check, check, check...

Dishes... check. Laundry... check. Groceries... check.

Ok.... so I guess I learned my lesson. No more blogging about chores needing to be done. I think I got about 4 or 5 offers of people to come live with us for a while and help out with our chores and/or hire us a maid.

I went home yesterday for a couple of hours and managed to clean all the pots/pans in the sink, do four loads of laundry, take care of the grocery shopping, play with the dogs, and eat twice. The only things really left to do are vacuum (and Jake bought me a Roomba for our anniversary, so the vacuuming pretty much takes care of itself) and the yardwork (and at this point I really should be hiring someone to fix all our landscaping, but I don't know when the best time of year is for that. I could handle most of it myself, but it's annoying doing gardening when cacti are involved. I wear super thick gloves, but I still manage to always get little pricklies in my hand).

That being said, I'm sure there will come a point when it would be nice to have someone come and stay. When that time comes, you'll know.

Also, I do have a husband back at home. Now that he's on high doses of steroids for the next two months, hopefully he'll have extra energy and much less pain, enabling him to help out with the chores.

Going back to my checklist:

Dentist approval... check.
I spoke to the dentist this morning, who said I saw him recently enough and I was clear to begin radiation treatment. I then called the RO back and scheduled by simulation for Monday.

Baseline hearing test... check.
My hearing looks perfectly normal. The only thing that was not normal was I didn't have appropriate contralateral responses (what the opposite ear responds with when a loud noise is played in just one ear). This could very likely be a temporary thing because of the recent surgery (it implies something is messed up along my 8th cranial nerve) or I could just never have had good contralateral responses, some people don't.

Initial consult with the Medical Oncologist... check.
So, once Jake was FINALLY released from the hospital around 3 (he finished his last treatment around 10:30. Hospitals are so slow with paperwork. :\), I got a call from the MO office saying that Dr. Kratz could fit me in at 4:00 if I could make it there on short notice. Jake and I decided to go since we didn't really see the point of going in to work anymore.
I will for sure be having chemo in conjunction with my radiation treatments. It seems I will be getting low-dose chemo every Monday morning, immediately followed by radiation treatments. Then Tuesday-Friday I'll just have radiation treatments. The whole thing should probably start in two weeks, so 12/21. Merry Christmas to me! That should last 6-7 weeks. Then we will review the situation and I might get an additional three doses of "mop-up chemo". Dr. Kratz didn't go into a lot a details about that, as it would really depend how things are going by that far into treatment. She gave me some reading material so I can learn all about Cisplatin, my chemo drug of choice. I'll have to write a summary on that for you guys later.

So on my to-do list for the next couple of weeks:
12/9 7:45am - Swallow test
12/9 4:00pm - Baseline bloodwork for chemo / consult with PORT placement person
12/11 7:30am - MRI
12/14 4:00pm - Radiation Simulation Session
12/15 TBD - Making a contract/schedule with the MO
12/? (sometime 12/10 - 12/18) - PORT insertion (I have no veins in my forearms, so I had the option of getting a PICC line, which would stay on an armband on my upper arm during the course of chemo treatment...or...a PORT, which they knock me out for and insert under my skin in my chest. As long as I'm not wearing a super revealing shirt, no one can see it. I opted for the PORT).
12/21 (tentatively) - Begin chemo, then radiation treatment.