Reducing My Visits from 2 to 3 - Week in Review

Time to Grow Contest Update

The race for first place opened up a little this past week.  We had someone take a big jump into the lead with 18 referrals.  Second place is a much tighter race with one person at 6 referrals and another at 5 referrals.  Don’t get discouraged though and give up if you are interested in the contest.  You can easily catch the leaders.  Remember the contest runs until April 1^st, so you all have plenty of time to catch up, just keep in mind The Tortoise and the Hare fairy tale.  I am so happy with the results so far but would love for the blog and its message to reach so many more people.  So keep flexing those networks and letting people that you think would enjoy or gain something from the blog know about itJ

Supporting this Site

You may notice slight changes to the side bar of the site recently.  I have been really unhappy with the advertising company I had been using and the quality of ads they were providing so I have removed them from the site.   The contests that I run were being funded by this advertising.  I want to continue to run contests throughout the year so I am going to try something new out.

You will notice there are a couple links to amazon.ca on the site now.  If you ever are planning to purchase anything through them please go through these links.  By doing so a small percentage will paid to the site and I will be able to continue running my contests J  I am not asking you to go out and buy from them, just if you already were going to use them you might as well use the links J  Amazon is an excellent site that offers an incredible range of products, I would check them out when you have a spare minute.

Health Update

I had a very good checkup with the doctor on Tuesday this week.  The cocktail of suppressants seem to controlling my skin GVHD very well now.  The staff doctor was so happy with the progress that he is planning to start tapering my steroids next week.  He wants me to remain at the same dose of steroid for one more week to give my body a little more time to stabilize the GVHD before the tapering begins.  The best part is since everything else is stable he gave me Friday off of having to go to the hospital for a checkup. 

When we do begin the taper, we are going to move slower this time around.  In the past we did large drops in the steroid dose at a time which caused flare ups in my GVHD and subsequent large increases in my steroid dose to get it back under control.  These large swings in steroid dose can be really nasty for my body so I am pretty excited to take things slowly this time around and hopefully reduce the chance of another flare up.

 The funny thing is this week my trips to the hospital for checkups were supposed to be reduced to once a week.  Of course that couldn’t happen, so instead of going just once this week I had to go three times. Go figure eh, you can never win J

Last week when they did the CT scan of my lungs, the doctors saw some water around my heart.  To be safe they wanted to do an echocardiogram to get a better image to make sure it was nothing to worry about.  This is very common for people coming through such a heavy chemotherapy protocol combined with the high doses of drugs I am on.  I technically don’t find out the results until next Tuesday but the Sonographer was a friend of mine from high school and he let me know there was nothing to worry about.

Thursday I was back to the hospital to see the dentist for my 60 day post transplant checkup.  This is a scheduled checkup examine the condition of the mouth.  The combination of my present drug cocktail, with the Total Body Irradiation, and GVHD can cause a reduced amount of saliva in the mouth.  Again, this is a very common condition post transplant. 

I do have GVHD in my mouth but not really bad, but my saliva level is lower than he would like it to be.  Saliva is one of our major defense mechanisms against bacteria in the mouth which causes cavities.  To help protect my teeth until my saliva levels return I will begin using fluoride every day.  So they took dental impressions to create custom fluoride trays for my teeth. 

I go back next week to get my new “toy” and learn how to use it.  Hopefully this fluoride will taste better than what I remember it tasting like as a kid J  All in all it was a pretty good week on the health front!

Personal Update

With all the trips to the hospital this week combined with posting on the blog I pretty busy. So I didn’t get up to too much else this week.  In my spare time I did a lot of reading on my camera.  I decided to tackle the user manual for my camera but instead of the Nikon edition I am using one written by a professional photographer, Thom Hogan.  I really enjoy reading his photography website and this version adds a lot more context and explanations to the concepts and components of the camera.  I enjoy learning the intricate details of the camera; the only downside is it is 790 pages so it is quite an undertaking!  I am a quarter of the way through but thoroughly enjoying it.  I sprinkled in some other reading this week so I didn’t get too bored J

I also went for my longest walk to date on Wednesday of about 45 minutes.  It was so beautiful out so I decided to go for a walk to do a couple errands.  In actuality it was more of a stroll than a walk but I fit right in with the retiree’s of Port Credit perfectly ;~) The walk made me feel great but near the end I was getting wiped.  Afterward it left me pretty gassed for the remainder of the day.  I intend to keep slowly pushing myself so that I get stronger, but it is a little like walking a tightrope to properly manage my energy levels.

Posting update

I have decided to only post one day on the weekends now.  I want to continue doing the dialogue post where I post something thought provoking and we all discuss it.  I have really enjoyed hearing your viewpoints and thoughts over these past few weeks and don’t want to stop that discussion day.

Taking a day off will enable me time to recharge my batteries and keep the blog content to the quality you have come to expect.    Plus I am sure you need a break and don’t want to hear from me every day of the week anyways :P 

Today’s Picture

It really has nothing to do with this post.  I was just going through some photos from last year and came across this one.  It is one of my favorites but I forgot about it, so I thought I would share it.

Oh I almost forgot if you haven’t gone and voted for my Bloscar please do so.  The voting closes Sunday.

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