Good News? What's Up With That?

We are sneaking up on two weeks post-Karen's last chemo treatment, the one with the reduced taxotere dosage and guess what? Reducing that shit makes a difference.

It didn't look like it would at first; in fact, if anything, our initial impressions post-infusion were that the taxotere might have actually been softening the side effects of the chemo. Unlike previous treatments where Karen had about 36-48 hours before the side effects leveled her, the fatigue and the aches and the nausea and all that fun stuff hit her that same day, within a handful of hours after returning home. It did not look even remotely promising.

And then, about a full week after the treatment, she started to rebound and by last Thursday (nine days after chemo) she was more or less back to a semblance of normal. We waited a day or so to see if it would hold since there have been occasional spikes of livable life during her chemo malaise so we didn't really expect the good to hold for more than 12 hours. But, incredibly, it has.

We are now just shy of two weeks after the last chemo and she is still up and about and doing things which is a marked and very welcome improvement over what this chemo has been. She's back to doing things at her church, staying awake most of the day, and so on. On the selfish side of things, it means I don't spend my nights rattling around the house alone. It's been shocking how isolating this has been for me because, you know, I'm not actually sick. But with essentially no one else in the house except for us (Dash is in NYC now and Miranda is super-busy and absent virtually all day every day, especially weekends) and with Karen largely out of commission, it leaves me with more solitude than even a dedicated asocial introvert hermit like myself knows what to do with.

So it's nice not to talk just to myself for a change.

We are pretty happy with things at the moment, all things considered. Odds are, this is a last hurrah but it's awfully nice that it looks like we'll get to enjoy a good, full-throated hurrah and not some weak mewling one.

We'll take it.