Off Topic - Follow Up

As many of you know, my wife and I have had a bit of a bumpy ride this year with good things and not so good things happening all at once. I always feel that I should share this stuff with my online community as it's part of who I am.

Following my orchiectomy I had a week of rest but was soon fit enough to work again. We more or less got our house ship shape to move in to, the floors got done and most of the trim was finished. The biggest problem is that although the house is larger in square footage than our apartment was, it has only one large closet, whereas our previous abode had four. Closets are great spaces for rubbish and useless items to accumulate and when you move to a new home where these unsightly medicine balls and giant hammock chairs that one’s partner thought at one stage were such a great idea to buy, cannot be stored out of sight, one has a problem. A small one I admit but there you go.

One of the reasons for my lack of posts is also that ComCast screwed up getting us set up with our internet and television connections and in fact, we still don’t have a home phone. I hated the idea of switching to ComCast but it will save us money in the end if their lousy service doesn’t drive me round the bend first.

I started chemo-therapy on Thursday last week and after a day of feeling fine on Friday, I spent the entire day Saturday blowing my cookies although there were no cookies to blow. It got so bad that I ended up in the ER where they filled me up with fluids, gave me an intravenous anti-nausea drug and sent me home, telling me to come back if it should start up again. So far no hair loss to report, although that isn’t something that’s been worrying me: first off I have a lot of it (hair that is) and secondly, it would spare me the expense of a haircut due in December. My next round of chemo is in three weeks and I’m hoping to be better prepared.

With regards to my wife’s pregnancy, it looks like we may lose one of the twins, which does not seem viable to survive, another pretty common IVF occurrence. Its been hard to live with that fact but we are grateful to be pregnant at all so we’re hoping the second baby will survive and be fine.

There’s still a lot of work to be done on the house itself and I have to somehow work in order to keep some kind of income flow going but all in all and considering everything we’ve been through we’re doing well. Not least because of the extraordinary support from our community and friends - even clients - which is quintessentially American in its selflessness. It just wouldn’t happen to the same degree in other countries and we are bother extremely grateful for it.