Round 11

Round 11 down, 5 more to go! Treatment today went very well, except for the fact that I can't ever escape this insomnia I get every Monday night. Jenny, my best friend and other half since we were young girls went with me today. I loved having her. We spent a lot of time laughing and just relaxing. Chemo can actually be relaxing without all the side effects. The nurse switched up my pre-meds today. Instead of getting the benadryl directly in my IV, I took it orally. I was still a little sleepy, but made it through the entire treatment without falling a sleep, slurred speech, knocking something over and I even had full control over my body. Niiiiice! My treatments from this point on should go just as well with the switch. The nurse I had has gone through the same treatment as I am and had similar side effects to the medicine. When she recommended taking the benadryl orally I was ready to try anything. She asked me if I was feeling like I didn't have control of my legs... I said "more like my whoooooole entire body." Now if I could just figure out how to skip out on the steroids, then I'd be one happy, sleeping girl.

When I was talking with the therapist last week she recommended a book called "Bad Things Happen to Good People." As I was looking for that book tonight, I came across a book called "Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You're Going Through." The title immediately caught my attention and felt like I needed to read this book. I didn't really know what it was about, I just knew I wanted to get through what I was going through. After reading the first two chapters, I learned this women endured a lot of pain in her life. Though, she has gone through some very different experiences than I have, I still felt like I related to her pains in many ways. Throughout my life, I have felt many feelings she had described. This book has already touched me so much. I read the first chapter three times and cried through the entire second chapter. The book sorta reminds me of therapy, you have to get through all the yucky pain and hurt before you get to the happy and the healing. I'm looking forward to reading on. :)

A passage from her book that I keep going back to-

"The breaking down into pieces of life is a painful thing to watch and even more painful to endure. Even more devastating is that as your life begins to unravel, day by day, piece by piece, there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. You see what is happening. You know what is happening. And you want anything other than what is happening to happen. You see, somewhere deep inside, we all know that lives are not built to fall apart. That is just not what lives are meant to do. The lives we are given by God are meant by God to grow, to blossom and flourish. The reality is, however, lives do crumble.
I now realize that lives fall apart when they need to be rebuilt. Lives fall apart when the foundation upon which they were built needs to be relaid. Lives fall apart, not because God is punishing us for what we have or have not done. Lives fall apart because they need to. They need to because they weren't built the right way in the first place. I came to this realization one day, after many days, weeks, months, and years of trying to fix the cracks in my foundation. One day, one moment of time, as I sat helplessly surveying the broken pieces of my mind, heart, and life. I recognized that a broken life is a test of faith of the highest order."