D-O-N-E

Oh hey, what's up, I'm done with chemo.

!

It's pretty great. This week is the first week since the beginning of March that I'm having to work five whole days, but fortunately I'm so glad to be done I don't even mind. I'm through the worst of my final week's fatigue, and supposedly things will "get better fast," according to my perennially cheerful oncologist. The last week or so I've had a few sore fingertips and still have the dry bloody nose that has been around every day for the past twelve weeks, but it is slowly improving. Other than that, I'm pretty much okay. I am so grateful to have gotten through this without neuropathy, which some people really struggle with a lot even on the weekly dose. I'm continuing to take my glutamine and B-6 supplements until they run out just in case, which will probably be another few weeks.

Now onto radiation! I met with the radiation oncologist last week and will go in for my simulation next Monday, where they measure me and set up the machines to target the area. The doctor told me she's pretty sure I will only have to do 4 weeks, which would be fantastic, although she can't say for sure until after the simulation. Most people say the skin problems with radiation don't really start until after week 3, so hopefully by only doing 4 weeks I will be done before any of that gets too bad. They have a lot of data, she claims, that shows 4 weeks is just as effective as the more traditional 6 to 7 (presumably they adjust the dose to compensate for the shorter time period), and the most recent data shows the results are even a little better. Either way, it sounds like I will be through the active treatment phase by the end of July. Except for Herceptin, obviously, which I will keep getting every 3 weeks until March, but everyone at the Cancer Center claims I will not have any significant side effects from it, and with the regular schedule at least I'll be able to make plans for the future and have a somewhat normal life again.

We are going to Copenhagen in September NO MATTER WHAT.

Almost There

You guys. The end is in sight. Next week at this time I will be DONE WITH CHEMO!!!!

I am starting to make plans like a normal person. It's awesome. My mom is coming to visit next weekend, and then the weekend after that we are staying at this *F*I*V*E* *S*T*A*R* *H*O*T*E*L* *A*N*D* *S*P*A* called the Umstead that is 20 minutes from our house. Look at it! Even the standard rooms are somehow as big as our first apartment.They have afternoon tea with live harpist accompaniment! Obviously we have never stayed somewhere even close to this great before so it's going to be a nice reward for getting through the last 12 weeks.

It's pretty crazy how 12 weeks seems like foreverrrrrrrrr. We both agree it has both gone quickly and also cannot remember what life was like before. I am so lucky, though, that I caught this thing at Stage 1A because people in later stages have to get 18 to 24 weeks of chemo that is much worse than mine. I can't imagine being 12 weeks in and only halfway done. Cancer sucks.

After this I have to get radiation, but I'm not sure how long that will go for yet - probably 5 to 7 weeks, 5 days a week. I meet with the radiation oncologist next week to learn more. The only side effects are potential temporary skin damage in the irradiated area (I'm hoping my relative youth will be an advantage there) and fatigue that builds toward the end. I think it will be a picnic compared to chemo, but I guess we'll see.

3 weeks. 98.7%.

Whenever I get too worked up about all this stuff, I walk around with two numbers on repeat in my head: the number of weeks left of this chemo business (THREE), and 98.7%.

My cancer was stage 1a, 1.6 cm, estrogen receptor (ER) and her2 positive. The her2+ stuff is what makes it scary - that means it's aggressive and grows quickly and is more likely to metastasize than cancers which are not her2+. But! Now we have Herceptin, a targeted therapy that shuts down those her2 receptors and, so the internet and my oncologist claim, makes her2+ actually a desirable feature in many ways, because the treatment for it is so good. A wonder drug. 

Still, it's hard to trust it, right? 

So I click here and read this study a lot: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1406281

"We performed an uncontrolled, single-group, multicenter, investigator-initiated study of adjuvant paclitaxel (Taxol) and trastuzumab (Herceptin) in 406 patients with tumors measuring up to 3 cm in greatest dimension. Patients received weekly treatment with paclitaxel and trastuzumab for 12 weeks, followed by 9 months of trastuzumab monotherapy"

This is what I'm having.

"The median follow-up period was 4.0 years. The 3-year rate of survival free from invasive disease was 98.7% (95% confidence interval [CI], 97.6 to 99.8). Among the 12 relapses seen, 2 were due to distant metastatic breast cancer. "

98.7% of women were alive and cancer-free after 3 years. That's a lot. Most, you might say. And only 2 of those women had it metastasize. That's like 0.5%. That's pretty good. The 3-year period might seem short, but her2+ cancers typically come back quickly, within 2 years, if they're going to come back. Mine is also estrogen positive, which can crop up again basically any time, but I guess I'm not too worried about that right now. I just want to get through the next 3 years. And maybe I will! 

It's funny, though, that when I see that I don't think, "I will probably be okay," but more like, "there is a slim chance that I might be okay." I've never felt safe hoping for the best, though. Better just prepare for the worst and then be pleasantly surprised, right?

98.7%, though. It's pretty good.

Silver Linings

1. Lots of time at home in my pajamas watching TV.
2. Really good excuse for not having to go to 20th high school reunion.
3. Will not have to shave legs for months.
4. My boss decided to up my vacation to 4 weeks for some reason.
5. Don't have to worry about the annoyance of growing out my bangs.
6. Can eat whatever I want because who cares about being chubby when you have cancer.

7. Don't have to clean cat litter for three months.

----

I wrote that list on February 17th, the day before my surgery, when I was having to expend a lot of effort to think positively. It's still pretty accurate!  Although I will say it's far less TV/pajama time than I anticipated - with the exception of Friday night and sometimes Saturday, I am pretty much okay to do whatever I want, and still have a relatively hard time keeping up with my DVR. And I will say, it is more disconcerting than you'd think to go from a lifetime of shaving your legs every single day to just NEVER. It's weirder even than being bald on my head.

To the list, I will add:
8. Lots of people are really, really nice to me.
9. I've quit paying attention to the news for the most part. Hopefully I can keep this up after I'm through treatment because I am not looking forward to 18 months of presidential election nonsense.

----

I had treatment 8 of 12 yesterday, so only four more to go. FOUR! I may just be getting used to the cycle or maybe forgetting what it feels like to not be having chemotherapy, but I feel like parts of it are getting easier. At the very least, they are not getting worse. So that's a pretty big silver lining too.

Jane Girls 4ever

Thirteen years ago, when I was 25, my boss got fired. As I was his executive assistant, this meant that for months I had no work to do. One day as I was sitting around, mostly doing nothing but trying to figure out how to renew my Jane magazine subscription online, I discovered on the Jane website what I saw at the time could be a fantastic way to pass my bored days: MESSAGE BOARDS. Message boards filled with people arguing over politics and yelling at trolls, talking about what they were reading and watching, asking for advice, listing what they ate that day, sharing pictures of their lives. I signed up immediately. It was an intimidating group; many of them had been posting for years and were already real-life friends, traveling long distances to attend meetups. I knew I wanted in on it.

In the intervening time, it has been the rare day that has passed without me talking with my Jane girls. I have posted from Tunisia, from Scotland, from Spain, from Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Key West. From three different jobs (shh). From three apartments and my current home. I have attended meetups in Ann Arbor, Michigan; in Columbus, Ohio; in Door County, Wisconsin; in rural Tennessee; in New York City. I hosted one at my house. The best friends we made in California were all Jane-based, and we moved to North Carolina in part because I already knew someone here, even though I had never met her until we arrived with our U-Haul. She met us at the hotel the very first night. Some of the best friends I have in Raleigh are a result of a book club started almost ten years ago by three Jane board veterans.

Still, after all of that, you don't really realize what people mean to you until the shit hits the fan. The shit in this case, of course, being cancer. When I was diagnosed I told Ben, and then my mom, and then my girls. And then they kicked into action and there have been zero days since when I haven't felt that a hundred people from all over the world had my back every second of the day. I have received countless cards and packages. Every day, almost, something new. I have been keeping a list in a notebook and it's three pages long. And every bit of it is exactly right - either something I didn't know I needed that has turned out to be crucially useful, or something I wanted for myself but hadn't gotten, or something to brighten up my day in a way I  hadn't even considered. Pizza Rolls delivered to my house the day before surgery, for example. Comedy DVDs to pass those awful weeks between diagnosis and the pathology report. Birkenstocks! Gift cards to all of my favorite and usual places. Handmade hats and candy and silly t-shirts and subscriptions to food delivery services. So many cards, funny and heartfelt and sarcastic and perfect. And today, a dress I mentioned in passing that I liked but wasn't letting myself buy.

We used to talk about whether or not we could get on Oprah, considering how we started so many years ago on a public message board and have formed such lasting bonds despite the fact that many of us have still never met in person. But now Oprah has been off the air for four years, and we're still going. I wish everyone could have internet friends like these - internet friends who are so real I haven't thought of them as internet friends for years. I am so, so lucky. Thank you, crazy fiber optics company CEO, for firing my boss. I would not be the same person today without these people in my life.

And thank you, my lovelies who are reading this. I love you. For real.

A Chemo Day in the Life

I have a bunch of stuff I take to chemo every time. The nurses make fun of me in a good-natured way but mostly everyone I see who doesn't have someone with them has a similar bag. It's boring, sitting there! I need my stuff! Generally, I take:

• my big giant LL Bean bag, given to me by dearest internet friends who, collectively, have so far anticipated my every need
• a big soft blanket, which I received from a friend I've had since the days of Rainbows and Odyssey in St Joe
• a junky cardigan sweater from Target, which still has bits of sap clinging to it from when my sister made me help her drag their Christmas tree outside first thing on December 26th
• some soft socks with grippy bottoms, a gift from another internet friend, so I can take my shoes off but still be up and around without sliding all over the place
• my Kindle Fire, a gift from my sister 2 Christmases ago which I could not possibly have anticipated how much I would come to rely on. Every cancer patient should have a Kindle Fire (or an iPad, I guess). It's my lifeline to Netflix and Amazon Prime and Spotify and the internet and a jillion books
• a bottle of water
• a Kind bar
• a book (never once have I read the book, but what if technology fails?)

I get there at my appointed time and go back to a big room with about 20 comfortable chairs spaced out around the edges. There are huge windows looking out into a garden, which has been nice now that spring has finally arrived. There are usually four nurses working and they let you sit wherever you want as long as you're in your assigned nurse's general area. 

The first thing they do is draw blood to make sure my counts are okay to receive chemo. The weekly Taxol is generally not too hard on white blood cell counts, but everyone is different and some people do have a hard time with it. So far mine has held steady. It takes about 15 minutes to get the CBC results back, so for that period of time I'm just sitting around. 

Once we get the all clear on the bloodwork, they give me Pepcid and dexamethasone by mouth, and Benadryl by IV. These meds are all to counteract the side effects of chemo - the stuff Taxol is suspended in can cause allergic reaction, hence the steroids and Benadryl, and I don't really know why I need a Pepcid, but whatever. The Benadryl is serious business. It's the same amount as you'd take to go to sleep (if you are me and don't mess around and always go for the 50mg) but it hits fast and hard, and for a good hour or so I kind of drift in and out. Usually during this time I try my hardest to pay attention to a TV show (current: Gilmore Girls) and fail and then just sit there and listen to music. 

After they give me the pre-meds, they order the chemo drugs. I understand chemo meds are very very expensive but it is super annoying to me that they can't have these ready when I get there. It takes another good 45 minutes or so to get the meds from the pharmacy. Finally, usually when I am starting to perk back up, it's time for Taxol, which takes an hour, and then Herceptin for 30 minutes. 

Eventually I have to pee, which is a big pain. You're supposed to drink tons of water all the time when you're receiving chemo, and treatment days are no exception. I always have to pee at least three times when I'm there. I hardly ever see anyone else having to pee! I guess I have a small bladder, or maybe everyone else isn't being conscientious about their water intake. Anyway, it is a big pain to unplug the IV and get up and go to the bathroom dragging that thing behind you. It's less of a pain now that I receive chemo through a port rather than IV - at least I have both arms free.

Once the Herceptin is done, that's it! They flush my port and unhook me and I pack up all my stuff and go home. All told I am usually there about 3 hours start to finish. It really goes fast, though, thanks to my various methods of entertainment. Usually I have chemo in the afternoons, so I work from home in the morning and then just check back in for a few minutes afterward when I get home. I never really have any side effects that interfere with my life until a couple of days later, so I try to cook dinner and go for a walk that night and just do things I would normally do. Only seven more times to go!

41.66666%

Chemo #5 of 12 is done, and there is not really much to report. The weeks are following a pretty clear pattern:

Wednesday: chemo
Thursday: feel fine until evening, when my skin starts to hurt
Friday: skin feels better but usually wake up jittery. Jitters fade as day goes on but I get kind of tired and spacey, like when you have the flu.
Saturday: more or less like Friday, maybe a little better.
Sunday/Monday/Tuesday: more or less normal.

So, all things told, it's really like a day and a half of badness and the rest of the time just waiting around for the next dose. I am lucky in that my side effects are not of the nausea/vomiting/mouth sores/other terrible horribleness that some of the other drugs can cause. I do have some aches and shooting pains on days 3-5 and other minor things that go on throughout the week but, in the interest of not being gross, I'll just not go into that.

The main problem with Taxol is neuropathy (tingling and numbness of the hands and feet), but since I am on a weekly dose the chance of that occurring is supposed to be less than on the older spaced-out higher dosages. I'm taking glutamine and B-6 supplements, which the internet says can also help decrease the likelines and severity, although my doctor doesn't seem to think it makes much difference. I haven't had any of that yet, anyway, and I hope I can stave it off until close to the end. If it gets bad enough, it can be permanent, which I do not want.

I did shave my head last week, which all things considered was not as traumatic as I imagined. People keep telling me I look good bald. Since most of them are my friends, they might be lying, but one of the warehouse guys I have never met before said to me in the parking lot, "that haircut looks sexy. But I ain't tryin' to hit on you or nothin'." I do have a wig and wear it sometimes, but it's suddenly weirdly hot outside and it's a lot more comfortable to go without, especially for a long period of time like an entire workday. It also feels like I'm wearing a costume - I know it looks natural to people looking at me, but it doesn't really feel natural to me to be wearing it. I'm sure I will get used to it as time goes on, though.

So that's it! After next week I will be half done! With this part of it, anyway.

One thing I have discovered in the course of cancer treatment is that you can order all your groceries online and then drive there and sit in a special parking space and they will bring them out for you and load them into your car. This has possibly changed my life forever. It costs $4.95 but I probably save that just by avoiding the impulse buys that come from wandering around a grocery store. Amazing!

The second week of chemo was pretty much like the first. Friday is the worst day and it gets worse as the day goes on, both physically (fatigue, spaciness) and emotionally. I think a lot of that is to do with the comedown from steroids that are given with my chemo drugs. By Saturday I am more alert, though, and then back to almost normal by Sunday. I hope this pattern continues!  I still need to look out for neuropathy, but so far I haven't experienced any of that.

I'm going to have a port put in next week. My arms are already bruised and 10 more IV weeks plus a year of herceptin just did not sound fun. The port is a little circular device that sits under the skin on my upper chest and connects directly to a vein, so that in order to draw blood or administer meds they just stick a tiny needle directly into it and supposedly this does not hurt. I think it will be a lot easier, especially because the IVs being in my left arm has meant I can't really use my dominant hand at all during chemo.

In other news, Banana has had five seizures this month. We have doubled his Keppra but are probably going to have to add another med. It's pretty crazy how we are taking this in stride now, though: oh well, it's just an epileptic cat!

Chemo 1

I guess this is for real now, as I am 2 days out from the first chemotherapy and starting to feel it. Stupid cancer.

My drugs are indeed taxol and herceptin. I also get benadryl and dexamethasone before they start the chemo drugs, in order to prevent reactions. I've read a lot of horror stories on message boards about people not sleeping at all for days due to the dexamethasone, but I had no trouble at all. I've been sort of fascinated by how well I've been sleeping through the whole thing, considering how much trouble I've historically had with sleep, but I guess my trazodone is doing its job.

The chemo drugs themselves took 3.5 hours to get in my body. I had a small reaction to the taxol, which can cause chest pain and shortness of breath in some people the first time (for me it was just a little chest tightness), so they slowed it to a 2 hour infusion and that was fine. The next time they'll do 2 hours again, and then speed it back up to 1 hour from thereon out. The herceptin was 90 minutes. I was there a long time, all told, because they first have to do bloodwork and I also saw the doctor and all that. I don't really mind, though - I can read or watch Netflix on my Kindle, etc., and the time passed pretty quickly. They bring around a cart with sandwiches! I got a pb&j.

Last night my skin started hurting, kind of like when you have the flu. And this morning I am weirdly jittery. My oncologist responds instantly to emails - seriously, within minutes - and told me to take ibuprofen and that both things are related to the taxol and will pass pretty quickly. It's kind of annoying how they can't tell you exactly what will happen to you, since everyone is different, but it's nice that he is so responsive and calmly tells me what I can do about things when they do happen.

One thing I learned via the internet is that taxol makes your nails really sensitive to light, and that one of the best ways to protect them in order to hopefully prevent nail loss is to paint your fingernails and toenails black. So that will be cheery for springtime, black fingernails for the next 3 months! I'm kind of digging it for the time being, though, I have to admit.

Next up: Drugs

Finally, finally, I start chemo on Wednesday. I've felt safer googling stuff lately and as a result of that I'm pretty sure my chemo is going to be a drug called taxol, once a week for 12 weeks, given concurrently with herceptin every 3 weeks, and then of course the herceptin will continue for another 9 months. Taxol given weekly seems to have very moderate side effects compared with other chemo drugs - some people don't even lose their hair, or at least not all of it. Regardless, I did this last week and I'm happy with it:

I also have a wig to wear to work but I think most of the time I'll just be bald or wear a hat.

The statistics for my type of cancer are all over the place, and I can either freak myself out or feel very reassured by what I read, depending on the source. The her2 positivity made it a very bad thing before the development of herceptin, so the older sources say that it recurs at much higher rates than her2 negative cancers. [I should say that "very bad" is still not actually all that bad, given that it's cancer. It's like 80% chance of no recurrence vs. 90%+ with other types. I feel Ben would want me to make this clear since I seem to be prone to catastrophizing and he is constantly having to bring up how "terrible" does not actually mean what I seem to feel like it means sometimes.] Neverthless, most sources seem to think that herceptin has leveled the playing field, that this drug has been a complete game changer, and that many oncologists are now of the mind that her2+ is a good thing, because the targeted therapy is so good.

Still, I'm just me, and nobody knows what's going to happen, and that's scary. We're hanging in there, though, doing regular stuff and being regular people. What else can you do? I still have a lot of books to read and TV shows to watch, after all.

Step One: Surgery

I had a lumpectomy last Thursday. It was pretty much a piece of cake. The worst parts were, in order of terribleness:

1. hearing the doctor say right afterward "we saw some cells in the lymph node that we thought might be abnormal" and also that I only had one sentinel node to remove. I was worried that with only one sentinel node, if it showed signs of cancer I would have to have more surgery to remove axillary nodes to see how far it had spread. And then waiting to find out how this was all going to play out through yet another weekend of sitting around.

2. pretty significant nausea the rest of the day secondary to the general anesthesia.

3. not being able to drink coffee in the morning until it was too late and then I had a caffeine withdrawal headache all afternoon.

4.the underarm pain from where they took my lymph node, which was still not bad enough to take anything stronger than Advil, but meant I could not take a shower by myself for the first couple of days because I couldn't lift my arms to wash my hair.

5. having to sleep in a bra for 4 nights.


On Monday I emailed my oncologist to find out results. On Monday night, he wrote back an email that I have read an estimated 427 times since then:

Molly
The pathology turned out showing a stage one tumor. You will receive the less aggressive chemotherapy for 12 weeks. You still need to wait a total of three weeks from your surgery. Let me know if you want to come and discuss before we start or just start around the three week mark?  Congratulations, that's the best news you could have had
Mike

I cannot believe it. I fully expected it to be in basically every location throughout my body. The next day, my surgeon called and confirmed those results, and said we had clean margins too, which is also important. The tumor was 1.6cm. And now it is gone, and I can breathe for the first time in weeks.

Chemo will start March 11th. I wish it was tomorrow but I guess I can wait.

CANCER WTF

Okay, well, now we get to introduce another topic into the blog besides food, travel, and an epileptic cat. As I'm sure everyone reading this already knows, I have breast cancer. It is IMPOSSIBLE that I would have breast cancer, by the way. I'm Molly! How can I get breast cancer? But I guess everyone thinks that when this happens to them. I'm going to start updating here with what's going on so you can all know without me having to update on facebook or individually or what have you. I kind of hate cancer blogs because so often the person dies at the end and then it is sad. But I will try not to die.

I have a small lump in my right breast. It is 1.5cm. My doctor didn't notice it at my appointment in January, so it is also relatively new. I think both of those things are good.

It is ER+ and her2+. If you want to google what those things are, you can. I'm not really interested right now in googling for statistics and information but I know people that this isn't happening to directly might want to know more about the details and how this is treated in a general sense. The short story is that there are good drugs to treat tumors with those characteristics, and that is good for me.

I'm having surgery on Thursday, February 19th. That will be 2 weeks and 1 day (really, a 1/2 day) after I found the lump. My oncologist assures me the two week lag time is not medically significant but it has been an extremely unpleasant 2 weeks. I lost 4 pounds in 4 days, which is for me nigh on impossible. But I am doing better now with my surgery reasonably close at hand, and after having spoken with the oncologist today. And also with Xanax.

After I heal up from surgery, I'll start chemo, probably the first week of March. I'll either have chemo treatments weekly for 12 weeks, or every 3 weeks for 18 weeks, depending on what the surgery shows (i.e., the biology of the tumor and if it has spread to lymph nodes). Either way, after that I will  have radiation, and then continue infusions of a drug called herceptin every 3 weeks for a year. Herceptin is a newish drug specifically designed to treat her2+ cancers, and it does a very good job. Then finally, I will take anit-estrogen medication (tamoxifen) for five years. And we will hope it doesn't come back.

That's all I know right now. It's kind of fortunate I've been going to 12 step meetings for nine years because if there's one thing I've learned sitting in those rooms it's that "one day at a time" is not just a platitude. It does work, living your life that way. So that's what I'm going to do, and we will see what happens.

Short Ribs

These short ribs are another Smitten Kitchen recipe, and cooked for 3 hours at low temperature in the oven. 

It was my first time making short ribs and I thought they were great! Even better was the accompanying parsnip purée. I was totally shocked at how much I loved the parsnips, given that I don't like them roasted at all. 

Smitten Kitchening

Some of my friends have started a project wherein collectively we're going to cook the entire Smitten Kitchen cookbook this year. So far I've made a few things I probably wouldn't have bothered with otherwise, so I think it's going to be a fun and positive experiment. 

We had friends over for dinner last weekend and I made a butternut squash and caramelized onion galette, which was fantastic. 

Then for dessert I made lemon bars, which use an entire puréed lemon. They were really good! They were light and fluffier than most lemon bars but very tart. 

Those two dishes together contained an entire pound of butter. So it's going to be a challenge to not gain a million pounds this year. 

Last night I made the grapefruit olive oil pound cake, which I thought would be a good thing to make for Ben since I don't like grapefruit. Alas, it turns out that I like this cake nevertheless. 

It's also relatively healthy for cake, containing lots of good citrus and not too much fat. Winner!

Tonight I'm making braised short ribs so stay tuned for that. I had to ask the guy at the grocery store for the ribs because I didn't even know what they look like. 

Happy New Year!

It is really really cold here. We have a space heater to try to keep it reasonable in at least one room because our electric heat pump does a frankly terrible job of keeping up when it is 12 degrees outside. Papaya knows what's up.

For Christmas this year we drove back to Kansas City. We got to go through West Virginia, one of the states neither of us had visited before, and it was beautiful. It is really, really long drive to Kansas City, though. We are going to fly on subsequent trips.

The kids really liked Uncle Benny.

Partially because he is maybe the world's greatest expert at Super Mario World for Wii.

Harry doesn't look too sure about me here but I assure you he was very friendly.

We saw some sights in Kansas City one day with Ben's dad and brother - the World War I Museum and Liberty Memorial - Adam took a family portrait at the top, featuring his foot.

And then we spent a weirdly long time at Harrah's Casino, where fortunately my friend Marci was able to come out and chat with us for a while. Because for most of the time, Ben and I were sitting quietly watching the horror that is your average Harrah's patron. One good thing is that they have free Diet Coke.

We also ate dinner there and Adam and I split a large bottle of special Royals-themed beer! Then the check came and we discovered it was $25.

Christmas morning was super fun!

Sully's a big fan of wearing gloves in the house.

We took Banana to the vet for the trip, so he would be monitored and also so the pet sitter wouldn't have to be at our house three times a day giving medicine to my cat over Christmas. It did not go well. He hardly ate and they said he "hid behind his pillow" the whole time. Poor buddy!! We were wracked with guilt for days afterward. Fortunately he seems to have suffered no long-term effects, but we are not going to be doing that anymore. I'm going to leave him at home and have the pet sitter come three times a day and tip her well and leave it at that. He still has had no seizures since August 23rd, and even though he is taking pills now about half the time (in lieu of the medicated treats he will only bother with when he's sleepy, for some reason), he's used to the routine and it's not a big deal. We are lucky; a lot of cats wouldn't be happy at all about pills three times a day but Banana sits there like a good boy and is and purring again a few seconds after he swallows it.

So! Now that we have that all straightened out, we are going to Copenhagen in April. Yay!