This has been a long week.  Since it snows a bit nearly every day, Mike has to plow the lot before school.  And since he’s my ride, and I’m his alarm clock, we keep the same hours no matter what.  So Wednesday we went in at 5 AM and Thursday we went in at 4 AM.  The good thing is that I get lots of school work done – what else can you do at 4 AM in your classroom?  The bad thing is that we tend to get home around 4 PM and crash.  Sometimes this week I never got up.  Mike wakes me after a couple of hours to see if I want to eat any of the food people send us three times a week.  Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.  Then I go back to sleep.  It doesn’t help that I have SAD and as soon as it’s dark again, I’m done (usually 6 PM.) 

I hate winter so much that this may be the best way to make it speed right by!  I do have to say that I’m still forcing myself to walk to the mailbox every day, no matter what the weather, and I haven’t caved and brought my notebook upstairs, so I’m doing stairs a lot too.  Just keep plugging along.  March is just around the corner.

Doctor’s next week and blood counts.  Pray for double digits!

From my friend Kathy, who has, by the way, escaped to California…

Okay, those of you now humming the theme song to “Carmen Sandiego” either have kids or ARE still kids….

SO, where have I been?  Well, we had a “cold day” on Friday, January 16, as did most of Michigan – but the staff had to report.  So I worked all day, and most of the night on grades, which were due on Monday (which they changed to Wednesday because of the cold day).  I graded 120 some thesis and literary analysis papers, not to mention homework papers, 50 Jekyll and Hyde final projects (which, by the way, were spectacular this year!!  I think many of the kids worked on them at home on the cold day.)  The good news is that all the seniors passed, although some were a bit disappointed by their final grade.  (When your exam, which is a cumulative exam covering 1600 years of Brit Lit, counts as 20% of your grade, the standard advice is you should study more than an hour the night before the exam.)  It’s pretty standard that close to 50% fail my final, and I only got one A- this year.  They just don’t study.  They can get A’s on unit tests, but when you stitch all that material together into a final, they get overwhelmed and unorganized and there goes the grade.  For instance, in simplified terms, if you get an A both quarters, and an F on the exam, you actually end up with a semester grade of B+.  And unfortunately, even with all the warnings and a 12 page review packet, and two days of review, some don’t study at all.  I just don’t understand.  I NEVER got an F in anything.  I would rather have died.  The few C’s I got almost killed me.  But that’s water under the bridge at this point…report cards were mailed yesterday.

So I’ve been working my butt off, and we have a 60 page deadline for Yearbook Monday, and I had chemo Thursday and Friday, and feel like I was run over by the truck that the steroids on Thursday and Friday allowed me to lift up in the parking lot (I have one amazing day every chemo period, when the steroids take over and I’m Wonder Woman.  Shame it doesn’t last…).  That brings us to this morning, and an update.

Blech.

There it is.  My update for the week.  In a word, Blech.  This time around is much harder on me, as I’ve said before, and I’m hoping this third round of chemo drops my numbers into the 70s, and my bloating totally disappears, and the pain starts to reduce.  These would all be good things.  I also wish I didn’t have this constant nausea this time around.  It’s very disconcerting, and since I DON’T throw up, I’m just sick all the time.  Right now I’m drinking sugar free hot chocolate, calcium enhance, of course, and eating some sugar free coffee cake.  Hopefully my stomach will settle down.  It’s funny.  If I nibble all the time, I seem to be okay, but if I wait and eat meals, I’m sick before I eat, and sick after.  I was never pregnant long enough to get the full morning sickness thing – is this normal?  It’s the only thing I can think of to compare it to – all day long morning sickness.

Fortunately I don’t have to go back for shots until Tuesday, which is a good thing.  It’s nice to go home at a regular time on Monday.  I’m just hoping I feel well enough to get up and go to church in the single digits tomorrow.  It’s been weeks, and if I didn’t have chapel at school daily, I would go nuts without regular worship.  Mike has been a couple of times without me, bless his heart.  Oh, in the midst of all the busyness last week, my Students for Life gave a very successful chapel on Thursday, which was the 36th anniversary of the Roe V. Wade decision.  One of our members was not there because he was with his church at the huge Right to Life rally in DC.  Wonder what Obama thought about THAT?

So, prayers for double digits and less nausea are my request this week.  I would like to feel like a person for more than the ten hours I’m at school – but unfortunately, when I step away from my students, I seem to deflate and need my bed.  But they are the most important things in my daily life to keep me going, so they get my best.  My husband, the most wonderful husband in the world, does understand that, and sees the results since he works with me.  He knows how important routine and my kids are to me, so he becomes Mr. Caregiver when we hit the front door, although I’ve insisted on walking the dog to the mailbox down the road every day but twice since the new year started, so I’m making some small strides.  I’ve also resisted the urge to move my computer back upstairs, because it’s good for me to do stairs.  I need to keep what mobility I have, and try to build some stamina.  My hope is that once winter ends, my numbers will be back in manageable ranges, and I’ll be walking the dog for more than just a mailbox run.  I’d like to do a Relay for Life this spring or summer, but stamina, stamina, stamina.  So the mailbox walks and the stairs are my humble beginnings.

Love to everyone who reads.  I’d appreciate a comment back so I know who still checks up on me regularly, even though I’ve not been great about visiting all of you.  I’ll try, now that the pressure of end of semester is off, and I have a couple of weeks before the build up of papers becomes unbearable LOL.

Your not so faithful, but always thinking of you correspondent,

Robin

not 147, but 104!!!  Hooray! 

God is good, all the time!

(I wanted 99, but I’ll take 104…I’m such an overachiever.)

It’s been an amazingly emotional and topsy turvy week.  Mike and I celebrated 27 years of marriage Thursday, but even that wasn’t the highlight.

First of all, I found out that my CA125 went from 17 (beginning of radiation) to 40 (we knew this already) to 147 AFTER the first chemo.  My numbers haven’t been that high and scary since I was first diagnosed.  Today’s doctor’s appointment confirmed what I think happened.  (I love my doctor.  He listens to me and then says “I concur with your diagnosis.” and we all laugh.)  I was feeling VERY ill.  I knew I was sick again.  I was bloated, my weight shot up over 15 pounds while I wasn’t eating anything because I felt so bad, my ankles and waist disappeared from the bloating…all classic signs of ovarian cancer, by the way, ladies.  Don’t just chalk anything like that up to menopause.  GET CHECKED.  (This has been a PSA.  Now back to our program.)  Anyways, my assumption is that during the screwy time period between ending radiation and starting chemo again, my numbers probably went higher than that, and the 147 is a reduction.

The good news is that after two rounds of chemo, my ankles are back, and downright sexy first thing in the morning, my gut is back to just being overweight (my soft underbelly is soft again) and I feel nauseous all the time, but better in terms of the cancer pain.  My weight is down to “normal” again, and I even lost a few.  Doc and I both concur that the blood tests he took today will show quite an improvement, because physically, the chemo has kicked in.  I mean in other ways than being the Bald Chick again.  (By the way, since this is the fourth time bald, my students didn’t even bat an eye when I showed up in hats this week.  I had warned them, and most of them have been around for Bald 2 and 3.)

Now on to other news.  If you look one post back, I asked you to pray for a Christian bureaucrat to come through for me.  Some of you know I’ve been struggling with grad school and certification for three years.  I swore I took the proper classes to fulfill my Professional teaching requirement, and 21 plus years of teaching are certainly enough to fulfill the teaching requirement – yet Michigan State University only recommended me for a Provisional renewal in 2000, which expired in 2005. NO one could tell me what other requirements I needed to fulfill, and I was taking grad credits in an online program up until my cancer diagnosis, just so if need be, I could reapply with an additional teaching area. This week I wrote long, detailed, plaintive letters to the entire State of Michigan Board of Education certification department.  I received a phonecall, and three emails back in less than a day, to their credit.  One gave me the name, email address and phone number to the head of certification for Michigan State University.  What was interesting is that it was a name that I had never seen before in my several years of fruitless attempts at information and certification.  In fact, the other gal that wrote me from MSU was a new name too, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  The bottom line is this:  The email I received said that I was recommended for PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATION and just had to fill out the paperwork, pay some money, and I’d be done.

>thud<

What?  That’s it?  I’m done?  I even got a letter from the head of the department apologizing for the twisted road I had to take, and the illness I’ve been through.  She told me they had good news for me, though…the news that will save my job, keep me from having to spend thousands of dollars that I don’t have on classes I don’t need, and if that isn’t God’s goodness speaking through answered prayer, I don’t know what is.

GOD IS GOOD, ALL THE TIME.  If you don’t believe that, message me.  I’ll give you nine gazillion examples, and do a happy dance on your head.