Check-up

My daffodil bloomed! Yippee!!

We went to Seattle today for blood-work and a check-up after Harv's radiation treatments.

The symptoms he's been experiencing so far since radiation are mostly fatigue and some shortness of breath or it might be more accurate to say that he is out-of-breath easily with exertion (i.e., walking to the mailbox and walking up the stairs).  He hasn't had a huge appetite, though he has been eating pretty well...just smaller portions pretty much. He's had really long naps in the daytime and has been able to go to bed early and sleeps most nights all night long.

There was some concern about his shortness of breath when I first reported it, but they thought it might be anemia -- which can happen sometimes with radiation. 

Dr. Lin looked at his blood-work and took all the recently taken "vitals" and thinks that maybe the shortness of breath is something called radiation pneumonitis. So, he gave Harv some steroids and said that we should know in a few days if that's what it is. If his shortness of breath improves in a few days, then we'll blame it on that. If not, Harv will need to get a CT to rule out other possible things.

His CEA is down a bit and the rest of his blood-work looked good so we're kinda thinkin' it's radiation pneumonitis.

That's pretty much it for now. 

Love you, peeps!