out.)