From the beginning of my journey I have told myself that I should not ever get “too up” or “too down”. This helps keep me balanced emotionally as I go through treatments. Another thing that goes with that is the expression “take things a day at a time”. I would like to change this to say “take things a moment at a time”. The way I see it is there are so many things that fill our days. A day can be filled with those passing moments where everything remains status quo. Some moments can be those pure golden moments that will make us smile for many years to come. And yes, some moments can be very challenging to get through. In all these cases I believe God is with us. God is smiling with us during our golden moments and embracing us as we go through our challenges.
This past week I hit a small bump in the road. At the time you read this I have cleared the bump, left it in the dust, and I am positively moving forward. I am going to briefly explain what happened being these are the types of things that can happen while going through chemo therapy.
8/16/2008 – Had a great day. My white cell counts are still very low but I feel very strong. I performed all my activities without any issues.
8/17/2008 – Another great day. My counts are still very low but again I feel strong. I just can not be around a lot of people. To change things up a little I played tennis with my daughter and felt great doing it. I spent the rest of the day swimming and enjoying the great weather. At night time I felt a little chill so I went to bed early.
8/18/08 – As I slept my wife reached over and felt my head and it was warm. We took my temperature at 3:00 AM and I had a fever. Going through chemo the doctors do not want our temps to be higher than 100.5. I was 101.5. We called into the Hackensack University Medical Center and were told to come into the emergency room. We arrived at Hackensack at 4:00 and my temp was now 102.3. I was immediately put on intravenous antibiotics and moved to a room. The question that had to be answered was “what caused the fever?”
When our blood counts are low, infections can come from two places: things outside us (other people) and things inside us (bacteria and other things that are inside us). My infection was caused from within and now we had to knock it out of me.
8/19/08 – 8/24/08 - I spent the next few days on intravenous. The hospital staff was simply amazing. Dr. Goy stopped by a number of times the make sure I was keeping my head up and stressed that this is just a small bump that happens sometimes and we will get past it. He, of course was right.
8/25/08 – I was released from the hospital feeling great and ready to move forward. Throughout the week I had noticed that the inevitable hair loss had started. When we arrived home Sue shaved my head. I now have a new look. It is not as bad as I thought it would be.
In this hospital stay I met another person that is in the same study. We hit it off great. I think we will be good friends.
Another thing that I am excited to share with you is in the course of treating me and running tests, a Chest CT Scan was run that showed my tumors have gotten smaller since my first treatment. This is very encouraging.
Although I hit this little bump in the road, I came away from it with more positives than negatives. A met new friend and I have the first hard evidence that my treatments are working. So, I guess it is true that every cloud has a silver lining.
We are still working out the details but it looks like my next in hospital treatments will be either the first or second week of September.
More to come…
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2 comments:
Rich, you're simply amazing. You have trully shown what it means to handle the challenges that come your way with grace and dignity. The years you have spent growing in your faith must be a true gift to you now. and you deserve every blessing that comes from that.
My family and I will continue to keep you and your wonderful family in our hearts and in our prayers.
Richie dude!!! I'm freakin' out down here in VA when I got the email today, I had no idea, but me and Penny are in big time prayer for you!!! (and Sue and the kids of course). Got some new praise music I'm diggin' lately, kind of slow and grows loud, and powerfully simple, from a band called "The glorious Unseen", they are a praise band from a church to the 20 something artists, etc. in Nashville called 'the anchor church' (none of the pastors get paid cause 20 something artists make no money ;-) Anyway, I know you love your music and thought, since your playing your guitar for 10 minutes or so everyday, those songs may get you on that guitar for a few more minutes in praise and worship! On the other hand, you may say, "Doug, that stuff stinks" which is usually what you say about my musical taste ;-) Be strong, we're praying and it is so good to know 'we don't know what the future holds, but we know who holds the future'!
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