Saturday, October 14th 10:00pm

It’s been a really rough day.

As for me… the bone pain is managable, but the chest pain ( in my sternum) is bad. Nothing a little tylenol 3 can’t handle though.. 

For Kerrie… it’s been miserable. The antibiotic they have her on has her all red and blotchy again, but we knew this would happen. It’s a common side effect of Vancomiacin ( can’t spell it… sorry) and is called “Red Man’s Syndrome”.  Her face is all swollen and puffy and she’s itching all over again… but even that was expected.

They told us she should expect mouth sores with the type of chemo they started today, and that her mouth would hurt, but they didn’t tell her it was going to absolutely burn. About an hour into the chemo she said she felt like her mouth was on fire and it got worse from there.

She looked like that guy in that commercial, who picks up the jug of water from the water cooler and starts chugging it.. she was drinking water almost as fast as she could,  and shoving ice in her mouth almost to the point of choking.. doing anything she could to cool her mouth down. I was happy to see her drinking so much water, because she is supposed to drink a ton of it every day,  but her stomache can only hold about 4 ounces ( because of the bariatric surgery) and she downed about 20 ounces of water in 10 minutes… so… she wasn’t able to keep it down.

Dad came up with the idea of having her suck on popsicles, but the chemo does funny things to your taste buds, so she wasn’t able to tolerate the taste of a nice, juicy Cherry Popsicle. It was a great idea though and we’ll have to find a flavor she can tolerate.

Her fever had gone down to normal, but the pain the chemo was putting her in had her blood pressure up and at one point it was 175 / 107… at that point they were finally  convinced the pain pills they had given her weren’t working and they gave her an IV injection of pain killers.

After the pain killers kicked in, and about 30 minutes after the chemo ended, she said it was tolerable and she was able to relax.

She was relaxed enough that she could start blaming me for the Tigers being behind in the game. It was my fault, because I had said I felt bad for Oakland and thought they should win at least ONE game… I actually wanted them to win the next three games, so the seventh game would be really exciting and then we could kick their butts. I like living on the edge sometimes 🙂

Kerrie loves baseball and she loves the Tigers, so I’m glad she was feeling better in enough time to see the game winning home run!

With no sleep last night, and no sleep today, she’s really wanting to take a nap.. but her pesky, older sister keeps bugging her about using the bathroom every two hours and won’t let her get much sleep tonight!!

Sunday is the last day of chemo, and we’ll try to have lots of ice and popsicles ready.. one more day, Kerrie, one more day… then this part of it will be over and you can rest until Tuesday!