More Medical and Life Updatery
Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Monday, October 13, 2025
Hey, it's time for an update!
I'm here to tell you that chemo brain is real. Between that and the anemia, I'm having quite the adventure. The good news is that my hemoglobin levels are right on the edge of being in normal range. Oh, and I'm also blonde, so there's THAT. ;-)
The nausea has also been a thing, but I'm getting that under control. I thought I'd use up the previous round of nausea meds from my PCP, and those were sorta kinda working. Turns out the oncologist prescribed the same med, but double the strength. That works! (For the curious, it's ondansetron.) As noted before, I have other nausea meds, and I get the heavy artillery during chemo week.
The meds schedule during chemo week is wild, and I'm working on something that will help me keep track. I need to get it done ahead of next Tuesday's infusion, though.
I'll spare you all the geeky details, but suffice to say my solution involves repurposing an old laptop to run some software. The machine dates to 2013, meaning it's tight on hard drive and memory. I got the brilliant idea to do a back door upgrade to Windows 11. That worked! I installed the largest piece of software, rebooted the computer .... and nothing. This morning I created a Windows 10 install on a USB drive, hit the magic key to boot from it, and ... nothing. On the third try it booted into Windows 11! I also discovered I had one gigabyte of hard drive space remaining. Over the years I've used this machine for web development and so there's all sorts of crap installed that I no longer need. I nuked all that this evening, and tomorrow I start again on the software.
This is part of a home/life automation thing. Paul already has a home automation hub, but this is for my stuff. I have Plans. Besides, doing stuff like this will help keep my brain from falling completely into a chemo fog.
I hope.
I'm back to doing morning walks, and working my way up to half an hour. I did 25 minutes this morning. This afternoon I pushed a cart around the grocery store on the shopping run. I've made my steps goal! When I get to the point where I consistently make my steps goal, I'll raise it a bit.
And it's off to bed.
Filed under: Life Cancer Sucks
Comments are closed
|