Spring has sprung

Posted by Roie Black on Sun 30 March 2014

The grass has riz

I wonder where

The birdies iz

Ah, yes! Spring has finally reached us here in Texas. Sorry bout that for those of you stuck under a blanket of snow up north!

More rolling

We headed east to Houston after church, and paying few bills, and a bit of packing for a three day adventure this time. We will be a bit longer on this trip since we are doing the imaging and them figuring out what the next step is before making the next move. Hopefully the tumor has shrunk and we will do another round of chemo, but we will see. If so, tomorrow will be a long day and we will come home on Tuesday.

I am very tired these days, so I begged off driving this time, so Cheryl is driving the entire trip. I feel bad about that, but she is game for it. The trip takes three hours each way, and we are getting into the pattern so we are used to it by now. Once we get out of Austin traffic, it is kind of pleasant.

BOOM!

If you have never been to Texas in Spring, you have really missed something! As soon as we cleared the clutter of Austin it hit us big time!

Wildflowers!

Here is the Texas state flower, the Blue Bonnet:

Blue Bonnets

And the second most common flower, the Indian Paint Brush:

Indian Paint Brush

These guys just take over the side of the roads all over Texas. Top a hill and be prepared to screech to a halt and jump out of the car, camera in hand ready to run into the field to take pictures of yourself and your family looking silly with flowers all around you. It is a tradition around here!

Bastrop

I was dozing in the car on the way out of Austin as we made our way through the town of Bastrop. I happened to wake up just as we stopped at a light on the east side of town. I saw a field full of paint brush as far as I could see. Looking up a bit the flowers turned into Blur Bonnets, again as far as I could see, Then a shocker. Up higher as far as you could see burned out pine trees. Bastrop was the scene of one of the biggest forest fires in the country a few years ago. It was the hottest fire on record ever and burned for weeks.

My best friend, Jim Petty, grew up on the edge of this town, in what is now a State Park, and the fire burned right to the edge of that park, almost taking the building he grew up in.

Alison Harden, a technician I respect a lot and who works at my school, fought the fire right up to her property line. She used to throw fighter jets off of carriers for a living (cool!) She should not have to deal with stuff like this. She helped her neighbor save their animals from the fire.

This town is not letting that fire get it down. Looking up a bit more, and there stands a water tower with a big happy face smiling down over the entire scene. How cool is that!

Bastrop Water Tower

I am looking into buying a new truck, and we went to Lost Pine Toyota in Bastrop to shop for a new Tacoma (I don't need a big honking Tundra!) and asked the salesman if they had lost enough pines to qualify for that name. He looked at me straight in the eye and said, "Yes, we lost more than enough!". No kidding. That fire burned thousands of acres around the town for weeks. They had DC-10 aerial tankers dropping fire retardant forever all over this area. It was front page news all over the country. They earned every bit of their name!

The entire area still smells of burned timber when you stop to smell the wildflowers, but slowly Mother Nature is reclaiming the area, as she always does.

The flowers continued the entire drive right up until we reached interstate 10, about 100 miles of the trip. It made for a gorgeous drive

Shopping

We reached Houston just in time to spend a bit of money in my favorite robot parts store, Mircocenter, next door to our La Quinta in Houston. I usually buy a few parts for my students to play with as part of my lab projects in one of my classes and today was no exception. After that, we bought dinner at the local Target and got to bed early, We have vampires to feed at 6AM!

Off to M. D. Anderson

We got an early start (5:30AM!) so the vampires would not have to wait, and missed breakfast for us humans. Cheryl found a nice off-Interstate route that got us there in 20 minutes, and we parked and even got to the blood center before it opened. We got through the blood drawing (why do they call it that, no one had a pencil anywhere, or a sketch pad that I saw), and only had two vials. Cheryl noted that the study was not going to continue if my blood did not have the right "magic stuff", I guess mine was too boring. Oh well.

Next stop was the CT Scan center to get my scan done to see how that durn tumor has been reacting to the chemo I have been doing. We got there two hours early, so we had some waiting to do, but that was not so bad. Eventually, they called me in, and had me change into a hospital shirt. They put in the first of two IVs I would get today, then put in a "contrast" dye and made me sit for a half hour while that percolated through my body. Apparently that makes the image much easier to read. Good, we want a very good image.

Once I was well percolated, I got to go find my personal Krispy-Kreme Donut machine. They seem to have dozens of these things here. Theses things slice you up (well take many images that the doctor can slide through and look at slice by slice. It is all pretty magical. The images were taken in short order. But not until they gave my yet another shot of another dye that feels really hot an makes me feel like I want to gag a bit when they shoot the images. I have no idea what that is all about, but it was over before it got too bad, probably because they focuses the images on just the area where hey knew the tumor was, not everywhere.

They pulled the IV and got me out of there in short order.

After that we headed off to see the Oncologist, Dr. Keis, but got there two hours early, again. I went ahead and checked in anyway, just in case, and they called us in an hour early. It seems like all of our appointments had huge waining times today.

I actually have gained a bit of weight (must be all the smoothies Cheryl has been making for me each night, YUM!). Dr. Keis came in before actually seeing the CT scans. He did a preliminary check of me to make sure things were going well, then said "don't go anywhere" (like I was going anywhere before hearing what he had to say!), then he left the room to go study non-moving pictures!

Happy time!

WHen he came back in, he had another doctor in tow, and he seemed pretty happy. The tumor has shrunk "noticeably". It is not gone, but the shrinkage is significant in all areas. Pretty good for only two rounds of treatment. Surgery is definitely an option, but I still might lose the left eye, so he is going to do one, maybe two more rounds of chemo to see if we get better shrinkage, then he will confer with Dr. Lais, the primary surgeon and see what they all think should be done.

This is all good news. Radiation might also be possible, something Dr. Scholl had hoped was possible, and did not think could be done in Austin.

And that is why I am in Houston!

Before we left Dr. Keis, we did discuss my shaking reaction to the chemo, as I was not looking forward to that side effect. Dr. Keis, and the second doctor discussed a way to avoid that and planned a modified treatment plan for today. Great! Hopefully that will work! We looked over the CT scan images, and even I could see that the tumor had shrunk in most of the images I saw. This is good news!

Round three

After our visit with Dr. Keis, we headed off to the infusion center for some lunch and another three hour wait before the start of round three. This was not going to be good, since it might take seven hours and was scheduled to start until 3pm!

We checked in early hoping it might start early, but the place was packed and they said things were an hour or two late. Great, we might be lucky to get out by midnight!. Oh well!

We finally got called in at around 4pm. I got situated in my private suite (!) and the nurse got my IV in (:-() and wrapped me up in my warm blankets. She started the Benedryl, and I was off to la-la-land and do not remember much until it was dinner time. Cheryl had ordered tuna, yogurt, Jello, milk, all kinds of stuff I could eat, which I did. What I could not eat, she polished off, and I drifted off to sleep again. When I woke up again, it was almost done.

WOW, NO SHAKES

The modified plan worked! I did not have any shakes. Better yet, the modified plan got me dome in five hours. We managed to get out of there two hours early, early enough to catch the last bus back to the main building. Good! I would not have liked to have walked that mile or so walk between buildings to get back to the car!

Then to top things off, we had another "get out of the garage free" episodes". I am sure that they are checking the credit cards and letting you park free after so many times. Or else, they just like us. I am sure not going to question our good fortune!

F4D Visit

Tomorrow morning, Cheryl and I are going to see an airplane that got me through college, the F4 Phantom II. Built by McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis in the early 1960s, I worked there as a cooperative engineering student and lived with my grandmother earning enough money to pay for my undergraduate college expenses at Virginia Tech. My grades were good enough that working there kept me going until I got scholarships that paid for the rest of my way through school, then through graduate school. Without the money I earned working at MAC-AIR on the F4, I would not have had the career I had, so I owe that plane a lot.

I plan on taking a ride in the F4D we will see tomorrow, and sneak up on the speed of sound in that bird. Cheryl has never been close to anything like an airplane like this one. Hope she like it!

Postscript

Cheryl has been by my side all day, doing work only a loving wife and care giver can do, and I love her dearly for that. She has crashed for the day now, and is fading to sleep as I write this. She has made phone calls to family and friends, sent emails to many and is reading a bit to clear her mind. You have no idea how hard this kind of day can be until you "walk a mile in her shoes" Say a prayer for her for me, will you all. I am not the only one in this adventure!

We both love all of you who follow us in this walk we both do!

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tags: Cancer