Margo has chemo treatment 3

Margo is at chemotherapy session 3 in the photo above at Mayo Clinic Rochester.  She saved a seat for our next door neighbor, Nancy who has been in chemo since January 2011.  Margo often took her to 3-day treatments every 3 weeks (she continues to take them and is gradually beating her cancer). 

Nancy's husband Gary, who is a colonel in National Guard and has been active since the war to free Kuwait, was back on leave and so the four of us had a nice visit as the two  had their chemo.  

Mayo's chemotherapy center is on 10th floor Gonda, downtown.  It has individual and group treatment rooms to handle maybe 50 folks at a time.  There is free coffee, treats, and many volunteers coming 

around to visit and ask if you need support as well as many nurses and others hovering around while the machine slowly drips the chemo into Margo's port.

  

Margo gets two pre-treatment drugs to calm the stomach and to prevent allergic reactions followed by the two treatment drugs.  Tuesday we were in about 7:00 am and out by 10 am, headed over to do a little shopping and breakfast.  

Margo is tired after the treatment, does OK on Wednesday and then Thursday usually tired and a little nauseous, and then by Friday OK again.  This Friday she has research MRI to see if the tumors have stopped growing or maybe started to shrink.  Because she is in a research study (a clinical trial of a new drugs), she gets extra scans free as well as more people hovering and checking on her progress.  

Margo is doing well so far.  No sign of hair loss and no other problems.  Three treatments down and 9 to go in phase 1.  Then it switches to treatments every 2 weeks for 12 more weeks.

Our big project for the winter is to rid ourselves of a lifetime of accumulated stuff that we need to sort through.  When Margo's Aunt Lou passed away, and then when her parents sold the farm, we boxed up a lot of dishes, pots and pans, linens, tools, and so on and just hauled them and unloaded in the basement and garage here, without looking through the stuff.  So this fall and winter is the time to sort out things and pass along what should go to Goodwill, the incinerator, be used and generally organize that stuff as well as a great deal of things that we accumulated ourselves and never use--and then regain our garage and basement for more useful purposes!  Amazing how much stuff we have to go through!