Today, day 8 of Cycle 30 went smoothly.

My appointment at the BMT clinic this morning was at 10:00 and I was a few minutes late because of searching for a parking space in the garage and that may explain the delay after registering for Craig to come take me in for vitals.  My blood pressure continues to be higher than I expect it should be: 144/74, which seems to be the new normal.  For more than 5 years it has consistently been around 120/57to 60.  In the last few months, when I mention the apparently high blood pressure to one of the PAs the have taken again later or ask me to take it when I get home and most times it is lower, so maybe I just suffer from "White Coat Syndrome" when I first get to the clinic.  Craig seated me in Chair #1 in the Infusion Room where Natalie greeted me and told me she would be my nurse and she would order the Velcade and would wait to put a line in my port until the Velcade was ready.  I have known Natalie for years, but don't recall her ever having been my nurse, there were a lot of new faces in the clinic and I didn't enquire as to why; probably staff being rotated from job to job.

The pharmacy called to tell Natalie that the Velcade was ready and she went down to get it; she had prepared all the material for the infusion earlier and placed a line in my port when she got back with the drug and was administering it when I was asked if I would be there long enough for a sandwich, which I declined, and I was leaving the garage by 12:07.  The traffic was light but I went by the Post Office to drop a card in the mail and then on to Ream's for some fruit.

Tomorrow promises to be a hectic day.  We contracted to have the picture windows in our Living Room replaced with high efficiency double pane windows and they were supposed to be installed last Friday, but when the crew arrived to inspect the job they decided the would need more equipment and another helper they postponed the installation until tomorrow at 8:00AM which meant that we would have to get earlier than we did this morning.  I succumbed to a sales pitch about reducing our heating and cooling costs by a huge amount by doing this when the salesman showed me that the temperature of the present picture windows was 98 degrees in contrast to 74 degrees on those we had  replaced about 10 years ago.  I told the leader that we needed to be downtown by 5:00 and he said "no problem";  we'll see.