It’s been rough around here this weekend.<\/p>\n
Angelica finished her last dose of the steroid that she was on on Thursday night. She woke up Friday morning a bit achy and I kept praying and hoping that she would somehow miraculously escape the brutal joint pain that she experienced that last time that we went through this round.<\/p>\n
It’s been a rough couple of weeks and we are just trying to keep focused on the fact that end is so close. She has one more “set” of chemo to go through and then she is on Maintenance.<\/p>\n
Maintenance is the long term chemotherapy designed to destroy any lingering cancer cells that may possibly be hiding in the body so that it completely eradicates any presence of the disease in the body. It is less intense that the previous chemotherapy and usually lasts about 2 to 3 years.<\/em><\/p>\n The steroid is a pretty brutal drug. It has it’s benefits, but some of the side effects are pretty tough to deal with. The few side effects that Geli struggles with the most are:<\/p>\n – a diabetic state These past 3 weeks have been tough because we’ve been attempting to control her blood sugars by food and exercise and she’s done really well. The biggest problem is that it’s something that requires actual effort and a discipline on her part to not just eat whatever she wants. The hassle of having to deal with it wears on her after a while. Especially because the steroid causes an increase in her appetite and what she wants to eat are carbs, but they are also what cause her blood sugar to rise. Typically after 2-3 days of being on the steroid, her body seems to recognize that it needs to produce extra insulin and she can relax a bit on being so tight on carb control. This last dose was a bit tougher than that…..I think her body is tired. I think that emotionally, she’s tired and that mentally, she’s exhausted. It took until the last day on the steroid for her body to catch up and stabilize…..not cool or fun!<\/p>\n I know that Jon and I are noticing that as we get closer and closer to the end of this intensive stage that we are getting more and more tired. We know the end is coming and it’s like the past year is gaining on us and we are feeling like we are being swept under. We’ve fought the exhaustion for so long and we just need to stay strong for a little bit, but it’s harder and harder to keep on.<\/p>\n If we’re feeling like this, I cannot even fathom what she’s feeling like.<\/p>\n Anyway, she’s slept so poorly over the past 3 weeks and has pretty much slept about 10 hours in the past 3 days. Even with medicine….and the lack of sleep is just compounding everything. She has said that the pain is at a 4 out of 10 and it’s mostly just in her knees although her shoulders and wrists and lower back hurt. Last time around, she indicated that the pain reached a 6 or 7 out of 10 and she had more joints that ached. So, if the pain is less intense and fewer joints are involved then she is just worn down and less able to “handle” it all. And that sucks!<\/p>\n We’ve gone the medication route to just try to wait the time out.<\/p>\n And even that only helps to take the edge off, it doesn’t remove the pain completely.<\/p>\n She did sleep from midnight to 4:30 last night but then has been up since then. Sometimes walking and moving the joints can help and this morning from 4:30am until 8:30am, she paced the floor while watching two movies. And at that point, she was just exhausted and asked for more meds and went up to take a bath until they kicked in and right now she’s sleeping.<\/p>\n We looked at her journal from last time around and if this time follows the same timeline as last time, then yesterday and last night should have been her worst times…..today should be less intense with tonight being better than last and then every day should get better from here on out.<\/p>\n The second half of this round is supposed to start on Monday or Tuesday May 30 or 31. We are just going to be upfront and beg for your prayers over the second half of this stage. At the end of this stage that we are coming up on, Geli has ended up in the hospital every time. It’s a pretty intensive chemo treatment and knocks her counts down to nothing, which puts her at risk of infection. It would be amazing if she managed to stay out of the hospital this time around. That is what we want. We want for Geli to make it through this next round of chemo and to not pick up any bacteria at all. <\/p>\n She has an amazing summer planned and we are wanting to just move forward smoothly onto the next stage of our lives.<\/p>\n I want to thank you for all that you’ve done. I know that I’ve not posted as often and really, things have been a bit crazy around here. There is so much more going on that I’ve not had time or energy to share. Just know that in all my busy, crazy, down, frustrated times…..the things you’ve done, the words you’ve sent, the prayers you’ve offered….they come back to my mind and give me strength and encouragement and make me smile.<\/p>\n Thank you for walking this journey with us. You have NO IDEA how much we’ve needed you and are thankful for you and appreciate you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been rough around here this weekend. Angelica finished her last dose of the steroid that she was on on Thursday night. She woke up Friday morning a bit achy and I kept praying and hoping that she would somehow miraculously escape the brutal joint pain that she experienced that last time that we went … Continue reading “On a Scale From 1 to 10….”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[48,19,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancer-sucks","category-gelica","category-health"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1794"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1795,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1794\/revisions\/1795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xangelle.com\/dailygrind\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n– insomnia
\n– wicked joint pain<\/p>\n