One week home

Well, I've been home just over a week now! I wish I could say it feels like I never left, but not really. I don't feel like I felt when I left, I guess is why.
It was fantastic to see the boys last Monday night after I got home. Mosey gave me the best response, he was very excited. The other two boys were still mostly interested in my bald head! Ha ha ha.
I didn't have to twist the truth too much to get permission to go home. We checked out of the hotel Monday morning so I knew we were going to be leaving, no matter what. I still hadn't kicked the throwing up (guess it wasn't the potassium after all), but at that point I sort of figured out it had to do with too much activity. The hugely strenuous task of taking a bath made me throw up every single time, I realized! Nothing I did or the doctors did made any difference with my throwing up, so why shouldn't I just go home and throw up rather than stick around Houston at $129 a night throwing up?
Anyway, when the nurses asked me if I was feeling better I basically said, "I think I'm feeling normal now." And I guess throwing up every day is normal now! When I told Dr. Popat I had a doctor's appointment on Wednesday when I got home, and he realized he knew the doctor, I guess he felt comfortable to let me go.
Tuesday, my mom got the house all in order, unpacked my stuff, did laundry, cleaned out the car, and otherwise was a tornado of productive activity. She had to leave Wednesday morning to go back to CA. I wished I could have had a couple of good days before she left, but Tuesday wasn't a good day for me, throwing up-wise. And it got worse over the next few days. Joseph got sick with a stomach bug, too, and it is possible I picked up that bug, although I was throwing up a lot before he started, and I was pretty careful about wearing my mask and keeping my hands washed. Who knows. After two days of not being able to keep anything down, I called my doctor and she prescribed me dexamethasone. The pharmacist was worried about giving it to Ben when he went to pick it up, because it is also an immune suppressant, but at that point it was more important to get me able to keep my medications down (to keep anything down).
That medicine made a huge difference and by Saturday I felt like a different person.
I had a great weekend, went to church on Sunday, ate three meals like a normal person, and felt some hope for the future!
Yesterday I had to go into the hospital to get blood drawn, so my sister took the kids down to the cafeteria for smoothies while I went up to the lab. Before we left the hospital, I got a call from Dr. Kalidas telling me my hemoglobin was down to 6.6 (this is very bad) and I had to get a blood transfusion. But since I'm a transplant patient, they had to type and cross my blood (looking f0r antibodies against blood since I've received transfusions before), and get the blood cells irradiated. So I had to hang out at the hospital a few more hours for that, and then back at the hospital this morning at 8:30.
I had to get 3 units of blood, at 2 hours a piece, so I was at the hospital till 3:00 PM! Long day. It was made a little more exciting by the girl in the chair next to me who reacted to her blood, or had a seizure or something, anyway there was a lot of activity and emergency phone calls and oxygen and all sorts of stuff. She's ok, so all's well that ends well, but I felt really bad for her. I remember reacting to the ATG at MD Anderson and it is a very scary experience. And she couldn't speak much English which I'm sure made it even more frightening for her. But the nurses in the infusion room were really nice and I read my book and watched some Olympics and then some cooking shows, so it was ok.
I'm feeling ok today, not as good as over the weekend though. Threw up again on the way to the hospital, so my no throwing up streak is up for now. I'm hoping it had something to do with my flagging hemoglobin levels and that I'll perk up again now that I've got some blood back in my system.
The really good news was that my blood pressure was somewhat normal (for me) at 97/59 or thereabouts during all my vitals checks during the transfusion, but even better, my pulse was down to 88, 80, even 79 one time!! Hurray!! Looks like my tachycardia has resolved, which honestly has been bugging me.
So that's the news around here. My sister got here last Thursday night, just in time for my really horrible Friday. She's taken things well in hand, though, and I'm so grateful. Her little girl Mara is here, too (2 years old) and is having fun with her cousins. Rosalynde's older two kids are at a cousins get-together at their other grandparents, so she was "free" to come and be house-slave here for a while. She's a really good cook, so we're lucky!
I've been reading "Indian in the Cupboard" to the boys, we're about halfway through now. They're enjoying it, especially since I can't find their math books, so they've been off the hook with math assignments!
School starts next Tuesday, so we're at crunch time deciding whether or not to homeschool. Both boys want to, and I want to, I'm just worried about my strength. So I'm continuing to pray about it and see how it goes. It would be good not to have the exposure to all the school germs, but homeschooling is a much bigger decision than that, and in any case, Mosey will be going to preschool twice a week, so some germs will be coming home no matter what we do.
I'll have to find the math books before we can start, that's for sure!
Ok, that's it for today.