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Greetings! You will recall from last Monday's exciting episode that my sister was scheduled to begin a week's worth of chemo, was all checked into the hospital and in her bed and everything, and the lab results came back showing her white blood cell count was too low.
So everything had to go back out to the car, with an extra added dollop of dismay, and my sister and The Boyfriend had to head back north to San Francisco facing an uncertain future (well... an even more uncertain future, I guess I should say...).
When I got here on Friday, I don't know how other people were feeling, but I was tense. What if her white blood cell count still wasn't up to where it needed to be, come today? There was this vague background radiation of uncertainty... when can we wrench this jalopy back onto the highway????
Turns out the answer to that was: Today.
I'm sitting next to her bed right now. She's napping. We got this morning's blood counts back and sister was "good to go" with this week's chemo. She's being hydrated at the moment in preparation for today's poison treatments.
See, the potentially life-saving venomous crap they are about to start pumping into her has an effect on her kidneys as well as the cancer. They need to load her up with "pee-to-be" so she'll be washing that stuff through her kidneys as quickly as possible as soon as it starts showing up there. As we all must know by now, chemo is a "blunt force instrument". When they use it on you, they have to take steps to undo, as much as they can, the damage it is doing to the healthy parts of you.
So anyway... it's a pretty bright and sunny day down here in Palo Alto at the moment, at least for me. My emotional weather is a fine autumnal day, with even a few hints of Indian Summer.
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