For not having a lot to do, I sure suck at updating!
I had my most recent chemo treatment last Tuesday so I'm starting to feel more normalish. I've been experimenting on myself. Like I wrote in a previous entry, the chemo before the most recent one, I was eating hot soup and a few days later my mouth was incredibly sore. I heard about this study where women who didn't want to lose their hair would wear ice hats to slow down the metabolism of those metabolically active cells and then they wouldn't take up as much of the chemo agents. Those women lost less hair than those who didn't wear the ice. I figured that would be applicable to any part of the body that has highly metabolically active cells, like the mouth, and eating something hot probably would increase metabolism and therefore increase chemo uptake. So, this time around, I ate ice and drank iced beverages during chemo and avoided hot things for the rest of the day. Lo and behold, my mouth pain was significantly less. Yay for self experimentation! My chemo nurse said they used to recommend that patients do the same, but the doctors said there wasn't enough evidence in the literature to really back it up. I definitely think they should offer it as an option, especially if the patients don't have cancer in their mouth, etc that could be negatively impacted by less chemo agents getting to the location.
I've also been doing a great job avoiding writing my paper. I hope to actually make some progress this week and maybe get it done. It won't be that hard! I just hate sitting down and writing papers.
On Friday, I met up with Renee and Sarah and it was so nice seeing them. We wandered around the mall and it was like being normal again (aside from the frequent use of hand sanitizer on my part :P). It still makes me sad that I won't get to do my final year of vet school with them and my other vet school friends, but I don't feel quite as heartbroken about it any more.
Yesterday was Aaron's birthday and I felt bad because we didn't do anything particularly exciting, but he seemed to enjoy the day. We got some delicious tenderloin steaks and a chocolate-raspberry cake from Whole foods, his mom came over, and we had a nice meal and conversation. It was very laid back but pleasant.
I'm trying to figure out what to do for fall semester right now. Initially I was thinking of just taking like half a credit to maintain my health insurance but half time for vet students is just 5 credits (and apparently 9 credits is full time and all of our additional credits are free. Weird) and if I'm half time, my student loans don't go into their grace period so I'd get the full 6 months after graduation to not have to worry about starting to pay them off. Now I'm thinking it would be awesome if I could just do all or most of those credits as an externship because I'd rather not take classes I don't want to take. I'd just do like a 5 week externship (because I believe each 2 weeks is 2 credits) at the clinic I worked at and bring my critters to. It would make me use my brain, brush up on clinical skills and wouldn't be too traumatic as I know everyone there. I'm fairly certain they'd let me, I just have to hear back from the school to see if it's something that would work out.
It's beautiful out. I think it's time for a walk!
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