And then I dropped the ipod in the loo.

So I started the chemo Thursday, and I was fine (tho jittery as all get out) until the last 10 minutes of treatment - then the big wave of nausea crashed. It's the first time that I couldn't sleep during the treatment, but I was wired to the gills, so I listened to music and wiggled the whole six hours. It was pretty awful, actually. Kevin went off to work, and next time I'm going to have friends tag team, so at least I have someone to talk to. Some of the time I was so wiggley I could only listen to half a song. The play list ended up pretty weird - something with a strong beat helped, and I think that banjos and drums affect a different part of the brain than other instruments - so lots of bang-jos and drums. If you want to make me a mix cd, I would be grateful.

I confess I wasn't expecting the chemo to hit me quite this hard, this early. Didn't sleep much on Thursday night, and still jumping out of my skin. I talked to the on-call doc on Friday, and he said it could be a reaction to the steroid (good!) rather than the chemo drugs themselves. This is hopeful, because I can probably cut out the steroid - can't very well cut out the chemo drugs themselves.

I did muster up the energy to take Tess out halloween shopping on Friday. They had a teacher service day (PT conferences next week) so they got Halloween off. How cool is that? So we went to Ross Dress for Less, which I've decided is my new favorite Halloween store. Tess went as an evil rock star - with this fabulous glitzy tango dress - and her first real pair of high heels. She's right on that magic edge between kid and teenager, and has wonderful qualities of both - not to mention that when she and Georgia and all the rest are sixteen they are going to stop traffic. Are these kids unusually beautiful, or am I biased?

I didn't actually really drop the ipod in the loo, I just came close. I was listening to music on the ipod; IV in my arm. Sometimes switching to the laptop for a different music mix - Kevin uses the ipod more, so it's mostly his music; and a BP cuff on the OTHER arm because they were monitoring a problem with one of the drugs. So in order to go the restroom, it was a fairly big ordeal. Remove the BP cuff, unwrap the blankets, get my shoes back on, disconnect from the computer, unplug the chemo pump, and then wheel it across the room. I just put the ipod on top of the pump, rather than spending more time untangling yet another wire. And sure enough, when I got into the restroom, the little bugger tried HARD to leap into the toilet. I caught it, thank goodness.