Fun Friday

Last Friday my physical therapy appointment was rescheduled to occur THIS Friday, so I have nothing to report as far as that goes.

It turned out that it worked out perfectly, though, because as you know I have been hating my hair SO MUCH that I reached out to a friend who has super-cute-short hair and got her hairdresser's contact info.  And LUCKY ME: she had a cancellation Friday afternoon so I was able to jet over and cut these stupid chemo curls off.  The hairdresser said that she has had a dozen or so friends / clients have chemo curls over the years but she'd never seen anything quite like mine.  She had some fun poofing them out first, and then she chopped them all off so now I'm rocking a very short pixie cut and I love it.

G, who was hoping I'd grow out my hair, agrees that it looks much better.  My co-worker JC says that the cut has taken "years" off of my appearance.  I'm really happy.

I don't have a good picture of the haircut yet, but I do have a picture of the hair that was cut:

 

Yes, I know

After the hair appointment, I hustled off to OHSU for my first Zoladex injection.  G was not available to provide videographer services on this trip, but perhaps another time.

The first shot I received was a lidocaine shot.  That feels kind of like a bee sting, but I have no doubt it doesn't hurt as much as the injection would....

Then, out came the injection needle.  That thing is large.  BUT thanks to the lidocaine I didn't feel a thing!

Sorry it's blurry, but that's post injection what the needle looks like....

What I, of course, didn't think about but makes total sense is that there is a decent amount of bleeding after this injection.  Within about an hour I'd bled through the first bandage and was replacing it with gauze and another bandage.

And here is what the injection site looked like about 4 hours later:

Hot

And 24 hours later:

Also pretty Hot

ANYWAY, except for some minor site tenderness it really hasn't been that big of a deal.  I don't think I'm experiencing much else in the way of side effects.  YET.

In looking online I saw that there are 1 month and 3 month treatments you can get of Zoladex.  I asked the nurse who said that they do have the 3 month treatments at OHSU, but typically Dr. Chui likes to see how his patients do before transitioning to the higher dosage.  Sounds just like him!  So fingers crossed now that I do, in fact, tolerate the shots well enough to switch to a higher dosage so I only have to do this 4 times a year instead of 12!