While I've been feeling pretty good with this round of treatment, one thing that still happens is that it still makes my face pretty red. Some of the drugs I take do make my skin more sensitive to the sun, but in the picture to the left, I've got a couple of coats of SPF 50 sunblock on. It's not the sun that's giving me the rosy glow. It seemed that it came up in conversations with people (mostly strangers) almost every day last week... "Have you been someplace sunny for vacation?"..."Have you been to Hawaii?" (I wish!)...etc. Well, it's really not much of a vacation, and not one I can recommend. I don't know why I have trouble answering this simple question - I've been this way for over a year. Maybe I don't really want dump the real story on strangers. More than once, the consequence of coming clean on the red face has made people feel bad for bringing it up - of course, how could they possibly have known? I assure them that they needn't apologize, and I hope that my explanation allows them to be comfortable around me. I guess I could just say I got some sun when I was out snowshoeing... Video clip - Sledding on Mt. Rainier
A quick clarification on the February 21 post regarding the blocking of this blog at the Swedish Cancer Institute. The IT department there is blocking access to this site only for people who are trying to view it from computers at Swedish - they are not blocking access anyplace else. Employees at Swedish can still access it from their home computers. Another end around is to subscribe and the post will get mailed to the email address of your choice (probably even through the Swedish firewall) - just type in your email address at the "Subscribe" button at the website (address is http://haydnprong.blogspot.com/ ). I also forgot to note that the last set of marker numbers dropped back from the previous level of 14 down to 9.5. This was the first set of numbers after resuming treatment without Avastin. As usual, I will be curious to see what the numbers do this Thursday.
