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Shannon Rinaldo - Journal

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Posted 2018-10-11T19:42:58Z

A Whirlwind Trip to Houston

On Tuesday afternoon Jason and I started out on our 8 1/2 hour drive to Houston. Shout out to Pam for watching over our furry boys as well as our relatively hairless one. We got to Houston around midnight only to go straight to bed and get up very early for my 7:30 AM mri on Wednesday morning. Last month the radiologist said that we needed to go with a spectroscopy mri because it's too hard to tell with a regular mri if we are seeing treatment damage or active tumor in the trouble spots. Therefore, I had the fancy one first thing Wednesday morning. This type of mri takes a little longer to do and it requires two doses of contrast dye. If you've ever had gadolinium rushing through your veins, you know that it's cold and makes everything cold as it rushes in (arm, arm pit, etc.) and can make your stomach a little upset. After the scan, we went to the blood lab so that they could do my regular blood panel, which tells us white blood cell count, platelets, and other general health markers. In general, the blood work is meant to test what treatment is doing to my body. After we left the blood lab, we went home to have some lunch because I wasn't scheduled to see Dr. No Naps until late afternoon. I was assuming that we were scheduled late in case the radiologist needed more time to read the fancy mri. We had some lunch and then the double dose of gadolinium caught up with me, requiring some serious bathroom time. [...]

Posted 2018-10-09T18:49:40Z

August & September checkups

As I prepare to leave for my October visit at MD Anderson, it occurs to me that I should write about a health update. I did not have a scan in August, but there were no weird symptoms or anything to be overly concerned about. However, the night before/ morning of August my checkup with the oncologist, I woke up in the middle of the night needing to pee so badly that only a little girl on her first road trip with dad can understand the level of discomfort. I tried to see if I could delay for a minute because I was clearly still more than half asleep. At some point I must have struck up the energy to get up and walk toward the bathroom. I woke up on the carpet with blood everywhere. I had no idea where I was for a moment and in the dark the blood looked like black liquid. When I figured out what was going on, I then crawled over to where my phone was charging and called Cassie, who was down on the first floor. When there was no answer, I started to crawl back toward the bathroom because I still had to go in the worst way. By the way, stone tile is hard and cold when you are crawling to the toilet. By the time I crawled back to the bedroom and to my phone, it was ringing. Cassie had woken up and saw that I'd called. I said, "I must have gotten up and fallen and I've cut myself." She ran up the two flights to check on me. She later said that she figured it was just a scratch or something. However, it was actually a gash in my chin that was so alarming to her, the three people at the front desk of the ER, and the doctors. If you'd only seen the horrified look on all of their faces! I'm pretty sure the medical staff aren't supposed to greet you with a gasp and mouth and eyes wide when they see your injury.[...]

Posted 2018-10-05T04:05:10Z

The Natives are Getting Antsy but I'm Driving Again

I have had so many inquiries about why I've not updated everyone in a while, so I've decided to just do it in bits. It occurred to me after the 97th request that perhaps my readers are concerned about my health when they don't hear from me. Surely they are not concerned because they enjoy reading my thoughts that much. Right? Well, I'm still doing well. So well, in fact, that the state of Texas issued me a brand new shiny driver's license! And it has a photo that's not ten years old. It actually looks like me NOW because they took a new picture. It's the darndest thing...turns out you can actually drive with a visual impairment but not without a whole lot of hoops to jump through. Also, by visual impairment I mean I'm STILL missing most of my left visual field, but apparently that's just fine for driving.[...]