So this morning was fun. I woke up around 2 AM, laid there in bed for a little bit and my nose started running. Now, I’m not sure if it’s just years of experience at work, but within a couple of drips I can tell it’s a nosebleed, even in the dark. I grab a couple of kleenexes and do the nose pinch (leaning forward, not backward, ’cause I know what I’m doing here). A few minutes go by. I’m getting sleepy again, so I go ahead and tilt my head back for a few minutes (I know what I just said before, but I was sleepy – bite me). A few more minutes go by. I get tired of gurgling, so I go back to the correct method. I’m starting to have visions of Modern Problems and wonder what I did to piss Chevy Chase off. Finally, after a good twenty minutes or so, the bleeding comes under control.
Now comes the wondering. You see, the gemzar I had on Monday is supposed to screw around with my RBCs and platelets. What makes you clot? Platelets. This might not be a good thing. So here I am, 2:30 in the morning, wondering if I’m going to bleed out. Barb’s still snoring away, so I make my way over to the computer. I find a couple of sites that mention a few different symptoms, but nothing about nosebleeds in particular. Then I come across someone else’s site. Their daughter had Hodgkin’s. She went through the stem cell transplant process much like I’m going to. The entries are from 2004. Where’s the update? What’s happening?
These are always bad questions to be asking yourself in my situation reading one of these blogs.
Sure enough, I backtrack and she died from pneumonia complications during the transplant. Wonderful.
This is why I don’t look up Hodgkin’s on the net. I have yet to find survivor’s stories. I find survivors of other cancers. I meet people who went through this. I occasionally stumble into a forum with people touting success. Personal stories though? They’re all “In Loving Memory of” or I’ll get sucked in until the last “but he lost the battle” bit.
So now I have even more of an impetus to fix the site up a bit. The new tagline is “Still Alive” and it’s gonna be right there on the front. None of that memorial crap here – you’re reading about a survivor, baby. And as we all already know, what’s cancer?