Tonight's Forecast: Achey with a 95% chance of freezing

I dread Monday night injections the most. I've had 3 days of no Intron in my body and I can just start to feel a glimpse of my former self. But alas, here is Monday. At around 8, I will grudgingly go get my kit o doom, sit at the kitchen table and prepare my treatment. I'll try and post a video of the whole process soon, so I won't go into the details just yet.

Sometime between 2 and 4 I'll slowly start to awaken to a body full of aches and pains. Even though I know it is coming and I've done this several times over, it always surprises me for a few seconds. I will undoubtedly try to ignore what is happening and lay as still as I can. It never works. Then I will realize that I have to pee and that I am going to have to get up to do this. I also know that I'm going to have to get to the kitchen and take a tylenol/advil or I will never get any sleep.

Every time it is the same ridiculous dialouge with myself. It goes something like "Oh, it's not that bad." "I really don't want to get up." "Uh, but I really HAVE to pee." "Just get up and get this over with already." "Fine, on the count of three this is happening."

Here's the problem: I will be freezing cold and I know that as soon as I step foot out of my bed, the shakes will start. Oh the shakes. Eddie says sleeping with me is like putting a quarter into one of those massage beds I've only ever seen on tv. It is also extremely difficult to pee with extreme shivers.

So, I'll hurry as fast as I can and assess if it will be a 2-3 blanket night. I will hop back into bed fighting the shakes and hopefully in about 30 minutes my pain reliever will kick in and I can drift off to sleep.

I'll wake up tomorrow morning to skin that is crawling. I call it "flu skin." You know when you are sick and your skin just hurts. My legs will ache, my mouth will be bone dry and my eyes will be glued shut. Intron is very drying.

I will do all of this with a smile on my face and a skip in my step. Not really. I'll most likely be a complete...errr...ahem...let's say grouch tomorrow.

Why the wait?

Ok, so why wait so long to start a blog? I tried to start one a few years ago, but realized that my life was pretty boring and I remembered that I had 3 kids and it was too hard to try to keep up a blog.

My diagnosis was in Nov and I asked my doctor if I could start treatment in Jan so I could have the holidays without being sick on treatment. He said that would be ok. So that gave me almost two months to imagine all sorts of things. I did what any normal person would do and sought expert advice....the internet. I basically burned my eyeballs out searching anything I could find about Melanoma. I was trying so hard to find out about Interferon and the side effects and just basically what to expect. The problem was that almost every blog I found ended in ""warrior" just lost their heroic battle to Melanoma". I decided that I did not want to die in real life and on the internet. No blogs for me!

I did my month of high dose Interferon when I came across a FB page called AIM at Melanoma. I found so many people that were in the same place as me. They were still alive and doing well. Those people have been such an encouragement to me, but I still wasn't ready to commit to a blog.

Cut to Leila's kindergarten graduation. During her program, they had a slideshow. I watched her program fighting back tears. Now, I wasn't sad because she was graduating Kindergarten. I am proud of her and want her to grow older and have a producive life. I was sad because last year, I could've told you about every picture of her year. I was there. I was present. I was a good mommy. I sat there looking at the picures of her year thinking that I don't even know what that day was or who that classmate is or what they were doing. It was at that moment that I really realized how much of the year had been taken from me.

So now I start this blog so that I can look back and remember in some way what has happened. I'm here and I experience things everyday, but I can't always remember. Hopefully, with this blog I can go back and read and it will provide some sort of record for me. Each day is a gift to me now and I guess I just want to remember them and if I can't remember, I hope this blog will remind me.

Intro to the blogging world

I'm joining the blogging world. Mostly because I'm hoping that it will serve as a record of the goings on. One thing that no one tells you is that treatment steals your time and your memories.

I'm going to try very hard to be honest about my day and my feelings and my cancer. If you are offended by doo doo, then this is probably not the blog for you to be reading. I'll probably mostly talk about my cancer cause if you've ever had it, you know that it's always kind of somewhere in your mind. At least it is for me right now.