Hope is a powerful thing, I hope.

The day after posting about my GOOD DAY, I crashed and stayed in the pits for . . . ? ahhh, the blog would indicate two full weeks.

I withdrew as much as possible to avoid spreading the gloom (and embarrassing myself with sobbing), to include staying away from Facebook. (Hard to believe, I know, but when you are as down as I was, you don't want to do ANYthing or know that anyone out there is having a laugh.)

Yesterday was the last of 18 weekly rounds of chemo, so today I'm having positive thoughts and felt I should give a quick update.

My positive thoughts are about how many things I'd like to accomplish today -- some of which entail going out and about (where no one is likely to know me) and doing some of the at-home things I used to enjoy like reading and writing and baking pulp muffins. (Still juicing.)

Yesterday at chemo I pretended to sleep so I wouldn't have to engage, but a few conversations did seep in. The woman next to me who is getting the recipe I had four years ago especially interested me. If you recall, that was a hard-n-fast treatment plan that nearly killed me with side effects, so I've had an eye on this woman who showed up all positive and bouncy one Monday 10 weeks ago. She is a nurse, so it seemed to me she thought she had a handle on the whole treatment thing and thus the cheeriness. She is an every-other-week person, like I was last time, so yesterday was her 5th round (out of 6). My goodness how that woman has changed from her first round. I don't think a positive thing came out of her mouth the entire time. She was obviously sick, angry, and worried. This, of course, made me feel better for two reasons: 1) It enforced that some of us do not bounce through chemotherapy no matter how hard we try to be positive and 2) It made me grateful that I was given a regimen this time that I could actually show up for 18 weeks in a row with perfect attendance.

Now of course I'm hopeful that the darkness will lift with the end of chemo and the start of talk therapy tomorrow. (Thank you, Diane, for the referral who thank-goodness happens to be in network.)

Next on the agenda, if I choose to do it, is radiation. Radiation is 30 treatments, five days a week for six weeks. Up to this point I've been against it, but I have a consult with the same radiation oncologist I had last time and he is quite likely to talk me into doing it again. As I recall, radiation was easy compared to chemo and if I DON'T do it and the cancer rears its ugly head yet again, I will always blame myself.

So that is the state of things this morning. You can be thankful I didn't blog you through the dark days. But hasn't the recent weather in Wisconsin been a bonus? (I wanted to end on a positive note.)