13...

Neither lucky nor unlucky. Just done. 13 rounds down and hopefully only 3 to go. That's the great unknown, the one I don't even like to consider. Am I almost done? My focus is on getting to round 16 and getting a break. I know the odds say that this won't be the end of my journey, the end of this dance with cancer. But I just want a clean scan at the end of round 16 to buy me a 3- month chemo holiday. Just a few months to breathe. One clean scan with no surprises. Not too much to ask, I hope.

Oh, and no post is really complete without pictures, is it?

Pigs...

I had a vivid dream 2 weeks ago: I was eating a hot dog loaded with relish and mustard. Why? I've been vegetarian for 17 years and besides, those were never my condiments of choice. Really, if I'm going to go carnivore, a hot dog isn't a brilliant beginning. A few days later, I had a dream where I was scarfing down all the bacon I could get my hands on...and begging the kids not to tell anyone.

Huh? It didn't make any sense to me either, until Hayden developed a fever last Sunday and I took him to the doctor. The obvious diagnosis, pork-product obsessed mom, is the H1N1 Swine flu. Which was just miserable for my never-sick boy. And it was equally disconcerting in my immuno-surpressed state to try to love the sweet boy and dodge his nasty germs at the same time.

I went for chemo #12 on Wednesday and was almost certain we'd delay since I was still in the incubation period for the swine flu. It seemed a little crazy to me to beat down my immune system even further when we had active flu germs in the house. But the second my oncologist relented and said we could postpone a week (I only wanted a 2-day delay), I freaked out. Everything I do is scheduled around good (non-chemo) and bad (chemo) weeks. Delay one chemo cycle by a week and the rest of my year is thrown into a tizzy. I'm sure we could recover, but you know how I like to plan. And so far so good, no swine flu for me.

Now back to those darned pigs...there has to be something good pig-related in my life, right? How about pigtails?

Yes, pigtails are a winner for certain.