Sitting here at Caribou coffee, trying not to spend too much time at our house in a given day. It’s just a short walk but it takes me a while to get over here because I walk at a snail’s pace. These meds are just blowing me away. I can hardly sleep at night, I can hardly stay upright when I walk, but I walked over here anyway. It’s about 45 degrees outside, which feels really nice. I’m thankful for the friends we already have at church. Kevin and his wife, Heidi are so nice. They have shown us hospitality like no other. I wonder what happens when you don’t go to church and move to a new town. You just hang by yourself, move by yourself, hire everything out to be done and pay for it. Seems kind of sterile. Since we’ve been here, they’ve been so nice and welcoming, rolling out the red carpet for us the whole time. It would have been a whole different thing without them.

I’ve been on a double dose since around last Wednesday. The hope is the symptoms simmer down a little and I can stand this combo a little longer. Nothing has changed. Taking chemo brings on life-debilitating sickness and for the moment, diminishing destruction of the cancer. It was better at first, but now, not so much.

The Doc has a similar set of drugs that will work like these 2 did at first. There’s an approval hurdle to jump through to get them to sign off on letting me us it for my type of cancer as it’s approved for something different. He seems to think we can get it if we crank this dose up and keep petitioning them to let us use it. Without approval, the insurance co won’t pay for it, which is a big problem. I’m not even sure if they would let us pay for it and use it if we had the means. I don’t totally understand all that anyway, just that it’s quite a bit of money for that stuff. Something like $12-16K per bottle of 30 pills or so. One I’m taking 4 times daily and the other just once every day.

The nausea is getting far worse. Puking daily for sure, mostly around dinner time. Hard to keep stuff down, but I’ve been taking the power shakes my Aunt Lindsey is giving me. She sent down enough of that stuff to power the whole WWF if necessary. I try to eat it, but can’t quite keep with the supply but I’m grateful to have an alternative to food because it’s a way to get down lots of calories another way.

The above shot is my side where we drain from which has become infected for whatever reason. I am taking a row of antibiotics to calm it down hopefully, but there are endless things like this that come and go amongst the bigger issues.

We opted out of traveling for Thanksgiving because I feel so lousy most of the the day and dragging the family down to Michigan in this state didn’t seem worth it. We’ll stay up here in Rochester and go to the pastor’s farm and eat steaks and chicken, non-conventional Thanksgiving style.

God is in this all somehow I am sure of that. I was awake from about 2-430am today watching a movie trying to kill time when I couldn’t sleep. Who knows what keeps me up. I’m worried about the chills that go along with the fevers that come and go. I worry about not being able to breath. Tylenol manages the fevers some, but mostly, it’s hard to keep a leg up on them and stay ahead of the game.

Annso posts more frequent updates on our GoFundMe account if you want the latest between these posts. She’s been very faithful to include the medical details and I’m grateful for that.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/8988b-help-pay-for-medical-bills?qid=2550fd0498369df5f47b9ab444d65c4e

A gift from a friend. Some encouragement which is so important to keep on truckin…