Officially out on leave!

I talked to my friend Michelle today, and she confirmed that I'm now on leave status, so YAY, I should not miss a paycheck. :)


Ok, so now I am two chemos in and six radiations, and no horrible side effects to relate except for managable ones:

• diarrhea
• REALLY dry mouth
• fatigue
• glucose numbers up

The pre-chemo bag of meds has a steroid and I'm sure you all know that steroids just really muck up your glucose levels.  And because they don't want me losing weight, I've been ingesting carbs that I don't normally do, so I asked Gloria at Dr. Ramaswamy's office (my primary care) if she would have him order me more test strips.  I've got to watch this more closely.  Don't want to survive esophagel cancer but go blind, or something. ;)

Anyway, I've gotten some more Glucerna stuff, so on chemo day, I'll munch on one of their bars and see how that goes.  And go back to no bread and certainly NO ice cream... bad, bad girl! :D

My big book of chemo facts wasn't a lot of help when it came to the diarrhea, but Ironwood had given me a couple of fact sheets for dealing with  my specific chemos, and it said to take Imodium and that's working like a champ

As for the dry mouth, apparently you want stuff with Xylitol and anything by Biotene.  I ordered some stuff from Amazon which I hope comes soon.  The Biotene mouthwash helps to augment saliva's natural defenses against bacteria, so I guess this will help quite a bit.

As for fatigue, I really have to give up the iced tea in the evening, for a couple of reasons, caffeine is a diuretic, and that's not helpful to dry mouth, and because my mouth was so dry after this last chemo, I drank a TON of iced tea yesterday... and way late into the evening.  So, I could NOT fall asleep.  Well, I did around 3:30AM.  Oh well.

So, all in all, I think this is going pretty darned well.  Thanks to all my family and friends for checking up on me, loving me, and keeping me sane.  I love you all very much.