Welcome to my life..my family..my world..unedited.

I have an appointment with Dr. L tomorrow morning. He’s my oncologist.
Oncologist.
It’s just not right to have one of those. (I wish we could put them all out of business with a cure. I bet they wish that, too.)
I’m not sure why I’m nervous about this visit. Maybe it’s because we’re a few weeks away from the year mark of my diagnosis. Maybe it’s just the culmination of all the stress over the past few weeks. Maybe it’s the fact that I need to shave my scarred up leg (can you say pain in the ass?) – hehe. Maybe I’m not worried about MY doctor appointment, but rather Preston’s appointment with the pediatric surgeon later in the afternoon.
Either way, I haven’t stopped stress eating for days. I haven’t exercised. I haven’t cut back on Coke. Maybe after tomorrow I can find a new normal.
I’ll keep you posted.

These past couple of weeks have been ridiculously stressful and busy and just crazy. Of course, there have been good things, too, but the crazy stressy has overwhelmed. I had about 10 different posts in my head – great ideas, fabulous stories, perfect pictures. I may even have written them down, but in the craziness of my mom being in the hospital, Preston being in the hospital, being a mom, a wife, a homeowner, a business owner….redoing the kitchen, redoing Matt’s room, keeping up with laundry, losing power for 20 hours….
The very worst thing is the guilt of not getting Matt’s room finished. He’s been sleeping in Preston’s room (which has actually been ok), but I promised him it would be done today and it’s not even close. I feel horrible. I’d like to just skip work tomorrow so I can get it done, but I haven’t been to work much lately with P being in the hospital, and I can’t go on Wednesday because of doctor appointments. I just feel like I can’t win. Add to that the crazy laundry, the stuff that just seems to keep piling up everywhere, Preston …

….and all through the house,
not a creature …well, the boys are sleeping ….the dog is out…. ah, screw it, I can’t even get past the first line! hehe
So tomorrow morning, I will get up and head to the first of two buildings of U of M hospital.  My first visit is to nuclear medicine, where they will inject a dye into my leg to find the node that they need to remove and take x-rays or photos or something of said dye-injected leg.
By mid afternoon, I will be at my second building for the actual surgery (x2).  The surgery (-ies) will remove fairly large area around the mole that was originally removed to make sure there is no remaining melanoma in the surrounding cells; the second surgical area is wherever they find that node, but probably right in the crease of my leg.
Here, in no specific order, are my concerns:

That they will find additional cancer cells in either the surrounding area or the node (obviously)
That they will screw up and use steri-strips, thereby giving me hives
That they will either screw up, or be unable to find, an antibiotic that won’t cause an allergic reaction.
That I will be nauseous after the …

I can’t seem to turn if off lately. I’m having trouble sleeping, and then when I do fall asleep, I sleep like the dead and can’t wake up. Let’s dive right in, shall we?
First, my business. I don’t really get it, but we’re super busy and have no cash. There is a serious cash-flow problem in my office and I don’t quite know what to attribute it to. According to Wall Street, we’re in a recession, but I’m in Michigan, so we’re way ahead of the curve on that one. That said, we’re busy. So busy, in fact, that we need more help, but I can’t afford to add anyone to the payroll. I can say all day that it’s old debt from when we lost an insurance company for a year and bought out of our franchise (and it is), and I can complain about the absurdly, ridiculously, atrocious cost of employee health care (yikes!), and I can whine about the cost of goods going up and the reimbursement from insurance companies going down (and down and down…). But alas, that doesn’t pay my bills. And bills I have. Up the wazoo. And I …