" may the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks!" from the hobbit, by j. r. r. tolkein!

in other words, i am hoping for better days to come! my last chemo was yesterday. the nurses said that i went out with a bang( why did i expect anything else?) five needle sticks, three nurses later, and as i said yesterday in a short post , it was not any one's fault. i have deep veins and they hide- not a bad idea considering what was coming. at one point, the nurses said that i might have to go home and come back on monday. now this scared me to death. i was prepared for friday, and i certainly did not want to worry about it over the weekend.( i am pretty good at worrying, unfortunately.)

so the third time was the charm, as they say. this little nurse , who had not stuck me before, came in my treatment room. frankly, i thought it was probably no use, but she found a good vein hiding out on the underside of my wrist. sneaky little vein and probably  thought perhaps no one would notice him, but bam! she got him, and all was well. i thanked her about 100 times before she left. she was not even my chemo nurse for the day. the other nurse who tried ( nurse number two )  was the phone nurse for the day. she  had stuck me successfully last time, but she just shook her head this time.

i would like to say that this time was easier. it was not. but, i was happier, for sure. i know that after the medications that they give you for nausea wear off, and that would be sometime tomorrow, i will no doubt be struggling with the nausea again. darn, that red devil, or adriamycin as others call it. the nurse practitioner did give me some new anti-nausea medications to try this time. i am hoping that they will work. of all of the side effects that chemo has caused, nausea is certainly the worse one for me.

jeff and i wore our " bea strong" shirts yesterday, and the staff just loved them. i told them that my wonderful coworkers had made them for me. i also took along my precious scrapbook that my friends april and charlene had made for me and made the nurses look at the pictures of everyone wearing their tee shirts. they were justifiably impressed. i can not even begin to express my thanks to all of my family and friends for your support. i do not think that i could have made it through all this without your love, prayers and support. i will always be thankful for this.

another person i need to thank, although he does not have facebook, or really does not even know how to work his cell  phone all that well, is my husband, jeff. he has been my rock through all of this. he has comforted me, dried gallons of tears. held my hand when i was so very sick, and most of all, told me i was beautiful, even though i look like a plucked chicken right now. i get teary just writing this, but i really, truly thank God for jeff.  he did however fall for my joke when we were about to turn into the oncology center from the main road. i said, " sweetie, you are in the wrong lane!", jeff said, " no, i am not, this is the turn lane to the doctor's office!". i said, " don't you remember? we are not going to the doctor today, we are heading to the beach!". even though this was the fourth time, he still  fell for it! we did however, go on to the oncology center :(

so, one day before too very long, we WILL be headed to the beach. it will probably be this fall- sometime in october after my last surgery, which will be the final  part of my reconstruction of my "foobies" as some women call them. i guess that is as good a name as anything else for them. this has been an interesting process, and will probably be a blog in itself. i will save that for later...

so, to use my favorite quote from the hobbit " so comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings."