Today was Thursday, and that means that it was time for an appointment. The appointments have been a little frustrating for me. Back in February my car died, so ever since then I've just used Zipcar to get around. This has worked very well for me; I can get to most places by foot, bus, or metro. However, I live in College Park, and the Greenebaum Cancer Center is up in Baltimore, about a 30-45 minute drive away.
It wouldn't be so bad to do with Zipcar, except Zipcar is pay-by-the-hour, and I spend a lot of hours at the GCC. My typical appointment goes like this. Someone in my family picks me up around 10 and I get to GCC about 15-30 minutes before my appointment time. I sign in, and then almost immediately get my vitals checked. Then I have to wait until my appointment time, at which time they draw some blood and tell me to wait in the other waiting room. And I wait, and wait, and wait, while they do a CBC (Complete Blood Count) test on my blood. Then I see my doctors, Dr. Singh and Dr. Rapoport, and they tell me that my blood counts are low but that that is to be expected. For a while, I would then have to go fill a prescription for Gleevec, but now that I've been approved for the patient assistance program the Gleevec is shipped directly to my house. Back when I had to wait for the prescription, I would be at GCC until 4:30, but now I'm "only" there until 3:00 or so.
The CBC is pretty interesting. I started out at 480 thousand white blood cells per millimeter cubed (which I will from now on denote as 480 WBC). They put me on Gleevec and Hydroxyurea (which is what most people think of when they think of chemotherapy), and that entire week at the hospital I dropped by about 50 WBC each day. I was at 70 WBC when they discharged me, and the next week I was in the normal range. Now I'm actually a little low, on white blood cells, red blood cells, platelets, you name it. Today they gave me a procrit shot to try to convince my body to make more red blood cells. Since my WBC is so low, they also gave me the flu shot and advised me to get the H1N1 shot when it becomes available.
Also today, we had a bit of a snafu. My brother came to the appointment with me, intending to get some blood drawn to test if he's a bone marrow match in case we decide to do a bone marrow transplant in the future. This of course confused the nurses --- they took his vitals, drew my blood --- in short they mixed up a lot of information and failed to take my vitals or draw his blood. They eventually corrected the mistake after Dr. Rapoport came into the room and jokingly mentioned that I had put on a little weight; at this point I told him that they never took my vitals, and then questioned how he believed the numbers he had in front of him. After all, I weigh about 150 pounds and my brother weighs 180, and I'd think it would be pretty unhealthy to put on 30 pounds in a week. In any case, we eventually got the matter sorted out. The thing I found so weird about it is that we knew there was some confusion, so we each checked the names on the sheets and they had Billy's name for the vitals and my name for the blood. Weird, huh?
Despite that eating up most of my day, I did manage to have a lot of good times today. In particular, I was one of the lucky "few" to get a Google Wave invite, and playing with that has been really fun. Though, Google Wave is all about collaboration, and my friend invites haven't taken effect yet, so there's not a lot to do with it yet. I did create a list of video games that I plan to purchase. I normally keep such a list in Gmail, and reply to the mail to update the list, so Google Wave really is exactly what I want for that. I will likely also move my "command line" folder to Google Wave, and probably share that with my friend Katrina as well. That folder is what I use to store useful command line calls that I would otherwise forget, and again, since I edit them and append to them, Google Wave seems like the perfect place.
Then, much later, I also managed to snag a PSP Go. I'm especially happy about this because NISA is having a 50% off deal on six of their games, five of which I plan to buy, this week only in honor of the Go's debut. Since I didn't own a PSP previously, the PSP Go is a great buy for me, especially now that I'm spending entire days at a time on the go waiting in GCC for my appointment with the doctors.
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