Painful BMT visit and finalizing plans for celebration of wedding anniversary

All of the invitations are in the mail, but we expect to hand deliver about 8 more to neighbors and or friends. I mentioned to Karen recently that no readers of the blog have indicated that they will come to our celebration and she told me that people probably have stopped reading it because it so much alike from post to post. But I repeat if any of you are planning to attend please let me know in order to get a fairly accurate count to the caterer.

The clinic was quite busy this morning and when it was time to insert a line in my port Elaine was busy so Ellen, a nurse who works in the back with some of the doctors and whom I had never seen before, was asked to do the job. She did not follow the normal procedures, which involve keeping everything on a sterile surface and she moved almost everything on a seperate tray without any covering at all. When she attempted to insert the line connected to a sharp curved needle into the central division of my port it hurt more than the procedure has ever done before and she didn't get any blood return. So she tried a second time with the same lack of success and pain and then decided she would have to get one of the Infusion nurses to come do it. Just then Elaine walked into the room and took over the insertion with a minimum of pain.

After that everything went smoothly, Andrea came by soon for the monthly visit and took my list of 6 prescription refills to send to the pharmacy and said that they should be ready when I was ready to go home (they weren't but I only had to wait about 20 minutes). I always have to wait for the bloodwork to be completed before they give me the Velcade shot, which is given through the port line, and only takes seconds so I don't think of it as an infusion. When Scott delivered a printout of the bloodwork he said that it all looks good, but the only way that I can make sense of his comment is that he didn't look at it very closely. I notice that some of the tests that were reported as low 2 weeks ago are now higher, but others are lower still and some reported as high 2 weeks ago are higher today, but a few others are lower, and some are unchanged. Emma has been wanting to talk to Kate Wilson, our next door doctor-neighbor about some of her medication and if she can get Kate here for questions maybe she can look at my test results and make them more meaningful to me.