Mom finished the first set of chemo treatments. Friday she began a different type of chemo, one that the doctors said would be really bad. She had a short time of being very weak yesterday morning, but so far today she is feeling fairly good. Her appetite is good, too.

She's going to have an ultrasound before the next treatment so that the doctors can see how much the tumor and her lymph nodes have shrunk. Please be praying!

Mom's treatments are moving along and overall, things are going very well. At her last treatment, (the 3rd one), the doctor did an exam and had a difficult time finding the tumor in her breast - it has shrunk that much (before it could be seen when she lifted her arm). He also told her that her lymph nodes had shrunk down almost to their normal size.

On another positive note, the doctor did the test to find out of Mom has the breast cancer gene - she does not. Which means, the doctor said, that the cancer she has is most likely environmental in origin. And means that the risk of Hope or I getting breast cancer is much lower.

The chemo treatments themselves are not bad, it's the blood platelets shot that she gets a couple of days after the chemo that gives her a hard time. For a few days she is very weak and tired; some days she can barely summon the energy to walk from the bedroom to the living room. For the most part, though, she starts feeling better and has a little more energy within 3-5 days after the shot. That gives her almost a full week of feeling better before the next treatment.

She has lost all of her hair, and other than the first day when she was pretty depressed about it, she has handled it admirably. When it really started coming out in hunks, we put her in front of the webcam and video-called my nephew. He watched while I shaved Mom's head :)

These days she's threatening to keep her head shaved because it saves so much time getting ready :)

I guess the main problem Mom is having from the treatments is that she is breaking out. It started on her hands and spread up her arms and is now on her face. Her palms and the soles of her feet are also sore and feel like they are burned, plus they are peeling and leaving near-raw places. She's taking benedryl and a prescription that stops the itching, but the peeling places are like burns and they hurt.

Other than the week after her first chemo treatment, which was very bad, Mom hasn't experienced the much of the other problems she was warned about. She has occasional bouts of light nausea, but it's not bad. She has some pain, but nothing near the intensity they told her she would have. It's not even bad enough for her to take regular pain meds, much less the heavy-duty prescription they gave her.

Her next treatment is this coming Friday, followed by the blood platelet shot next Monday. After that, I think she will be taking a round of a different chemo.

Mom sends her thanks to everyone praying for her. We all know that the reason she's doing so well is because so many are praying for her, and we thank God every day for it.

God bless all of you.

Mom had outpatient surgery today to put in a port for the chemo treatments. She called a couple of hours ago and said everything went fine, except they gave her a shot of morphine just as she was telling them that morphine keeps her awake. She told dad he had a loooong night ahead of him :)

Her next chemo treatment is Friday, then she has to go back to the doctor next Monday for an injection of blood platelets to boost her white blood cell count.

Even though the doctors explained what to expect from the treatments, none of us really had a clue. She didn't really react until about 3 days after her first treatment, but this past week was pretty rough at times. She had a couple of better days interspersed between days when she was too sick to get out of bed. But by this past Friday evening she was feeling better, and almost back to her normal self by yesterday, with the exception of not having much strength. She was feeling good enough to boss me around :)

We're all so thankful for the friends and family who call and visit. They've helped keep Mom's spirits up and have been an encouragement to her, especially those who've been through the same or something similar. Thank you to everyone praying for her and sending her get well wishes. I pass on all the messages, and I can tell you Mom is appreciative of every one.

I had abandoned this journal long ago, and I really had no intention of using it again. However, things have led to me finding a use for this journal, and that use is reflected in the color scheme. My mom has breast cancer. I will be using this journal to keep family and friends updated, especially those who can't call or visit often, if at all. I'm using LJ for updates because Facebook has a character limit on posts and it's difficult to fit the updates in the space allowed, and because I realize that not everyone I'm friends with on FB wants to read about mom's cancer. Consider this advance notice, because all of my posts from here on will be updates on mom. I won't be offended if anyone "unfriends" me here on LJ :)

It's finally happened.

InuYasha has reached the end. The final chapter (#558) has been posted.

I'm sad to see it end, but I'm happy enough with the ending, and I trust there'll be plenty of fanfic to fill in the gaps :)

Thank you Rumiko Takahashi for giving us such great characters and a story we'll never forget!

School's out and relatives are coming to visit. So I'm gonna be offline until Tuesday. Have a great Memorial Day weekend everyone!

A week ago a new member joined our family - Suki. Suki is half manx, one of two kittens in the litter, and the only one that inherited the manx characteristics. In other words, she has no tail :) Not even a stub. When she's excited, since she can't twitch a tail, her entire back end wiggles :) She's such as sweetie!

My latest obsession has to do with acquiring manga scanlations. Three reasons for this: many of the ones I download are not released in the US. As for the ones that are licensed in the US, scanlations allow me to read ahead of the volumes I've been able to buy and also read chapters that won't be released in the US for months or even a year or more. For example, Fruits Basket has been finished in Japan since March of last year. The current release in the US is Volume 19 (of 23). So it'll be at least 3 months before the last volume is released here. I fully support buying mangas when they are licensed and available, but I can't afford to buy all that I want as quickly as I want :) The last reason is that fan scanlations aren't subject to censorship and the typical dumbing down that occurs when manga is translated by a publisher for the US market.

So anyways, I've found scanlation torrents, and I've used bittorrent to download a few. Then there are sites like One Manga where you can read the manga online. I've used that for downloading the individual image files of mangas that are only one or two volumes in length. But that process is not reasonable for mangas like InuYasha or Bleach that have hundreds of chapters.

I kept seeing references to using IRC to download scanlations, so I finally decided to investigate. In spite of the fact that I was taking programming classes at college in the early 90's (COBOL, PASCAL, and Basic to be exact!), I knew nothing about the internet at that time. The first time I used the internet was when I went back to college in 96, and I had my first taste of chat rooms in 99, using chat rooms provided by sites like yahoo groups. So even though IRC has been around for a long time, I didn't know anything about it.

Learning about IRC was easy; figuring out which application to use and how to use it was another story altogether. I found several tutorials online, and I quickly figured out that using IRC was like using MS-DOS; what I couldn't figure out was how to actually get to the scanlations. In any case, after about five days of trial and error, I have finally figured out what I'm doing! Woohoo! I downloaded my first file yesterday (volume one of Love Monster).

And of course, now that this area has opened up to me, I'm going to be without internet access for the next week or so (except at work) and won't be able to download anything...

The move has begun, although its not like I have lots of fanfic to move.

All of my stories will be posted on Media Miner. Non-adult and PG versions of stories will also be posted on fanfiction.net. Adult stories will also be posted on adultfanfiction.net.

So far I have only posted one Forever Knight fanfic. Insatiable has been posted to Media Miner and adultfanfiction.net. I started working on the PG version of First Dawn so that I could post it on fanfiction.net, but in doing so, I developed an itch to revise it. It was the first fanfic story I ever wrote (and finished!), and it shows, LOL. Not that my later stuff is much better, but still... :) So I dunno. I originally planned to have four stories in the First Dawn series, and then hearts_blood was going to write one that goes between #2 and #3, but I'm thinking that if I do get around to revising it, I'll make it end after the second story (which is also finished but needs work). Since I've decided not to teach summer school this year, I just might have time to do some writing this summer. That would be so nice :) I might even be able to churn out an Inuyasha or Blood Ties or Moonlight fanfic in the process (hee!). Or, (gasp!) finish some of my half-done FK fanfics that have been sitting on my hard drive for about 4 years or so.

Well, I had this bright idea that I would put my Forever Knight fanfic on fanfiction.net. However, I discovered that the site does not allow explicit content. Now, it's not like my stories are on the level of something from Ellora's Cave, but most of them have descriptive sex scenes. I hesitate to post them on the site, because the strongest rating that's available is the one that says the story is only suitable for ages 16+. I could use that one, I guess, but I'm just not quite comfortable with it.

MediaMiner does have a mature rating, but it's an anime fanfic site, although it does have sections for non-anime fanfic. I'll probably post my stories there, it's just that there's no "Forever Knight" category - and FK fanfic readers would probably never think to look on MM for FK fanfic, and MM readers are probably not looking for FK fanfic on MM...

Does anyone know of any other multi-fandom fanfic sites that allow adult stories?