The Last "Pre-treatment Weekend"

Things will get busy starting Monday. So we took the opportunity this last weekend to spend time together. Friday night we hung out and Saturday night we went out for dinner, dancing and some gambling at a local Casino.

It was the right thing to do and I knew it when Vicki told me on the way home last night that for a few hours she'd forgotten the upcoming trials of Chemo and Radiation therapy. For just a few hours we were just a couple having a good time on a Saturday night. Sometimes that's all you can ask.

We've been given the schedule from both cancer treatment groups and Vicki has 9 separate appointments for treatment next week. It will be hectic to say the least. While we are blessed to have some of the best doctors and technicians in the country at Barrow's Neurological, the offices for Chemo are at some distance from us and the hospital. It means we will be spending a great deal of time in transit from home to one and then the other treatment location. The tightness of the schedule has already caused some stress and tension, but we have put a plan in place to handle it next week.

My middle daughter Jamie is here for another week from Oklahoma and she along with her oldest sister Bridget are taking Vicki to St. Joes on Monday. That day she will get her port for chemo and her first run through for radiation. She is freaked out about the mask she must wear during radiation. It fits her face extremely snugly and holds her head in exact position.

Tuesday she and I will be going to her almost day long first chemo session. During this one they will give her two separate drugs and couple of liters of saline. This takes 5 and 1/2 hours. Then from there we will drive down to the hospital for her first radiation. That takes no more than 1/2 hour or so total. Still, it will be a very long first day of treatments.

Wednesday and Thursday she gets a one drug chemo treatment lasting about 2 hours and again radiation after each one. Then Friday she gets a shot at the chemo Dr.'s office for bone marrow loss and then another radiation treatment at St. Joes. During all this I will attempt to got to work all the days but Tuesday.

The next three weeks will be daily radiation and then the fourth week we start with combined chemo and radiation again.

This is scheduled to continue till she's had somewhere between 28 and 33 radiation treatments and 5 or 6 chemo cycles. That puts the total treatment time to around 6 months. Hopefully by February or March she will be done with all this and cancer free.

Anyway that's what I'm hoping for.

RT