Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! Nope.

Opened my blinds this morning to see three hot air balloons floating past, one of them was quite close. Hot air ballooning is something I can highly recommend. We took my sister up for her 40th birthday... seems a long time ago now (hahaha, I'll pay for that last comment). Ballooning gives you great views and it is very peaceful to just drift along with the morning breeze.
Things continue to really well, I have not even gone close to having a fever yet, which means I have managed to avoid infection. That is pretty amazing for someone who has a depressed immune system and has spent the last eleven days surrounded by other sick people (the last three days I have had no immune system at all).
Also, I have somehow managed to avoid or minimise a lot of the problems that most people get when having this type of chemo, maybe all those years of looking after myself reasonably well might be paying off...
The only slightly unusual issue is that my heart rate keeps jumping up to around 120 beats per minute with even the mildest activity, having a shower will do it. Everytime it happens they give me another ECG, which always checks out ok. I've had so many now that I reckon they should just leave the machine by my bed and I will do it myself. My heart was thoroughly checked out before we start all this and everything was fine and blood tests reveal that my electrolyte levels are ok too, so it is likely that the high heart rate is just another indication of how hard my body is working to repair itself and get over the chemo.
I also had the worlds slowest nose bleed last night, it dribbled just a couple of drops every ten minutes for about an hour. The bleed was caused by my very low platelet levels, normal platelet levels are between 150 and 400, my level this morning was sitting at 10. At least that is what they tell me, after the nose bleed and the puffy eye a couple of weeks ago I am suspicious that one of the nurses might be smacking me over the head with my own patient chart in the middle of the night, maybe they have been reading this blog.
I think the Peter Mac building might be reading this too, after I called the building out of date on yesterdays blog it seems that it engaged in a bit of payback. Last night the nurse call system malfunctioned, instead of giving a short buzz everytime a patient hits the button, this time it got stuck on and gave out a long and continuous wail for the next half hour, dogs within a 5 mile radius were doing this:

Overnight I had the smallest increase in my neutrophils, from 0.00 to 0.01. I might be getting excited over nothing, but last time my neutrophils turned the corner they rose so quickly that I was out of hospital just 3 days latter. Here's hoping they are on the rise again!
Cheers, Pete.