Monday’s better than Sunday

Greetings all,

I’m writing from Carbondale, Illinois, where I am visiting my sister (before heading off to my hometown in Indiana for the rest of the week). I spoke with Val on the phone this evening and here’s the report on her health and well-being:

We appear to have established a pattern that the weekend after chemo (chemo’s on Wednesday) is not very much fun. Especially Sunday. She sounded pretty rotten yesterday, body systems out of whack, joints hurting, nausea and grogginess the result of various meds. In the spirit of the buddy system, our dear friend Amy spent the night on our couch in case Val needed a late-night pal. But today she’s feeling (and sounding) much, much better. Still having joint pain but managing it with the judicious intake of Tylenol rather than Vicadin.

For a couple days before and after chemo she’s on steroids, administered to inhibit any allergic reactions to the chemotherapy. In this I’m relieved to say the steroids seem to be successful. However, they also make her face kind of red and puffy, and as an egregious bonus, this time they’ve given her zits “all over” (she reports) her face and naked scalp. Bald, puffy, and covered in zits – it’s an interesting experience (she sighed wryly on the phone) in letting go of vanity.

But she sounds good today – a bit loopy, a bit ornery, a lot like herself. TerriSue, our rockin’ oncology nurse, prescribed a cream for her scalp and sounded downright enthusiastic when Val reported that her cough still hasn’t come back. And if this chemo cycle follows the pattern of the last, she’s over the hump and can look forward to feeling better and better over the next couple weeks.

Meanwhile, I am sitting in a 1915 southern Illinois bungalow in a little bit of woods, listening to the cicadas and frogs buzzing in the muggy dark and watching Abby reassemble her house after her weekly dinner club. I played lackadaisical prep cook to her master chef for this feast, and marveled as she served 15 people chicken roulade, pesto pasta with all sorts of veggies and basil we picked from the garden, and Moroccan carrot salad, topping it off with the most spectacular ginger peach marscapone tart, as big as a wheel and glistening in three shades of rosy orange.

Yum.

Deborah