My energy level is improving, too. My voice is more resonant again when I talk on the phone. I still lay on the couch a lot, but I’m more energetic when I’m up.

Taste is getting better and better. Today I noticed that I can start to detect saltiness again, and I had mustard on a bockwurst today and was able to taste it (most of the way).

The nutritionist we met with at the SCCA said that seeing how much I had improved week-to-week made her day.

I still have to take 8 pills twice a day, and I still get pain in my legs every once and awhile. It feels like the sensation after working out more than usual, even though I’ve not really exercised. And I’ve started having dizzy spells again after getting up from a really relaxed sitting position. If I’m not careful I collapse onto the floor or the ground until the spell passes. Really annoying, and kinda dangerous!

But I’m getting better.

Some of the same symptoms from the hospital continue to plague me here; one of the biggest is that my legs keep tensing up. I can focus and relax them, but they inevitably tense up again.

Hopefully a few days at home will set me right as rain!

This time I wanted to do everything I could to avoid suffering through the joint pain on Saturday morning. My lizard brain considered trying to stay in the hospital a few extra days (or checking into Extended Observation) to be somewhere that had IV pain medication available.

My rational brain said this was silly. Checking into an expensive room for a night to avoid a few hours of pain seemed excessive. And my rational brain won, as it often does.

Besides, the pain showed up a day early. Friday morning my knees and ankles hurt like the dickens for a few hours. Engage opiates! And ibuprofen! I got up and read stuff for a few hours, and eventually (after an hour or two) the pain subsided enough for me to go back to sleep.

I did the same thing on Saturday, and on Sunday. That would’ve been a lot of days in the hospital!

I’m glad that’s done with.

Next we scheduled an appointment with a transplant specialist doctor at the SCCA to see what she recommended as the next step. Apparently the speed with which the lymphoma asserted itself in my CNS suggests that we ought to do a stem-cell transplant.

My case was discussed by a bunch of well-regarded doctors at the SCCA, and the consensus was that I ought to do an autologous stem-cell transplant.

This is a biblical-flood sort of treatment. When we collected the blood stem-cells back in November, that was us preparing am ark. Now we’ll irradiate my entire body and fill it with a crazy amount of chemo, in a stage known as “conditioning”. This will hopefully kill off any remaining individual lymphoma cells. Unfortunately it also kills offy bone marrow (and along with it, my body’s ability to produce new blood cells).

A few days later they give back my collected stem cells and my body starts to rebuild. The stem cells find their way to my bones and start producing the cells that make up bone marrow.

As part of this, I think I’ll lose a lot of the immunities my body has built up over the year. We’re really hitting the reset button!

There’s one additional question to be answered: there wasn’t a solid consensus among the SCCA doctors on whether or not to recommend extra radiation focused on my brain and spine. Lymphoma in the brain can be sneaky (as we’ve found), and am aggressive approach is more likely to get it all.

This can, however, cause damage to healthy brain tissue. Possible decreases in memory strength, among other undesireable things.

I need to decide soon, but I’m leaning toward going for it. The goal of a treatment like this is a cure, and I want to do everything I can to get there.

I awoke to intense pain in all of the joints in my legs. Terrible pain like they were broken. But they weren’t; they all moved fine. And thank goodness this was pain that could be pierced by Percocet!

After the second high-dose methotrexate, Saturday morning arrived and the exact same pain returned. The night before saw a walk through the grocery store, but not much more. This time we visited Urgent Care to make sure that nothing was actually going terribly wrong.

X-rays and blood tests looked good. It sounds like arthralgia (like arthritis without the inflammation) can be an occassional side effect of the treatment.

Next time I’ll take Friday night off entirely and see if that changes things.

Getting out of the hospital after that second treatment was a bit stressful. They prescribed that I was to take 25mg of Leucovorin (the Methotrexate antidote) every 6 hours, for nine doses. We checked at the hospital’s pharmacy: out of stock. Group Health? Out of stock, unless we wanted to drive to Tacoma! My dad got on the phone and started calling pharmacies; he found one near our house that had it. The only problem was that they only had it in 5mg tablets! So I got to take 5 pills every 6 hours. It was just a shock that they were discharging my from the hospital without first knowing that I would actually be able to buy my rescue dose.

Also! I had an MRI of my head performed on Wednesday, and Dr Norman has communicated that it looms great. The lymphoma appears to be responding well to the treatment.

In a few weeks we’ll be meeting with a doctor at the SCCA that specializes in transplants to gather a recommendation on next steps after treatment. These lymphomas have shown themselves to be tricky, and it might take a stem-cell transplant to get me a chance of a long-term remission (or even cure).

I was to get my next dose of DepoCyt delivered intrathecally on Friday, but we had to postpone it as I forgot to start the pre-medication (Dexamethasone) on Thursday. For some reason I had started thinking that the Dex was pre-medication for the methotrexate. It turns out that administering DepoCyt without the pre-medication can cause seizures (among other unpleasant side-effects). I’ve started the Dex now and we’ll roll the treatment into the rest of the party on Monday.

Tomorrow we start round three.