Interesting, to me at least

G'day all!

Today I trundled down to the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance in South Lake Union for my two year checkup.

I like this bridge.  Not sure why.

In Oz, I get to do scans and bloodtests before I go, here, it's the other way around.

The oncologist I saw was quite impressed with the chemo I had - FEC (fluorouracil, epirubicin and cyclophosphamide) is not commonly used in the States, presumably because of its side effects, but I tolerated it a whole lot better than I did the taxotere.  She was mighty impressed with the dose of that too - I think I got the highest dose they are game to give people.  I was so glad to get off taxotere - at the time I thought I was doing pretty well though in hindsight....  I am too trusting and the oncologist I saw was very encouraging, but jeez I had some issues.  Anyway, if it really was such a high dose, no wonder I felt, no I was hammered by it.  Two years on, I am pretty good - the most annoying things I've noticed are some of my nails are still wonky (multilayered, tending to split/break easily).  I'm not sure that I'm firing on all cylinders mentally either but eh.  I'm still here!

Most of these pleasure craft cost upwards of half a million dollars.

I have to wait for results of the bloods and have a mammo next week but my physical checkup was fine.  I appear to be in rude good health.

That is the sneaky thing about cancer.  Apart from being a ball of stress and having a chest infection from a vicious virus doing the rounds in California when we were packing up there and coming home, I seemed to be in good health.  I was the slimmest and fittest I had been in a while, I was eating good food, exercising (packing is *excellent* exercise), yadda yadda yadda but the blasted thing was galloping.  It grew a centimetre (almost half an inch) in a month from when it was first detected to when I got into the health system.

A million buck view that you don't want to see

I have to say the view from the waiting room in the breast oncology area is excellent, even if it is one that really you don't want to have to join the BC club to see.  It is a lovely view of Lake Union and a little of Queen Anne and Fremont.  I particularly like the two cottonwoods/poplars/similar just to the left of centre that are growing on either side of a road.  It looks like they have been trimmed to keep them apart.

You can also see that despite having our almost record run of dry weather broken on Monday, things have cleared up quite a bit, except now there are wildfires burning on the other side of the Cascades and smoking things up a LOT.  I couldn't see either the Cascades or the Olympics today and the city (downtown) was pretty hazy and it is what a mile away in that shot.  Still, I am not complaining about having some sun!

Downtown Seattle from Lake Union

In other news, or not, I really should pull my finger out and get the binding of a new (old) quilt sewn down so I can show it off.  I've been slack and distracted.  I did have a little issue with the quilting where I did not pay a whole lot of attention to the excess batting.

Ahem...

A cloud?

But with a little effort and careful snipping and pulling, it's now fixed.  I only have about another foor and a half metres of binding to sew down.  I have heard of and done this thing called sewing the binding down with the machine but let's just say there is a reason why I like free motion/squiggle quilting so much and that is that it doesn't matter that I can't sew a dead straight seam to save myself.  I can't do very fussy quilts because of that, even when I use a 1/4" foot on the machine.  People tell me they can't quilt because they can't sew straight seams.  Well if I can create something that is passable, anyone can if they can point a sewing machine at material.  Maybe it will never win a prize but it doesn't have to.  It is also very freeing if you have perfectionist tendencies - you learn to get over insisting things are perfect all the time if you ever want to finish or stop ripping things out....  Even then, my stitch ripper is my best friend.  LOL

anon!