Scattered Thoughts . . .

Sheila is recovering from her hospital visit a few days ago and we're ready to jump into more medical appointments for her. On the positive side, she is slowly recovering and feeling better. We're still waiting to see her Oncologist and her Primary Care doctor early this week to discuss these newest problems but, for now, she is feeling more stable.  My health, however, is taking a serious hit. I went out to mow the lawn after breakfast yesterday morning since it was a first day in a week that we finally had dry grass. It was beginning to get warm so I opted to forego pulling out the weed-whacker and just do a relatively quick mow. I figured I needed to minimize my time out in the sun, heat and humidity so I skipped the weed-whacking. My health does not do well in the heat and Saturday was a bit warm and quite humid. I knew the wisest thing to do would be to just run the mower over the lawn as quickly as possible without overdoing it and then get out of the heat.  About

As anyone would expect, after months of cancer treatment, Sheila is exhausted. To make the expected exhaustion from treatment worse, we've had at least two busy, absolutely hectic days each week since her radiation treatment ended... Thanksgiving, Liza's wedding out of town, Christmas dinner with friends, a few days in Manhattan, Christmas, and our New Year's Eve anniversary celebration with some friends (our 10th anniversary, actually). It has been an exceptionally busy month. After months of cancer treatment and then an exceptionally busy month socially, it comes as no surprise that Sheila is so exhausted that, at times, she needs to be off her feet because she feels as though she doesn't have the strength to keep her body upright. She is definitely overwhelmingly fatigued. Unfortunately, I'm not fairing much better. We're quite the pair right now. My health has been barely balancing on the side of stability over the past six months as we managed Sheila&

I had a fairly good day yesterday... my health was relatively stable... I did some annual staining around the outside of the house... I assembled a hand pump station and stained it... I assembled the galvanized plumbing fittings... it was a productive day! This doesn't mean I didn't have moments of borderline lousy health yesterday... I did. A few times during the day, I needed to cool down... cold showers... cold water over my head until I cooled down... cold water on the insides of my wrists to cool down my blood... It was around 90 degrees all day so I had to work hard at keeping my body cool so my health would not fail. Around lunchtime yesterday, I wheeled our air conditioner to a window... set up the vent in the window... plugged it in... and we had air conditioning in our living room, kitchen and bedroom. I might need to resort to turning on the air conditioning today just to cut the edge on the humidity which is causing serious breathing issues for me today. Today

The kids were here for dinner again tonight and that is always a welcomed change of pace so that part of our night was really nice.  The problem was that it was a bit hot this afternoon (the low 90s) and I think this negatively impacted my health. Something caused my health to nosedive and I know warm environments are terrible for my health so... I'm blaming the heat. Ironically, earlier this morning was a better morning than I have experienced in quite a few weeks. As a result, I managed to do some much needed laundry... cut my hair... and shower. This may not sound like much, but it was more than I had accomplished in one day in quite some time and enough to completely exhaust me of energy... even taking my breath away. I ate some lunch and then slept for almost three hours. When I awoke, the kids were arriving at the house for dinner. At this point, the temperature in the house was in the low 80s and my health was beginning to slide down the slippery slope it finds far too o

This morning, I wrote about how I missed a dose of medications yesterday... then missed some more medications last night... then missed a medication this morning... and how this sort of thing snowballs into something out of control...  This snowball has indeed enlarged and gotten out of control! This is a dangerous sequence of events for anyone struggling with Systemic Mastocytosis. Today was a "down" day for me... trying to recover from the missed medications... rest up... avoiding the heat and humidity (which trigger anaphylaxis and miserable health)... so, after lunch I laid down on the couch in the air conditioned living room to try to catch up on much needed sleep and to, hopefully, recover. The good news is that I had no problems whatsoever in falling asleep... The bad news is I was awakened very abruptly. My chest was pounding in palpitations... I was groggy... although I awakened suddenly, I was still groggy...  and feeling weak... I still wasn't thinking cl

Yesterday... it was brutal for a couple of hours. I was in and out of the bathroom, terribly sick and nauseated, and teetering on complete anaphylaxis. It was not a pleasant few hours. Systemic Mastocytosis is a rare illness in which the body's mast cells will indiscriminately 'attack' the body rather than their usual enemies such as wounds, pathogens and allergy. During this process, the mast cells will release a bunch of mediators which causes countless symptoms including anaphylaxis.  Typically, I do well at handling most of the resulting symptoms but anaphylaxis is a tough one to handle. When all these mediators are dumped into the body by my mast cells, my body responds by going into anaphylactic shock or at least bordering on anaphylactic shock or anaphylaxis. Yesterday, after breakfast, I started feeling rather poorly. My stomach was bothering me. I was a bit nauseated. Before long, I knew I would be sick and in the bathroom. I checked for my pulse... I had a