The Little Town of Rennes

Bonjour mes amis!
Well, class is almost over. Tomorrow is our last day, and it's only a half day. I am happy to have completed this course and have 6 hours under my belt, but it's been very difficult and I'm glad that it's over. I will miss my awesome French profs and my super cool classmates, but I'm ready to move on to vacation time with my family. I will have Friday afternoon, all of Saturday, and Sunday morning here in Rennes before I leave for beautiful Paris! I can't believe how fast this has gone by, and I will miss Rennes so much. This town is just way cool and super beautiful! I will be sure to post some photos from my adventures once I get back to the states. We went out last night to celebrate the start of Bastille day. We took the metro one stop to the town center and took a bus out to the countryside to watch an AWESOME fireworks show (feu d'articfrice en francais). The show was AMAZING! Kaboom Town in Addison ain't got shit on Rennes' fireworks haha. After the show was over, we got back in line with the huge crowd to take a bus back into the town center. After that long and tedious adventure, we went to Rue de la Soif (Thirsty Street) and did some bar-hopping. I had an awesome time and met some awesome French and Canadian guys. I have realized that I really enjoy meeting French people and conversing with them. My French has gotten a lot better (though I still have room to grow), and I can't wait to see my family on Sunday and impress them haha. Give me a holler to let me know I've got some readers out there! Merci, and I'll see you all stateside! :)

RENNES, FRANCE! :)

Bon soir!
It's 10:30pm here in the world of Rennes, and I was finally able to get on a computer to drop a line about my goings on. Alors, I got to France (le grand ole Paree) on Friday evening. I stayed the night in Paris (toured the important pieces at the Louvre, walked around, and had some great crepes with a glass of white wine at this little cafe on Rue Cler). The next morning, I got up early, hopped on the metro and headed to the airport. My backpack was SUPER heavy and I packed WAY too much, but c'est la vie. I got through it. I met up with the study abroad group at the airport and after some intial difficulty (our professor being late and missing the first train to Rennes) we started our two and a half hour train ride to Rennes. When we got to Rennes, everyone was tired and cranky, but after a couple days of relaxation and good food, we finally all got settled in. Class started Monday, and it's mad hard. MAD hard. I'm probably in a higher level than I should be haha, but oh well. I know that I'm going to learn a whole lot. We went to Mont St. Michel on Wednesday for a while, and then walked a really long distance out on the bay while the tide was out. We had to take our shoes off at one point because the seabed got so mucky and wet that it was almost like walking in quicksand. When we finally reached the water, the tide was starting to rise and was doing so very very quickly. Although we had to walk about 4 km in total to get out to the water and back, it was really awesome and probably something I never would have done on my own. Tomorrow is the last day of class this week, and then it's le week-end! There are probably many other things to say, but I'll leave it at that for now. Au revoir mes amis! :)

A New Chapter

Hello all! So in the last blog I posted, I mentioned that treatment was over with and I was very happy about it. However, there is always a step after finishing treatment that is VERY important. The scan. A PET scan has to be done to check for any remaining cancer. I had my scan on May 13. We talked to my doctors a few days later and the results were as follows... The scan was mostly clear, EXCEPT for a small dot that was right in the zone where they focused the radiation. Therefore, the doctor's are fairly sure that this is a false positive that came about due to not waiting long enough after radiation to do the scan. They went ahead and announced that I'm in remission again (YAY!!!), but they want to see me back in August for blood work and another PET scan. While the new was kind of anti-climactic haha. I am going to look at the positive side and think, "Yay! I'm cancer free! I'm in remission. And I'm moving forward."

Part of this moving forward is my study abroad trip to France this summer. I am beyond excited as I well should be because I leave in less than a week! Around 5pm on Thursday the 23rd of this month I shall be boarding a plane to fly off to my adventures in France! It seems very surreal, but it's happening. I've just barely started packing for the trip, but I also have the task of boxing up and packing up all the things for my apartment this fall. For as soon as I return on July 27th... I will be leaving for San Marcos on July 29th to move in to my new digs! And I don't want the daunting task of packing up my things when I return. I want to be able to relax and spend that last bit of time with family before I head back South.

So now this blog will be turning into a tale of my French adventures whilst studying in Rennes, France. I'll also include the vacation details of my family trip that is occurring after my study in Rennes. Here is the current itinerary as stands:

July 23rd- Leave for Paris
July 24th- After a layover in London (for 5 hours), Arrive in Paris!
          Explore Paris a bit and spend the night there
July 25th- Meet the study abroad group at the airport to take a train to Rennes!
          Arrive in Rennes, move in, explore the town, get to know the rest of the group
July 27th- Classes Start
July 28th-July 16th- STUDY EAT STUDY PARTY STUDY EXPLORE STUDY DRINK STUDY LEARN! (I'm sure there will be tons of interesting stories to tell that occur during this time)
July 17th- Meet my parents and brother (Owen) for our well deserved family vacation in Paris
          Stay 3 Nights in Paris
July 20th- Leave grand ol' Paris
          Visit Chartres on our way out of Paris
          Head to the coast to see Mont St. Michel and St. Malo
          Then drive down to Rennes and stay 1 night
July 21st- Leave Rennes for the Chateau Region
          Explore the Chateaus in the area and the spend 1 night in Tours
July 22nd- Fly out of Tours to Dublin, Ireland
          Spend 2 Nights in Dublin
July 24th-July 26th- Drive to Kilkenny and EXPLORE!
                      Spend 3 Nights somewhere in the area
July 27th- Head back to Dublin and fly back to the Americas :( I'm sure I'll miss Europe!


So that's the basic plan so far. Stay tuned for interesting tales and wonderful pictures from my trip. I will post my new address when I get there if you feel inclined to send me post. Loved ones, please expect post cards! I will send them as I think of you, so don't be offended if you don't receive one. Either I didn't have your address or I didn't see something whilst there that inspired me to write to you. :) Wish me luck on my foreign adventures! I could not be more excited! Now, time to pack :/

Hey guess what...

Treatment is DONE!!! I am super relieved. Thanks to everyone who has supported me throughout this process. I couldn't have gotten through quite the same without such great friends and family :) So now, I'm going back every other week for check ups with my oncologists. And in about 5 weeks... ish... I'll do a PET scan to make sure that it is still clean and I'm still cancer free. We have to wait 4-6 weeks from radiation in order to avoid a false positive on the scan. But I'm optimistic. I'm done with cancer for a very long time. And that's that. :)

I'm Back!

Ayayay, sorry everyone! I know it's been a while since I've updated. A LONG while haha. But, I'm out of the hospital! I have been for over a month. I got out at the end of February. They gave me some time to recover from my transplant once I returned home, but now I'm doing radiation treatment. I have to do 17 treatments total, and today was treatment number 13! So I have to go tomorrow and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of next week, but then I'm done! I took some photos when I was last in the hospital and really wanted to post them on here (that's one of the reasons it took so long to finally post... I kept saying I wouldn't do it until I could put pictures up... but that still hasn't happened haha). But no worries! I'll get on that as soon as I get the photos on my computer. And they'll be worth it! Awesome pictures of blood transfusions and the steak-in-a-bag they were giving me while I wasn't eating haha. So there's something to look forward to! As always, thanks for reading, and I'll try to be a bit more consistent from here on out :)

Back in the Hospital

Well, I'm back in the hospital! We checked in at 12:30pm today, and I'll be here for an unknown amount of time. Most likely a month. Maybe a scosh more. Maybe a scosh less. We checked in downstairs of A building at Medical City, and THIS is what we saw in the lobby while we were waiting...

 It's kind of small and difficult to see here...

 So here's a better photo. Now I know what you're thinking... Why is that man on the phone? Who is he talking to? Where can I get a coat like that? What's up with the stache/beard combo? No just kidding. Some of you MAY have been thinking that, but most of you probably had this reaction... Is that a BIRD?!?! Why yes. It is. A sparrow, in fact. In the hospital atrium.

 Just another day at Medical City. Oh and I named him Edward. Edwardo if you're feeling spicy. ;)

After all the sparrow excitement, I got up to my room (on the 11th FLOOR. super high up and super views!) and got all settled in. Then, they came by and put in a picc line today for my chemo treatments and other assorted purposes, so that was interesting. They just did it bedside. No big deal. There was some numbing shots and all that good stuff, but it was still a little uncomfortable. It looks like this...

Pretty shweet. It's sore, but not so bad. Chemo starts tomorrow morning. Yippee!! :/ But I guess the sooner I start, the sooner I'm done, right? Chemo will go for 6 days, and then I'll have a day of rest before they put my stem cells back in. After that... it's all a waiting game. Wait until the stem cells seed and grow. Wait until my counts come back up. Wait out any infections. The week after chemo will be the hardest and most dangerous time. All of my blood cells (white blood cells, red blood cells, platelets) will literally be wiped out due to the chemo (and they mean to do this... can you believe that? :P), so I will be REALLY vulnerable to infection. So please keep me in your thoughts and prayers during that time because any little thing could turn into a really terrible problem. Seeing as chemo starts tomorrow, I probably won't feel up to updating too much. However, I will have my mom or dad get on here and drop some updates so you can all know how I am doing during that time.

As always, thanks for reading! You have no idea how much it means to me :)

Collection is finished!

Sorry I didn't update sooner, but the collection really wore me out. You'd be worn out too if they cycled all your blood through a machine in 3 hours. So I went in to see my doctors Monday morning (without having eaten or drank since the night before just in case we went ahead with the surgery), and they checked my counts. And they were exactly where they needed to be! My cb34's (the ones that they monitor for the stem cell collection) were at 120, and they only needed them to be at 20. So I was super prepared for the collection! So they sent me down to day surgery in order to have the temporary catheter placed for the collection. Well, after over 3 HOURS of waiting (I thought I would pass out from thirst), they fit me in and I went back for surgery. It was really interesting how they did it. They gave me some conscious anesthesia so that I was still able to talk to them during the surgery. Personally I don't feel like they gave me enough... but that's another matter haha. So they covered me with this tent, and taped up one corner of it to a pole by my head so I could breathe and see the anesthesiologist. And on the right side of my neck (where they placed the temporary line) was a hole in the tent with tape around it that they fastened to my skin. So they had this nice little area to work on. The doctor talked to me here and there saying I would feel "bee stings" (the shots to numb the area) and "pressure" (when they shoved the catheter into my neck), but it was all over in about 5 minutes. Over three hours of waiting for a five minute procedure. Oh the joys of a hospital.

They took me up to the 9th floor of building A at Medical City after the surgery in order to start the collection. The collection took about 4 hours once we started, and though I tried to stay awake and watch an episode of Dexter on my laptop... I was asleep after about 30 minutes. Apparently... missing 10% of your blood volume at a time can be rather exhausting. Who woulda known? So the collection went well, and they sent my stem cells off  to be counted. We went home. Ate some pizza. And then received a phone call from my stem cell coordinator saying that I had collected 8.5 million stem cells!!! And our goal was only 5 million. So I am a master collector, and they were all really impressed with me. But you know, I just did my best. Focused really hard on getting all those stem cells in the bag. :P Just kidding. I wish you could control that haha. God was simply on my side that day. So now a bag of my stem cells is chillin in some freezer at Medical City, and I can't wait to have them back in another few weeks! I miss them already :( After receiving the good news, Kelly (my awesome coordinator) told us we could come in the next morning to have a nurse remove that line they put in. Now, I know what you're thinking, "Woah. She had surgery and a doctor put in her line, and now some nurse is just going to yank it out?!" I thought the same thing, but apparently it is really simple, fairly pain free, and they do it a lot.

So we went in this morning, and my lovely nurse, Sheila, cut the sutures, and popped the line right on out. She let me see it, but I didn't manage to get a picture. Sheila held pressure on it for a while and bandaged it all up, and then they made me stick around on bed rest for an hour until they could be sure that I wasn't going to pass out or die or something. But other than being tired, things went very smoothly! So my mom brought me back to the house and I slept for 4 hours. Woohoo! One of the great things about having cancer... no one can ever question your need for a nap hehe.

        ^^The huge catheter that they put in for the stem cell collection ^^

                   ^^The super cool bandage I now have until tomorrow afternoon when we can remove it^^

PET scan is scheduled for Thursday morning, so once we know the results of the scan we can move forward! I'll post again soon!

Holding out

So my appointment went well on Thursday.... except for the fact that my counts were not high enough to start the stem cell collection on Friday. So we will head back to the doctor on Monday and hope that my counts are high enough then. While I was at the doctor, they decided to hang a bag of fluids because I appeared to be slightly dehydrated. The fluids actually made me feel quite a bit better and gave me more energy. Yay for fluids!

Also, I got a new wig today! Or rather, I got back my old wig that had been restyled. Last time I was sick I was fortunate enough to have a loving grandmother who purchased a human hair wig for me (I'm not even gonna tell how much those things cost). I wore it a lot (practically every day actually) since I was in school, so when I pulled it out of the box a few weeks ago it looked a little tattered. It had thinned out a lot in the time that I wore it, so I was fairly sure it was done for. Well, a couple weeks back when I went to go purchase a new synthetic hair wig, we brought along my old wig for the ride. Tracy, the woman that owns All About You- a fantastic salon and wig shop here in Plano that you should TOTALLY check out if the mood strikes you- worked her magic on my old wig. She cut about 4 to 5 inches off and made it into an angled bob. It is tres chic and super duper cute. Basically, I love it. She turned the tattered old wig of yesterday into the adorable and stylish new wig of tomorrow. I seriously feel like it's an entirely new wig. I'll probably sleep in it... Just kidding.

Please pray that my counts are up on Monday and we can start the collection! Oh also, pray that my nose heals. I got a nasty infection where my nose ring is Wednesday night, and since my counts are low it has been painful and it isn't healing well. I'll update next week about the collection :)

Two Chemo Treatments Down!

I finished my second chemo treatment on Saturday around 5pm, and I was able to go home on Sunday around 3pm. It was just... you know... awful, but I'm feeling MUCH better today. It's really difficult to describe how chemo makes you feel. I mean, you have the nausea and the discomfort, possibly some headaches or pain. Whatever, but the real terrible thing is that even when all of that is under control (which usually means you are so medicated you can't see straight)... you still feel, just gross. That feeling FINALLY went away this morning when I woke up, so praise the Lord! This round of chemo was definitely a lot harder on me than the first time, which I imagine is a pattern typical to chemo. However, I am hoping and praying that this is the LAST round of chemo before my stem cell transplant. We won't know for sure until I do my next PET scan, which should be happening in the next couple of weeks. So please pray for a clean scan because that means that my cancer is gone (well, at least for now), and they can proceed with the stem cell transplant to KEEP it gone.

I'm not exactly sure when they will start the transplant, but they are hoping to do the collection on Friday of this week. I go in on Thursday for them to check my blood counts and see if they are at the optimum point for collection, and if they are... Then Friday morning I will have a temporary line placed. They seemed sketchy about where that will go... neck, chest, arm? But I'm sure they'll let us know beforehand. And then they will start collecting that day. It takes about 4-6 hours to collect, and they just hook me up to a machine and I watch movies or knit or stare at the wall until they're done. Hopefully I collect all in one day, but if they can't get enough stem cells, then I will go back each day after until they have enough. So wish me luck! I'm focusing my blood cells and letting them know what's up. They also have me doing Neupogen shots every day (yeah... my mom is giving me two shots at home everyday. Super fun.), so that should help boost by blood count as well. Wish me luck this week, and I'll give an update about how the collection goes!

P.S.- If you are reading this, let me know! Comment, make a google account and follow the blog, or send me a text saying hey. I would really appreciate it :) I want to make sure I'm not just writing this for myself haha.

Apparently... I'm Impressive

Well, the doctor's appointment yesterday was a success! My counts aren't just up... they're WAY up. My white blood cell count went from 0.6 last week to 23.5 this week. My doctor's were freaking out haha. So I can once again go out in public, which I will be taking full advantage of before I am admitted to the hospital again on Tuesday morning where they'll knock my counts back down again. After my doctor's appointment yesterday, I went to go get my haircut since it has been thinning since Sunday. Well, A LOT fell out during the haircut and over the past couple of days. So... it's a bit patchy. I've been wearing hats since the haircut, but in a couple of days it may just be time for it to go. Ah well, that's just part of it, huh? However, I have come up with a list of things that are awesome about not having hair...

1. The length of my showers will now be cut in half!
2. I never have to worry about brushing through knots.
3. I no longer have to worry about shaving. Anything. Ever.
4. When I get ready in the morning, I now only have two options... scarf or fake hair. Or possibly hat. Easy easy decisions.
5. People will pay more attention to my face?

Well I don't know about that last one haha, but there are definitely some silver linings :)

A New Year!

Hello all! So I've been home from the hospital since Monday December 27th, and things have been getting progressively better. Some days are worse than others, but all in all MUCH better than being in the hospital. I received a Nulasta shot on Monday before I left, and what it attempts to do is jump start my bone marrow to produce more cells in order to replace the ones that I'm losing due to the chemo. When we went to the doctor on Wednesday the 29th to check my blood counts, we were told that I am neutrapenic (meaning that the neutrafil in my white blood cells are WAY lower than they should be normally). Essentially this means that I am more susceptible to infection, so I've been staying in since Wednesday in order to avoid large crowds and/or sick people. I have had some visitors though, so that's been nice. My best friends in the whole world, Shelby and the Hannahs, came to visit for New Years Eve. They stayed the night, I showed them around Plano a bit (I know, I went out! Wow. God forbid haha.), and then they went home New Years Day. It was all in all a very successful new year! However, the past couple of days my bones have been aching quite badly from the Nulasta shot. Apparently, growing cells really fast in your bone marrow is painful, which I remember from the last time I went through treatment. It just wasn't quite as bad last time, but I'm feeling quite a bit better today and am walking and moving around a bit more.

Next doctor's appointment is this coming Wednesday, and we'll see where my blood counts are then. If they are where they should be (on the rise), then we are looking to start chemo again on the 11th. If my counts are better, then Plano friends... prepare yourselves... I'll want to leave this house and go places! I'll update after the appointment :)

Thanks for reading,
Brenna