Wednesday, December 18, 2013

New stove

Here's a picture when I still had hair:
Kate and Rob with hair
 We got a new wood stove, big enough to heat the whole house from the downstairs. Monday the chimney sweep came and gave it a clean bill of health - better than the old one upstairs.
Kate and the new wood stove

The scarf look

Smile for the camera
 In the pictures above you can't see the whole scarf, but the colors are better than the image below. I made this scarf in grad school with a friend who wanted to learn batik. We spent many joyful hours with melted wax over a sterno fire. We also learned a lot about color theory, this being yellow and turquoise dye. The designs are from a Chinese paper cut book I just adore.
Whole scarf
 The fan really is turning:
Stove as the star

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Update

Well, it's been an interesting month, for sure. What's going on is that three days before I went on that flight over the Chukchi Sea, I went to the doctor with a cough and fatigue. The cough is most likely due to my blood pressure medicine (ace-inhibitor cough), but only crops up when I'm otherwise unwell. I used to get that cough in the spring before I took vitamin D regularly.

Anyway, the fatigue and tachycardia (fast heart) were more alarming to the PA I saw. She had me get an EKG, then a chest x-ray. The x-ray showed a mystery mass in my mediastina (between the lungs, behind the breast bone). The next week I got a CT scan and a biopsy of the thing - lymphoma. It's the most treatable of cancers, but by the time I met the cancer doctor, another lymph gland was acting up, next to my neck. A week later I had the surgery to put in a Power Port for giving me chemo and the first of the chemo treatments.

I'm in for four chemo treatments, spread three weeks apart, then another PET scan in Anchorage to assess what's what, then possibly two more chemo treatments. Yes, that's up to 18 weeks of "chemo brain". I'm on Family Medical Leave, trying to get a little work done from home each day.

It has been suggested that we set up a Caring Bridge site for all of this:
http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/katehedstrom/