Well, it's Sunday and I'm climbing the walls! Charlie has just dragged me out of the house to do a run in the car and I do feel better for it! Up until then I was getting more than a little grumpy, annoyed, angry and generally fed up!
I've been stewing since Friday night! I just think everything would be so perfect if I didn't have leukaemia. We tried for a boy and we're having two boys, great, our extension is going to be built (tell you about that in a minute) and I just feel things are finally going somewhere…but I have this leukaemia and I'm getting really angry about it. Charlie would tell you that me angry is not a good thing…I tend to roast in my own anger for a while and then explode (we did a thing called "the Marriage Course" with friends from church, lots of stuff about communication, sharing, etc. In the bit about coping with arguments I was a "raging rhino" and Charlie was a "hiding hedgehog"…very complimentary >:-o).
I guess I'm in the "why me?" phase of all this. My treatment is progressing well and there is a good chance that my next bone marrow sample will be the last one I'll have to give for a while. It seems that I'm currently responding well to the ATRA drug and the doctors are confident that I can be monitored sufficiently with blood work alone. This is good because having bone marrow taken is not the most relaxing of procedures! The needle is huge and it gets stuck into my hip bone! ~:-|
We've been trying to get an extension put onto the house for three years or so. Our friend Gordon did the plans for us and we've now, after a long time trying, got a builder to do the job. I'm so pleased that the building work is now going to happen. It will give us the space we're so desperately going to need with our new additions! Our house is currently a three bedroom semi with a living room/dining room, kitchen, utility room (nothing fancy and bolted on to the back of the garage – very cold!) and toilet (under stairs) on the ground floor. The first floor has the three bedrooms (one of which Charlie uses as an office for all his school/business/web design stuff) and the main bathroom.
We plan to knock the existing kitchen and utility room into one to give us a family kitchen/living area, move the utility room to the back of the garage, move the garage forward to make space for the utility room, and add a vestibule to the front of the house. Upstairs there's an open plan study on the landing in the middle of the house. A new big bathroom above the family kitchen, the existing bathroom is being turned into an ensuite for us and a new bedroom is being built at the front of the house (for Amber)…heaps of work! Crikey…I didn't think it was so much until I had to type it all out…eek!
The building work is planned to start mid-May and finish (hopefully) mid-July. This a good time for the building work to be going on because I'm likely to be in hospital at that time and away from the chaos! My obstetrician would like to deliver the babies at around 34 weeks and my haematologist was thinking around 32 weeks. Either way, that works out to be from the middle of May to the start of June. I will probably get steroids to boost the babies' growth before then (and if I run 3 miles a day, do some weights, bench presses etc. I'll qualify for the Russian team at the Olympics 🙂 I'm back into hospital tomorrow and I hope to be out by mid-afternoon. V. x
P.S. My friend Dave from Canada just called. Great to catch up and he did cheer me up a bit!