Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Chemo Treatment #1 is Done

I haven't talked to my dad yet, but my brother just sent me an email with the latest update.  My dad is finished with his first chemotherapy session. He did not have a reaction to the treatment and he is now eating chocolate cake and lemonade. He slept for three hours in his chair in the treatment facility. That is so him! I laughed at that part – the eating sweets and the sleeping.

If you know my dad, you know he LOVES to eat. He could eat most people under the table yet he’s been the same weight (for the most part) since I was zero.  My brother and I were just discussing how we hate that he hasn’t been able to eat as much as he would like to due to all the tests he had to take the last couple of weeks.  We want to feed him. Which reminded me of my great-aunts on my mother’s side of the family who use to always try to overfeed us whenever we visited them in Albany, Georgia.  I can just hear both of them saying, “Help ya’self”.  My dad does the greatest impression of this by the way.

Alright chemicals…it’s time to go to work!   

10 comments:

  1. I believe that's pronounced "Hep" ya'self! The L is silent. He is supposed to be keeping his calories up - he could probably do it with a piece of Frances' caramel cake.

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  2. LOL. Oops. Sorry for the "misspelling". Caramel cake...hmmm...yum....we should bake one of those. I do have the recipe.

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  3. All of us here in your Dad's Spanish Class in Barcelona are rooting for him! And we can all personally attest to your Dad's propensity to whip out the odd Granola bar or two during particularly difficult imperfect subjunctive conjugations. Glad to hear he's eating again. Thanks for the updates, B.D. - and for the Dave Barry piece, which, even though I'm eating my breakfast, had me chuckling and spluttering insanely into my coffee...

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  4. The odd granola bar? Bob? That may have been the first indicator that something was awry. He has scolded me many times for trying to feed him hay and other healthy seeming food!

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  5. Go, Bob! And thanks for keeping us all in the proverbial loop with your blog, Miss L.!

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  6. Thanks Andrea! My dad is lucky to have tons of people who love and care about him and I knew that they would want to know how he's doing.

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  7. Thank you so much for doing this, Lauren. I have known your dad since 1995 (polio eradication, 1995)and I am not surprised to see that he is tackling this "monster" (as he called it in an e-mail) in the same proactive, take-charge way I have seen him handle every other situation with which he's been involved. He is a wonderful man and I am pulling for him. Thank you for committing to keeping us informed of his progress and I hope that he sails through the chemo with a minimum of side-effects and can have one of his favorite "brews" soon...... Jean Smith (CDC)

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  8. what a great blog, almost as good as the political blog by the man himself. all of us here in geneva (yes, now I am one of them, for the next month or so) are pulling for him, around the world! from pakistan to india to nigeria and on and on .... I just spoke to bob, via skype, and he actually seemed to welcome the call - get busy, skypers! I predict he'll be at moe's a week from tomorrow (sure he'd be there tomorrow too but after all its Good Friday and we all know how he respects religious holidays) .... carl

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  9. Good to hear the first treatment went smoothly. I was just thinking about the chocolate chip cookies he had ready when we visited in ATL. And his rule; that we could only have them if we had 7. At least that's how i remember it. Thanks for the blog L.

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  10. Bob must have loved David and Joseph more than you. His rule for them was, and I quote, "no more than 18 cookies per day and no more than half a crumbcake per hour and at least 4 soda cans but no more than 20 daily". On at least 1 occasion, I have been told David ate a whole cheesecake under Bob's watchful eye. (I think Bob was jealous.)

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