Bugged by pests

My boring, bland dinner

Today, I learned some things.

I learned that the yellow jackets flying around the street-side window in Katie's room are coming from a nest under the roof.

I learned that the cabinet moths that have been flying around my kitchen have a more official name  – Indian Meal Moths – and that the worms that I found in my food  most likely came into my house from the South Hadley Big Y, causing me to think I should go tell them about the money I spent replacing the food that I threw away. Maybe they'll give me a coupon for something.

An exterminator from Terminix told me these things after he went up to get rid of the yellow jackets and extend a bee pole up to take care of the nest. I wasn't happy about calling an exterminator, so I was pleasantly surprised when he told me that Terminix has switched to  environmentally friendly products. He left me a pheromone catcher to trap the rest of the nasty moths; I have been vacuuming them up and squishing them for a couple of weeks. Sweet success: One of them wandered in there shortly after I put it on the counter.

Last night I closed Katie's door and used a towel to cover the gap at the bottom, but not before one of the yellow jackets got out, causing me to stand in my PJs in the upstairs hall, brandishing an old New Yorker. It went into hiding, so I gave up and took Maddie into my room and closed the door and put a towel at the bottom. This took until about midnight.

Another bug is in the picture, and that is the bug, probably graft vs. host and colitis, bothering my stomach for more than two weeks. Nothing I eat seems to sit well. You can see from the photo what I had for dinner: rice and homemade applesauce. This is getting me down.

You would not expect to find the words "happy coincidence" and "appointment with  gastroenterologist" in the same sentence, but those phrases paired when Melissa said them to me after I told her on the phone that I have an appointment at Western Massachusetts Gastroenterology tomorrow morning to discuss my upcoming routine colonoscopy.

It has only been three days since I started taking the new medications, cipro and flagyl, and she said she and Dr. Alyea are on board with giving them more time to work as they did last time in addition to the steroid budesinide, which I have been taking since the first time this happened in June.

I'll be interested to hear what the doctor the has to say.

There's a first time for everything

For the first time in a some 12 years of going to Dana-Farber, I totally messed up on my appointments, going to Boston today thinking I was seeing two doctors when actually I was seeing none.

I think it started when I wanted to wear a certain pair of earrings that are my recent favorites but reached for a different pair that caught my eye first, thereby messing up my mojo.

Actually, I know how it happened. I had written on today's calendar that I was seeing Laura Goguen, the tongue doctor, at 9:45 a.m. At one point that was true, but they had rescheduled it for December and I had forgotten to cross out today's appointment. Then, for some reason, in my mind I had transported next week's appointment with Melissa to today, and yes, I write things down, but I had just spoken to her about our shared belief that it was today at 1, and it never got corrected.

So when the driver today arrived 15 minutes late, and we got stuck in traffic, I thought I would be late when actually I was early...by about two months.

I realized this when I went up to the 11th floor to head and neck oncology and tried to check in and they told me my appointment was in December. I asked if Dr. Goguen could see me today instead but she was already too booked.

I had better luck getting in to see Melissa. She sent down the orders for my blood work, I went and got it, and we had our appointment. She said I shouldn't be too hard on myself because once in 13 years isn't bad.

A man in the waiting room, who had heard me standing at the check-in window sounding flustered when I explained my mix-up, said not to worry, he had taken multiple wrong turns on the way in, even though he totally knows the way. A little solidarity in confusedness is a good thing.

I asked Melissa why she thought my stomach problems had returned, and she said that although it is not totally clear, it is probably a combination of Graft-vs-Host of the gut and a reactivation of the colitis that I previously had. Meanwhile, it is still new to me to have normal platelets, so when she said they were at 162, it was magic to my ears.

But first, I had done some other odd things, such as forgetting to check in at Lab Services and going directly to the waiting room, a problem which was only remedied when I asked at the desk how much longer I would need to wait and the staffer said (nicely, though), it would help if I checked in. The time was not wasted, however, because I met a nice white Standard poodle service dog, Freddy, and bonded with a woman who was on a new immunotherapy trial for her kidney cancer and was doing very well despite having been told more than a year ago she had three months to live and who told me, "Every day is a gift."

Even odder, when I went to try to get in to see Melissa, I went to the seventh floor instead of the eighth, which is the leukemia floor. But this mistake turned out to be providential because I practically walked right into my friend John Stifler. I knew he was bringing a friend to Dana-Farber for chemotherapy, but I didn't know where they would be.

It turned out to be perfect timing for them to bring me back to Western Massachusetts. So I got to cancel my ride and go back with friends.

This is a change of pace. Instead of writing about crazy drivers, I wrote about crazy me.