10/27/21 Remodeling This 30 Year Old

The other day I was “reading” my daily devotional.. that I am terrible about reading daily. My husband was talking to me while I was reading it and I remember thinking that I was not fully grasping what  I needed to be taking in. 

I had to go back and read it last night. It was about when things are not necessarily going your way and to trust god in the process… because your life is like a remodel. You have to tear down the old in order to build back up the new. You have to see the bad before you can begin to see the good. 

I totally should have paid more attention to that devotional last week when I was reading it. 

I got infusion #8 and things went great. I was feeling a tad bit under the weather but recovered enough to go to my sister in laws rehearsal dinner on Friday, wedding on Saturday, and then a breast cancer event on Sunday. (Pics below)

I got infusion #9 and spiked a fever after treatment. Fevers in cancer patients are apparently really bad. 🤷🏼‍♀️ After Covid tests, influenza tests and an overall look over, they sent me home and my fever didn’t last more than 24 hours! We thought maybe some sort of virus had hit my body. 

Fast forward to this week, I got infusion #10. I started out neutropenic (my neutrophils were below 1.5) and got that darn fever about 5 hours after treatment. This time,  I had to get the full work up of blood work to check for infection and my neutrophils went down to 1.0 a day later.😩 As a precautionary measure, they started me on IV antibiotics and sent me home with oral antibiotics while they wait for the blood cultures to return. I was instructed to come back in the morning (this morning) to check my wbc/neutrophils again. My WBC have come up slightly but my neutrophils have gone down again. 😭😭 

I don’t think I realized the extent of the severity of not having any wbc to fight off infection. Pretty scary to think that in a Petri dish world full of germs, even a slight cold could be detrimental to my health. 

The nurses have been telling me that I need to rest. That I need to stay away from stress and just relax. 🙄  I don’t think I have been stress free at all for the last 20 years! (Seriously wondering if that’s a cancer cause.)

My body is fighting back after 10 rounds of chemo. Luckily, I only have 2 more weekly rounds before I get 2-3 weeks to “refresh” before starting the last half of my treatment. At home, I have to quarantine from my family… which makes me super sad. Beau’s only word he says is “mama”. All I hear is mama being screamed from outside the door. To be fair… He yells it all of the time.. especially when we wants more food..  which is basically all of the time. So, who knows if he’s yelling for me… or just for more snacks. 
We all are being super careful to stay healthy. While I’m locked up in my room, JR FaceTimes me so I can see my babies… and then of course has to keep me giggling with his memoji facetime capabilities. 

JR and I have done our fair share of remodels over the years. Well, JR has done them and I just project manage and try to help where I can. For God’s sake, I put a power drill through the wash machine one time. I don’t even know how it happened. I am not made to touch power tools. 

I will never forget the first remodel we did. It’s a joke in our household nowadays. In our first house we had this absolutely terrible bathroom. It had asbestos floor tiles, it was blue, the vanity was made level by a piece of cardboard under one side of it, and it had a window in the shower. It was awful…and we took it down to the studs. At some point we needed to do some plumbing. JR had some questions so we called my dear old dad. His advice was to tear the wall out and “just look at it”. Just look at it! Seriously!? What the hell kind of advice is that!? But, that’s what we did. JR tore all of the walls out and just looked at it and was able to figure out the plumbing situation. The bathroom had a good foundation, we just had to build upon it. The bathroom was our first big project as a couple. We learned a lot from that bathroom… like to never let JR drywall and never let Nichole paint. 😊 When it was all said and done, we were so proud of that bathroom. 

In a way, I feel like this is my body.. stripping itself down of all the bad so we can just take a look at it… Take a look at the foundation so we can figure out how to build it up going forward! 😊

Fingers crossed we are at the low point so we can start moving up tomorrow! 🤞🏼🤞🏼

Prayer requests: 

 1. Please pray for my bone marrow to get its act together and start producing like it should. I have to come back tomorrow morning to be checked again. 

2. Please pray that my fever stays away and that I do not got any sort of infections and stay healthy. 

3. Please pray that my family stays healthy!