Monday, August 23, 2010

Getting ready for Barbados, 2010!

Thursday, August 19:

I had my annual visit to my kidney cancer surgeon. He said that things are looking good and reminded me that chances of a recurrence are getting smaller each year as are probabilities of a metastasis. Whew! However. He asked me about the CT scans I'd had last year. I had lung nodules at that time as well as an enlarged mediastinal lymph node.

I was supposed to get those scanned fairly regularly and my PCP was supposed to order the scans. I did a couple of those then we (PCP and I) thought that maybe the radiation risk was worse than the possible findings since there was no change. So he stopped ordering the scans and I forgot all about it. Until today.

So my kidney cancer surgeon said that my PCP would no longer be in charge of these scans. He referred me to a pulmonologist. The KCS thinks there will probably be a biopsy. Yuck.

I called the hospital at 11:00am and said that I needed a CD of my scans and they said they'd be ready when I got there. I got to the hospital at 11:20 and their machine had broken. So, I waited while they made a manual copy.

I got home about noon and, of course, the pulmonologist's staff was out to lunch. I left a message for them to ca back but of course they didn't. When I called them back I got an appointment for September 8. I hope that this doesn't signal the beginning of a new medical journey.

Like Scarlet O'Hara I'll think about this...tomorrow.

I finally did it! I've been looking at Macs for a while now. I'm so tired of the Windows constant security updates. On tuesday night there were 35. Egads! I've had 5 different Macs in my amazon.com shopping card trying to decide what to get for a long time. Today I made the decision.

We leave on Saturday for our annual trip to Barbados and I'll be carrying my laptop in my backpack. Since I just had a bit of surgery on my mid-back, I want to keep things as light as possible. My Gateway weighs 7.5 pounds and the battery lasts maybe 3 hours. The Mac weighs 4.5 pounds with a 10-hour battery.

On some kind of whim, I looked at amazon.com again and they said that I could get next day shipping if I ordered by 7:30 pm. I assumed that the shipping costs would be prohibitive but I looked anyway – only $3.99. So, I ordered it and hoped that they were right about next day delivery. I hated the thought of this Macbook sitting on my front porch for 2 weeks if I missed the delivery.

To read about the Barbados trip, please read in my Beautiful Barbados Blog.