Pseudomonas

Emily was the best part of the first two days.  She drove me here, stayed with me, slept in a crappy bed next to me, and made me feel much better throughout the bacterial infection.

Emily left Saturday night to pickup the boys, which my in-laws had been watching (thanks guys), she'll be returning this morning with the boys.  Max said he wanted to trade one of his birthday presents to visit me.  That's a pretty big deal for Max.  It takes a lot of energy to avoid thinking on how much I already miss my family.  I'm sure that will be increasingly taxing over the 12 week hospital stay.

For now I'm in relatively high spirits.  My fever broke around 6 last night and it hasn't returned.  My muscles are strangely sore, likely due to a lactic acid build up brought on by the bacteria.  My headache is gone.  That was a terrible headache, a frequent 5 on the pain scale.  I'm eating again.  I don't know if it will stay down but I think it will.  Trust me, I'll let you know.  I'm thoughtful like that.

Now that I'm eating again it's back to calorie counting.  I really need to keep my weight and strength up this time.  I can't strength train, since the muscles don't build back up properly once torn due to the disruptive nature the chemo has on cellular regeneration.  So I'll be counting on yoga, stretching, walking, and the like to maintain at least some of my strength.  The last time I was here I actually lost a lot of muscle due to strengthening exercises I attempted while on chemo, whoops.  I ended up so bad off that I couldn't even lift myself off the floor, at 134 pounds.

I knew that I was going to end up back here, or at least I knew it was the most likely scenario.  So I've been doing my best to build myself up for it.  I wanted to start out strong so that I'd have more to lose before I was put back into a gimp condition.  For the last 7 months I've been working out almost every day.  I've gone from 134 pounds up to 164 pounds.  Right now I can consecutively do 5 pullups (old broken right elbow holds me up), 35 pushups, 100 squats, 100 lunges, etc with free weights.  I've kept track of all of my exercising metrics so I'll have a good measure of what I lose, which I'm assuming will be a lot.  But more importantly it helps me know the difference between pushing myself and merely stretching my muscles.  Even while I was sick yesterday I was doing lunges and squats.  Yeah, don't do that.  It made me feel quite a bit worse.  I'm just saying, I'm dedicated to pulling through this with as much health as possible, however little that is.  I feel like I went in blind last time, now we can see if it makes a difference to go in with knowledge and resolve.

For now, I'm looking forward to seeing Emily and the boys.  I need my morning antiacid pills, a dressing change for my PIC line, and a shower.  I've had 750 calories for breakfast, last night I had about 300 for dinner.  A grand total of 1350 calories since Friday morning.  There's a lot of pigging out in my future, pigging out.

PS - my bacterial infection is pseudomonas.  My physician just told me this.  She said "it is one of the scary ones and had you not been here it would have killed you, as it must be treated through an IV."  No more boring e. coli for me.