Last of the Carbo dance!!

Let's dance.  

And a drum roll please!!!  I am hoping, hoping, hoping that I have said my last farewell to the horrible foe-of-a-friend Carbo as I got in for my chemo treatment yesterday.  That marks the start of Cycle 6 which is the *last* cycle.  It always starts with lots of appointments, lots of hope and encouragement from the doctors nurses and staff,  and then for extra measure on the first day of each cycle, they add the carbo in for sweet remembrances.  (call me tomorrow and Saturday - I'm sure I will not be quite so flippant about it all then....)

Actually, the first four months of treatment, round about Saturday morning while trying to master the pretty horrible carbo side effects I would tell Scott sourly, "they are trying to kill me" and I honestly half way deep inside my exploding brain believed it.  My other bodily organs seemed to confirm the whole idea.

Then again Sunday night as it would start to climb down, I would tell him again, "honestly, they are going to kill me"...... only half joking this time.

So we are not sorry to see it go. 

I feel like I should have a ticker tape parade going on here or something.  And yes, my injectable steroid is still 'carrying' me until this afternoon, and I do have my 14 blankets layered on my bed ready for my three hour steroid-withdrawal time later on, but right now, it's celebration time!!

And I am - right now I am drinking a good level of alkaline *lucious* two banana - orange juice smoothie.  (Remember, the one nurse that told me that steroids make you "happy, energetic and fat!!"?  Well as much as I hate the steroids and they hate me, and as much as I wanted to hurt her then for saying that, I do have a window of 12 hours it appears each week that her mantra is true - especially since they stepped them down quite a bit.  They give me a fake 12 hour window of "feel-good".) 

As tired as I have been this past week, I wasn't sure I would get in but my blood work looked even better this week than it did last week so we attribute that to a few things:

1. God's finger moved
2. Prayers of the saints
3. Zantac healing up some chemo-ulcers
4. Change of diet to alkaline to help heal up chemo-ulcers
5. God's finger moved
6. Prayers of the saints

I am trying to do a balance of 80% alkaline food and 20% acid food which is a good way to help those nasty chemo-ulcers according to Lance Armstrong's "Live Strong" website.   Scott tells me I am costing him a fortune at the grocery store, but he is also very glad that my stomach is no longer smelling like it just curled up and died some days. 

And you will never guess what fruit they said is like the #2 thing to do this with:  WATERMELON!!  If I could have a food that I would take along to heaven with me, it would be watermelon.  And come to find out even though watermelon has had a bad rap of being "high glycemic", it is like all wonderful in the alkaline world and helps also with vein strength and expansion as well. (read headaches).  Who knew??

So I scrub them over three times with hand sanitizer, use a different knife to cut it open, then a different one to scoop it out, and then we have happy land for a while.  It . has . tasted . so . good. 

So there are some things still playing around in the back of my mind that want to bring me back to earth today, but a friend of mine that has gone through chemo a year earlier than I, told me to really celebrate those chemo cycles.  So those other things we can talk about next week, but today we celebrate finally breaking into Cycle 6!!!!! 

This friend is also suddenly back in the hospital with some pretty severe stuff, so if you could lift her up in prayer, that would be awesome.  I'm not sure how much she is public yet with this, so I will leave it at that, but she has become so dear to me these past six months with answering crazy questions and telling me about my hair, and just stuff you can't really talk about with anyone unless they have gone through it.  So I am grieving her troubles, but she says God is surrounding her.  

That's also kind of the problem of meeting different ones with cancer and getting to know them and closely disclosing facts you don't usually talk about to anyone else, and then they have relapse just when you least expect it and it hits hard.

When I was 20, I read the Foxe's Book of Martyrs.  (I think it belonged to good friends Doug and Denise Neer and I never returned it..... blush, blush)  So I guess I am finding out that you get strength from the ones that have gone through the fire.  They kind of tell it like it is, know how hard it is and don't "fancy" any of it up.  And then they give you a big hug and tell you it's gonna be ok, no matter what, it's gonna be ok.  God is near.

And they give you some loving faith lessons through it all that help tremendously.  If it were coming from someone who was insincere or in denial of true consequences or  just falsely "giddy because they are getting to serve the Lord this way" - I would want to hurt them too, because that's just doesn't seem to be what I get from the Bible.  But the real-life-real-faith-folks, both ancient then and here in the now - they are pretty awesome. 

I have a couple that have surrounded me with the best words, and I cannot ever repay them or thank them enough.  God is "surrounding" us, even on those days we don't feel it so much. 

But reading that book that Foxe penned so long ago is both a sobering, but a *wondering* experience.  How ever they continually faced the rack, or other such tortures, trying to get them to recant and deny their faith, I cannot fathom, but it helps me put my feet on the pavement in the parking lot and walk up to the waiting room knowing that. 

And the latter day fellow "tortureds" are so awesome to me as well.

God is surrounding us, no matter what.