No Title, No Picture

Thursday started with Vital signs at 6AM, blood work and breakfast at 7.  Scrambled eggs, wheat toast, Oatmeal, banana and coffee.  The coffee is actually good and always very hot.  They have very good, insulated, institutional dinnerware.  My mid-morning visits from my medical teams all had positive things to say.  And here come the drugs.  Fragmin stabbed into my belly.  This is a great little device many of you more familiar with medication may have even used it.  The drug is in a little 3” plastic cylinder with a half-inch needle at one end and a short plunger at the other.  It is well packaged to avoid accidents as it is often sent home with patients for personal use.  Once you expose the needle you stick it firmly into the flesh and press the plunger to inject the drug.  When you hit the bottom of the syringe a little release snaps the needle up into the syringe so that it is no longer exposed and non-reusable.  A new bag of saline was followed by injecting the Cyclophosphamide [in Canada, Procytox] in two shots, not by drip. It appears to be a pretty useful drug treating many of the same maladies I have previous listed but also lupus and MS.  Its function is to “harm cancer cells causing their death” and as a bonus it lowers the body’s harmful response to diseases of the immune system.  Vincristine [Vincasar PFS] is used to treat leukemia and cancer [“it harms the cancer cells causing their death”].  This was given as a drip of 2-3 hours.  The administration of this drug was almost as scary as the rituximab with the warnings, robes, etc.  A drop leaked onto my sheet [the hookup wasn’t secured] and they had to strip the bed and put the sheets into a hazardous waste container. I am still tickled by the idea that it can be so dangerous to handle and yet it goes full bore into my frail and delicate body. I was also administered the allopurinol and prednisone again.  I have one more day of prednisone [Sunday] but continue with the allopurinol for some time longer.  Caroline came to visit today bringing me a wonderful mozzarella sandwich from Cheese Plus in SF.  That was followed by a chocolate gateau [same source] and a champagne truffle from a Swiss chocolatier also in town [the name escapes me but the taste lingers].  I unplugged my tree and took Caroline on a short tour of the facilities.  When we returned my lunch was waiting for me.  They were concerned that I did not eat much of it.  I soon faded into inanities and Caroline gracefully departed [I would have been looking for a stiff drink nearby].  But my spirits were greatly lifted and I fell asleep quickly and slept soundly most of the next 8 hours.