Crap, is it August already??

Well, guess I missed July!  Oops.  All kinds of stuff happened.  Too bad you don't get to hear about most of it.  I will tell you this:  I got pneumovirus.  It went away.

Anyway, we just got home from a lovely camping trip at the edge of the Mokulumne Wilderness.  It was Luna's first, and thus a first for all of us as a family.  There were amazing wildflowers, ginormous trees, new birds, bats, and lots of hiking.  It was a fantastic, if slightly mosquito-y good time.  Luna was completely beside herself.  Every time we turned around, she was scaling granite boulder piles, or climbing on fallen trees, or was in the middle of a meadow picking flowers, or was climbing up a hill off-trail.  This shows that a.) she was clearly born to be outdoors, and b.) we should probably be more attentive as parents, so we are not always pulling our daughter off the top of boulders, out of trees, etc. 

Apparently, there is a way to get a fatigue-plagued, low blood-count-having, drug-addled, kind-of-complainy transplant patient to physically push herself a lot further than she has in a long time.  I guess all I needed was an interpretive sign cheerfully posted at a trailhead in camp.  The sign provided information on a couple of suggested hikes, the easiest being described as a moderate, 1.5 mile hike through cool pine forest and across a meadow of wildflowers, ending at a high alpine lake.  The other suggested hike was one I had hiked before while backpacking (in, obviously, healthier times).  I  remembered it as steep, exposed, and long; and naturally chose the first hike. Brett, Luna, Topo and I set off triumphantly.

Now, once you have me on a trail, you really just have to rely on my stubbornness from a former life to keep me going.  Even if the trail is longer than the cheerful sign had indicated (how is that even possible?!  The Forest Service could have figured the mileage on their personal iPhones, for Pete's sake).  Even if it is steeper than previously supposed.  And more exposed.  And climbing up to over 9000 ft in elevation.  Keep in mind, I haven't even walked more than a couple of miles at sea level on flat ground in at least a year.  And here I am on this mountain, saying, "Let's just go a little further until we can see where the trail goes."  "Let's just go to that ridge and see if we can see the lake."  "We've come so far already.  Let's just keep going until we get there."  By the time we finished that 5 mile hike, I must have been completely out of my mind.  Because Luna was falling asleep, I suggested another hike to keep her awake.  So we hiked up another trail looking for an old mine, and when we didn't find it, I suggested, "Let's just go a little further and see what the trail looks like."  "Maybe it's off the trail, and we should just climb up this rock face here and see what's on the other side."  "Well, it's not here; let's climb up and peek over that ridge."  Brett was kind enough not to point out that I had no business doing any of this.  And guess how I felt afterward.

GREAT!  I mean, so I went to bed at about 7:30.  So I am sunburned (I took every precaution, except, you know, "staying out of the sun").  So my legs are a little shaky.  I feel like if we could have just stayed up there for say, a month, I could have kept going and going until I became practically my old self...or rather, another new version of my current self.  Jessie 2.0.  One with fewer bugs and less likely to crash.

But allow me to temper all this good news with my characteristic worrying.  Right now, I'm starting to worry about my blood draw tomorrow.  In July, the month that Blog forgot, my kidney function was getting progressively crappier.  Then, at a couple of blood draws, all my numbers shot south (and I know that this was a dramatic drop because I recently put all my blood count numbers into an Excel spreadsheet and graphed them!  There, I said it!  I also added trendlines and R-squared values!  Laugh all you like!  I already know I'm a nerd!).  This was concerning to all, but my doctor was pretty sure it had to do with medications.  So she cut all my dosages for several days to see if my numbers recovered.  And they did, a little.  Also, I wound up with a rash covering almost my whole face and scalp that I was pretty sure would never go away...until it did about 2 days later.  I am still pulling large patches of dead skin out of my hair periodically (yeah, guess I really do need need those stupid pills after all). 

Since the meds seemed to be the culprit, my dosages were re-upped and at the next blood draw, my blood counts maintained the same level, except my white blood cells and neutrophils.  They dropped again (you may remember my neutrophils from past blogs about me worrying).  With low neutrophils, I'm even more susceptible to infections than I normally am (normal being "pretty susceptible").   So I have another blood draw tomorrow, a week earlier than I'm usually scheduled.  My doctor is calling Seattle about the whole thing.  My worries include the following: that my neutrophils will be so low that I'll be instructed to be super-extra careful again like the post-transplant days, and that something more nefarious than medications is messing with blood counts (something that begins with an "L" and really, really sucks).

To play the bright side for a moment, I'm glad we took this camping trip before my doctor could tell me not to for whatever reason.  Turns out, it is pretty hard to worry about anything when looking at an alpine lake just as blue as anything you've ever seen, surrounded by snow-covered peaks and the sweetest-smelling pines while sitting with your super-awesome husband, super-cute kid and trusty dog.  So that was good.

Well, all this writing is getting my mind cranking up about tomorrow again, and frankly, I'm not ready to think about it yet.  So I am abruptly ending this post here.  I hope everyone is really enjoying the summer, wherever you are!