Another Funky and wierd day.

Though it isn't really relevant, I thought I would post a picture of my two kitty cats. These guys have soaked up their fair share of tears along with bringing me (and everyone else in my family too) a whole LOT of laughs and happiness...
Buzz (the one on the right) has been my cat since I was 22 years old. He is now 12 years old...gettin' up there for a cat; an old man...but still so cool. People always tell me he acts more like a dog than a cat, he is so friendly. You can't tell much from the picture, but he used to be a whopper of a cat when he was in his prime: a 20 pounder, which is considered pretty ginormous in terms of size for cats. Sick, I know...but at one point when I was in my complete trainwreck state of mentality over this melanoma, I actually made the morbid statement that I wondered if I would outlive this old boy. What was I thinking?
Jada is the one on the right. She is a total nutbag. She is now 5 and she tears around the house like she is stoked up on catnip (also referred to as kitty marijuana by myself and Ed) most of the time. But she is a Bengal, and that kind of goes with the territory. Jada and a laser pointer can be the source of quite a few laughs.

Anydamnway...On to my whacked out day. Over all, much of it I could safely consider surreal.
This morning I was walking my kiddos over to the bus stop as I would any other morning, and my neighbor strolled over to where I was standing. She looked very upset, and I soon found out why. She told me that she was now part of what she referred to as mine and Mr. Jim's (another neighbor of ours) "club"....
I didn't have to ask what she meant, but I still stood there in disbelief and and shock and said, "No...God..."
She is only a couple of months younger than I am and she has two little guys, ages 4 and 2, and she just found out she has breast cancer....

Unreal. That makes three of us with some type of cancer or another in just our immediate vicinity of houses...

Is it me, or does it seem like cancer is becoming more and more common everywhere you turn? Maybe it just does when it hits more close to home...Maybe things really do travel in threes...
Who knows...But shocking all the same.

Had another appointment up in Philly today with the research nurse I will be working with for the vaccine trial. This appointment was a spur of the moment thing, since my need to have a third appendage attached (the JP drain) is kind of throwing a wrench into the works with my vaccine schedule.
Because the only time the procedure for the drain could be scheduled was next week, my anergy panel (skin testing) appointments had to be bumped up to today and Friday...(I am feeling quite boneheaded lately, so maybe I already mentioned this before) *Gone Pshyco...BAcK lAteR*

Anyway, aside from those blasted little skin bubbles made from those skin injections stingin' like a *insert expletive here*, (aww, hell, who am I fooling...I have been known to use my fair share of obscene language)...Things went pretty much as I expected them to: SNAFU--situation normal: All F**ked UP.
It turns out that the nurse is going to have to contact AVAX technologies to see if they are going to be sticklers about my having a drain in place while on the vaccine injections. Apparently, and this makes sense to me, they need my immune system to be in PERFECT shape for this study. If I have a JP drain, then there is the risk of infection, and therefore, a threat to my immune system.
As she told it, if they are sticklers, they may pull me off the trial. At this point my eyes are rolling up into my skull so far that I am not sure they will come back down into normal position again.
But... if they are more lenient, they may let the oncologist and nurse I am working with just bump everything back another week.

The other thing that she informed me they are hoping for is that the drain will only have to stay in for a week. At this, I was trying to hold back a laugh.
Let me just interject here by saying I can't imagine that having a drain in for only a week will do too much to get rid of this grapefruit-sized seroma/lymphocele bugger that I've got. Even if it does drain what's there...Will that be the last of it?

Soooo. On the one hand, I may quite realistically and possibly loose this opportunity to have this promising treatment that could bump my odds up from 26-27% five year survival to 45% (the vaccine)...
Or....All these different departments have to all cooperate, communicate, rigidly choreograph each and every next step, get rid of this lymph fluid (basketball in my gut) which is a threat to my participation in and of itself as I understand it, and everything has to come together just right and fall perfectly into place at all the most opportune times...
Should I play those odds?

I am still hoping against hope that it will all work out...

Am I living in an alternate reality here? Quite possibly....But one thing I know for sure: I have a whole buttload of phone calls to make tomorrow.