BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Overnight on Thursday night, the IV machine infusing me with the drugs had some issues with the Etoposide. Every hour or so, there ended up being lots of small bubbles in the IV tube. Obviously they don't want these bubbles injected in me, so the machine starts beeping loudly everytime this happens. Very loudly. Wake the dead loudly. Well, it had happened a handful of times during the week, but through the night on Thursday night/Friday morning, it happened like every hour. This of course led to one of the worst nights of sleep I ever had.

Through the morning Friday, I battled through fits of nausea and fatigue, but overall felt pretty good, all things considered. I watched the Red Wings victory parade online, which was fantastic. (Except for when Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick got up there to speak. He's in the middle of a pretty brutal text-messaging/mistress scandal, and was booed lustily. I actually found it kind of humorous.) My mom swang by in the morning, and in the early afternoon Almondy and her son Remy stopped by to see how I was doing. She brought me a little bag of goodies, as well as well-wishes from the rest of the office. I am excited to get back to work and see everyone again.

After she left, I dozed on and off a bit until around 5:00 PM, when the infusion of these drugs finished. I was unhooked from the IV machine and was able to take a shower. Getting up felt pretty good, but after the shower I got really, really hot. I sat around in my boxers for a while just trying to cool off. After 20 minutes or so, I felt better, and was able to get dressed. I wouldn't be hooked up to the final drug (Cytoxin) until Saturday morning, so I had a "free" night of not being hooked up to anything.

Around 6:30 my girlfriend Melissa came over. She had driven down from British Columbia today after working, and would be here until Sunday morning. It was certainly great to see her, even though I looked and felt like crap. We walked down to "The Garden" to get some fresh air. It was raining, which kinda sucked, but actually felt good and helped me cool off. We wandered around for a half-hour or so before we went back to the room and I had dinner. By this time I was fading fast, and though I tried to watch the Stanford/Cal-State Fullerton baseball game, I fell asleep around 8:30 or so.

Melissa gave me a soft goodnight kiss and headed back to my house for her "guilty pleasure" - a bubble bath and an issue of US Weekly...