Saturday, May 21, 2005

Grossly Negative...

My rost recent PET Scan has come back Grossly Negative (don't you love that in every arena other than Medicine negative is bad, but in Medicine you always want to be Negative). One thing I learned from my PET Scan is that my Ureter isn't in the right place. Instead of coming straight down, mine verves off on the left and takes a little road trip. Nothing big, just a curious side note. The only thing going on is that my Liver hasn't returned to normal like it should. My levels have come down since my Jaundice last June that led to them finding the Hodgkin's. Jaundice isn't usually associated with Hodgkin's so the 2 events really fall into the lucky coincidence category. Over the last few years, my PCP (a brilliant Dr named Denoia, who is retiring from practice to go into research unfortunately) has run so many Liver tests on me because my levels were always going up and down. So now Dr. Guzley says if they haven't gone down more on my next visit, June 30, I'll have to go see a GI Specialist. Sometimes you just want to say, Geesh!, haven't I been through enough.

On a more joyous note. 2 of my brothers have been accepted to College and will be starting this fall. Congrat's!!

One really big plus is that my energy levels have been higher than they have in the past 8 years. I go to work (full time hours now) and have been coming home and doing landscaping. This past week I've spent about 15 hours after work working in the yard, in the atrium and on the roof. I know, your thinking what in the world are you landscaping on the roof? Our house is shaped like a square dounut. In the center is an Atrium and in the Atrium is Creeping Fig vine. It has grown out of control and since the Atrium is two stories tall, the only way to trim it back is to attack from above.

We're building a deck in the Atrium to replace the rock garden that was in there. I moved all the rocks out, one bucket at a time (the Atrium is 11 ft by 11 ft with the rocks about 2-4 inches deep, so it was over a ton of rock). Now we're trying to take all the vine down from the four walls and over the windows to start from scratch. We're really excited about the deck. It's going to be diamond shaped and stained to match the natural wood trim around the windows and doors. We're saving up to replace the sliding doors with French Doors so it will be really nice when it's done. We already have the Chiminea (outdoor fireplace).

At the same time we are moving another rock garden in the back. The previous owners LOVED their rock gardens. This one is about 30 feet long and goes on a diagonal stretching from 2 feet on one end and out to 15 feet on the other. My brother was supposed to help when he was here, but he's a teenager and lazy. I did get the twins to help. They were so cute with their little gardening gloves and beach pails (they're 3 1/2) moving buckets of rock. They did 10 buckets full before they realized it wasn't any fun helping Aunt Tina. We're about 1/3 of the way done and next week we're having a rock moving party with my neighbors (they volunteered). When it's all done we are going to plant Monkey Grass and Dwarf petunias because they are Xeroscaping plants and in San Antonio it gets very dry. The rocks are just too much maintenance. When they laid the rock they used plastic plant block and it's all deteriorated now so the weeds come up through the rock like crazy.

Well I know this has been a long entry, but I've been pretty busy. On a sad note. My Mother-in-Law and the twins are moving to Florida in June. We will be very sad to see them go, but Jeff is graduating from OCS (Navy Officer, he's going to be a Navigator like Goose in Top Gun) in July and that's where he'll be.