Earlier this week, I was still so tired,  but it felt like my brain was waking up a little more. I began noticing more and more (not my own!) typos in anything I was reading online. My first thought — “does this mean my blood counts are back up?”

Luckily, I found out late Tuesday that was the case! My white blood cell counts bumped back up after two weeks on-pause from treatment, and were over 100 again, so we could start a new chemo regimen yesterday.

For now, the plan is to switch from a lower dose every week for 12 weeks (only got 2 weeks in on that plan) to a higher dose every two week, with a neulasta shot to give my bone marrow a nudge between sessions. I gave these shots to myself during AC treatment in Dec/Jan anyhow, so I’m used to doing this. There are different potential side-effects, but so far, it’s not terrible.

So, I think yesterday’s chemo session was 7/10 instead of 7/16, but I’ll know more certainly about that next week. I’ve been told not to think of the end-date as set in stone at this point. This entire thing is a constant lesson in not getting ahead of myself.

Yesterday was a record-setting day — from showing up to heading home, it ended up being an eight hour day. WHEW! No wonder both J and I are worn out today!

It was intense and hectic for everyone from the patients to the support staff to the docs yesterday — a water main broke on the top floor of the Cancer Center, and water leaked down, down, down… shorting out almost every single outlet on the floors below except for the “emergency” outlets.

This meant no computers except laptops charged off the emergency power strips, so all of the steps that usually involved scanners and check-in, etc. were on printouts. Even my medical ID bracelet was sharpie-on-plastic DIY-style.

Jeremy’s exact words were “this is like a hospital in a movie!”

You know when you watch a TV show and a hospital is all crazy with bonkers-overflowing waiting rooms and a man is walking around in circles for an hour with the most EXTREME hiccups you’ve ever heard (sorry, mister, everyone totally understands that might just be a part of what you’re dealin’ with), and there’s an older gentleman who REALLY wants to play a game on his phone but doesn’t understand how to turn the sound off, and then the nurses are running all around calling folks’ names over and over because there are just SO many people? Bingo.

Once we got back into the chemo area itself, it was relatively chill, but even one of the nurses there admitted he was kinda waiting for things to turn into a zombie movie or something. If I was a rich woman, I would’ve bought an after-work round at Casey’s for every single person on duty at the CC yesterday.

But the bottom line? Dang do I have admiration from every single staff person who showed so much professionalism. It was pretty amazing, the level of not only grace, but graciousness-under-fire that I saw each step of the way.