Headed to the University of Iowa hospital tomorrow (i.e. today, after I get my night's sleep) for the first time in three weeks. It's be the six month anniversary of my bone marrow transplant.
My doctor let me do blood draws at the local hospital the last two weeks, saving much time and driving. Tomorrow the eye doctor will look at my eye -- still pretty bloody and pretty blurry a month after surgery -- and tell me how I'm lookin'. Later, the throat doctor will put a numbing liquid down my nose. I will taste it and it will taste terrible. Then he (or one of the fellows he's training) will navigate a tube camera down my nose to see if my vocal cord is still paralyzed. Hope your Thursday is less exciting! Friday I go back for another bone marrow biopsy, a procedure where they look for cancer cells. I've got a "pulmonary function test" coming up soon, too. That's where I sit in a glass contraption that looks like a phone booth. Except instead of checking for a dial tone and wondering how long ago the phone book disappeared, I wear a nose plug, put my mouth on a mouthpiece, and go through an exceptionally boring series of breathing exercises while the technician looks at graphs on a computer screen.
In other news, my phone (no case or protector) and Kindle were stupidly left atop a vehicle today, and survived the tumble and being run over long enough to be found by a kind person who saw to it that we were quickly reunited. I was without my phone for five hours, can you imagine? First contact, man informs me that my phone runs German and explained how he went about tracking me down - at two calls, he was pretty efficient! Around 5pm, I remember my phone's alarm clock rings about ten times a day, reminding me of medical stuff I have to do, and that one of them goes off at 4:30. I gulp my horse pill, call him back, and explain how to shut off the alarm clock on my German-language phone. "Thanks, I was just hitting snooze," he said. Snooze only snoozes for ten minutes, which will drive you batty pretty quickly!
Other notable things: I've had to stay out of thu sun for the last two or three months, because I'm immunosuppressed. A couple weeks ago, I itched all day long, all over my body, for a whole day, and the next day the itching was gone. I've had a dull ache in my lower back (comes and goes) for a few weeks. For the last week I've been pretty low in energy, not waking up very early and getting tired in the afternoon and evening. The stupid kind of low energy where I'm tired but unable to fix it with a good nap. Tried running a few mornings ago and felt really slow and weak. I mostly walked.
I recently took a road trip with my dad. We drove from Iowa to Ohio to visit my uncle Dave, driving from one four-letter state to another. The only other four-letter state, Utah, was not on our way, and driving to Guam (a US territory) is impossible. First time I left the state since last July, an exciting milestone. Had fun, interesting enough trip to merit writing down some more stories and details, hopefully I will pull it off.
