Dentist revives cancer patient with Portuguese sweet roll!

Hello to all my friends and followers, I resumed my chemotherapy treatments yesterday at the Dana-Farber Cancer center. My white blood cell count is back up to a normal range as a result of the Neulasta injection last Monday and I was able to receive my regular weekly chemotherapy infusion today.

The past two weeks have been quite difficult because of the ever increasing side effects of the chemotherapy drugs.  My sleep continues to be short, interrupted and restless; I’m now using Ambient on a regular basis in order to return to a more normal 6-8hr’s of sleep each night.  I’m starting to experience disruptive and more significant bone pains in my legs, hip and back and this contributes to my sleeping problems.  

I’m also experiencing an ever increasing degree of Peripheral Neuropathy in my feet and hands.  The neuropathy starts as a tingling and numbness of my feet followed by burning sensations, shooting pains, throbbing, aching, and a feeling of “frostbite” or a “walking on a bed of coals” sensation on the bottoms of my feet. This is quite disruptive to my sleeping and by the end of each day it causes a high degree of discomfort when walking. I was prescribed a new medication to relieve the neuropathy at my visit yesterday. Today it feels like I’m walking barefoot over a bed of glass.  It’s very uncomfortable to say the least.

Last week was quite a week, besides the medical issues, things at home weren’t as quiet and restfull as expected. It all started when a bird somehow made his (or her’) way into the house, then flew into the downstairs bathroom and sat there on the edge of the tub staring at me just before he went into an atomic burst of energy and flapped and threw himself up against the windows and then started bouncing from wall to wall. No...No…really this is a true story! After that the bird entered an opening in the wall beneath the sink. There’s a large “I forgot to Patch” hole surrounding the water pipes going to the sink. This began his multi day exploration of our walls and ceiling. It was the bird’s edition of where’s Waldo, or perhaps where in the world is “Mr.  Starling”. 

First he went up the wall crawling east across the kitchen ceiling then turning west back in the opposite direction until entering the walls of the 2^nd floor bathroom all the while announcing his progress by squawking, clawing and pecking his way through wall by wall from floor to ceilings and up and down stairs. Quite a startling event when sitting on the john and then hearing something in the wall next to you start chirping and trying to peck and crawl its way through the wall (cured my constipation)!! He then proceeded to climb up the ceiling to the 2^nd floor, (east again) into the ceiling of the 2^nd bedroom (west) and then back south west to the entry hallway wall and then straight up to bird heaven. Woossshhh…

And now to the Portuguese sweet roll…

This past weekend, Theresa and I travelled to Connecticut to go sailing with our friends Debbie and Jack. On Saturday afternoon I started to feel dizzy, a bit confused (Come on now... hold back the jokes) and then became completely disoriented and was slumped over the table trying to regain my composure when our friend Jack (aka-the “Dentist”), rushed out from the kitchen with a “Portuguese sweet roll!  Oh if only all my meds tasted as good as that roll! In a couple of minutes I felt fine and quickly returned to normal. This was a very sudden and odd feeling even more surprising was just how fast it ended. As it turns out, I experienced an imbalance of blood sugar due to a less than balanced breakfast.

That’s all for now hoping for a better time of it this week. Thank you for all your e-mails and phone calls of support.

Chemo Ken…and the Red dogs