Thankful Thursday

[mdlbear]

Today I am grateful for...

• Getting rid of that damned Foley catheter that's been plaguing me for the last two months. Not being in (nearly as much) pain is a win. I will note that intermittent self-catheterization, i.e. shoving a rubber hose up one's penis and into one's bladder has a great many problems of its own, but on the whole it's a win, and this is a gratitude post, not a rant. I'll save that for later.
• Beginning treatment! I started Monday expecting to be scheduled for surgery sometime in the not-too-distant future, but went home having actually started chemotherapy. (It feels odd to me that testostrone blockers are considered chemo -- they're not what the word normally calls to mind.)
• My quirky and occasionally bizarre sense of humor, when I can find it. Being able to partially offset scary and unpleasant things by seeing humor in them helps a lot. Wry and/or dark humor in most cases, but whatever works...
• My care team. Which has many new members as of Monday.
• Telemedicine. I have three appointments next week; two are on Zoom and one is on phone.

Comments

[acelightning73]

Sick humor is the most useful coping technique for medical misadventures. The sicker, the better. (The chemo they wanted to give me was an aromatase inhibitor, but they didn't want me to get cervical cancer (although I'd had a hysterectomy by that time and I didn't have any cervix at all.)

[azurelunatic]

Do keep an eye on the appointments section of MyChart. I've had at least one appointment that I found out about through seeing it on the page of upcoming appointments, rather than getting any sort of notification that one had been scheduled, so it's technically possible for those notifications to get somehow lost or not sent.

[mdlbear]

Thanks! I usually hit MyChart several times/day -- in addition to appointments, things like forms and questionnaires have a habit of showing up at random.