It’s been a nerve wracking week here at Chez O’Shea. This week marked nine months since the end of Chuck’s chemo treatments, and six months since his last PET scan. Monday they did a new PET scan and today we got the results. It was all good news. Mister Fatty Necrosis, of whom I wrote [...]
We spent Halloween weekend in Pasadena, at the California Library Association’s annual conference. All of our time was spent in an exhibit booth, so I have no real idea how the conference went, but our booth area seemed pretty popular. The booth’s theme was “Libraries, Learning and Zombies” so we had to dress up, of [...]
<cue theme from Rocky>
So here at Chez O’Shea we have been all about the physical fitness/getting in shape thing of late. I’ve been training for an Olympic distance triathlon that is (gulp!) next weekend and Chuck has been struggling to get back in shape post-chemotherapy (they don’t really tell you how long that takes – [...]
It’s been a while since the last official Chuck-date, but it’s been for all good reasons. He’s been recovering from chemotherapy (and let me tell you, chemo kicks some serious ass so it requires a lot of recovery) and growing hair and starting to run again and regaining his taste in food and wine. So [...]
Chuck had a PET scan this past Monday, his first since the one that declared him in remission from his follicular lymphoma last April. The test itself was uneventful: he had to eat a weird diet the night before to get his blood sugars low, then got a dose of Ativan and went sleepy-tie-tie for [...]
Wow, I haven’t posted in a while. Happily it’s because we’ve been busy doing fun stuff in between work stuff. We spent a great long weekend in Ventura/Oxnard last weekend at a beach house. We spent one day hiking on Santa Cruz Island. What an amazing and beautiful place – we’d never been to the [...]
This weekend marked the 16th annual El Prieto Handicap – Chuck’s annual race. It’s a very neat event, held in the San Gabriel Mountains in an area called Oak Grove Park. Two miles of the race is on a single track trail called El Prieto (hence the race name), and every year the direction alternates: [...]
Time flies when you’re getting your life back to some semblance of normal. It’s been six weeks (!!) since Chuck’s last chemo treatment and he has actual hair growing (versus chia fuzz) on his head and his beard is also returning. His energy is returning and his taste buds are starting to work. The hardest [...]
I started this post on April 21 with the words, “I am sitting in a waiting room at the City of Hope…” I was doing that yesterday as well. Over the past six months, I realize, I’ve done a LOT of waiting in waiting rooms at City of Hope. But yesterday’s doctor visit officially put [...]
At the end of the day today, as the last of the chemo dripped into Chuck’s veins, all of the nurses in the infusion unit came into his room, sang Zippity-Doo-Dah and gave him a medal! We were doing pretty well keeping our emotions in check until they put that medal around his neck, then [...]