Newsflash: Bodies need red blood cells.

This is probably pretty intuitive, but I've found that our bodies (or at least mine) operates way more effectively when it actually has a decent number of red blood cells.  I went into clinic yesterday for what I planned on being the final drug in the final round of treatment.
Clinic visits generally follow the same basic schedule.  I check in on the fancy touch screen.  By the time I sit down the phlebotomist pops her head out the door and calls my name.  They are impressively fast.  I go to the little room, step on the scale.  They do everything using the metric system, so yet again, I berate myself for not doing better at knowing what 99.82KG actually means, and recommit to start using the metric system more.  Really America?  you want to be the final holdout using the imperial system of weights and measures?
I usually reminisce briefly on how much pie I would have to eat to get back up to my starting weight (it's a lot!), and then I think how nice it was that I had so much extra padding going into this thing.
I sit down in the blood drawing chair, and make some small talk while they draw numerous vials of blood.  Somewhere in there I have to confirm that I am who my wristband says I am, which I find somewhat interesting since I'm on a first name basis with pretty much everyone on the 8th floor at LDS hospital by now.
Once labs are drawn, we wait.
With cancer, waiting is something you get really really good at.
Yesterday, we waited.  The labs came back, and it shouldn't have come as a huge surprise to me that pretty much all of my counts were really low.  I was just at the threshold to get red blood cells and platelets.  My white blood cell count was at 0, which coincidentally I found irritating because I've been getting a shot every night to stimulate white blood cell production.  If I'm going to go through the pain of a shot, I better get the gain of increased white blood cells.  I felt kind of cheated.
Lance Armstrong showed how effective blood doping could be in a professional athlete, so it must be just as effective in a cancer patient right?  I took a page from lance's book and we ordered up two units of blood, and some platelets for good measure.
Remember when I said that cancer makes you good at waiting?
This little shift in treatment changed our planned 2 hour long clinic visit into a 8.5 hour long marathon of sitting around.
By the time we left, I had received my scheduled final dose of rituxamab, two units of blood, a unit of platelets, and some cafeteria nachos that sounded waaay better in my head then they tasted in real life.
I am happy to report that things are progressing well.  The red blood cells have made it so I can go up my stairs without being winded, and put some color in my face.  (I'm told pale is not a good look for me).  I have officially completed the drug treatment portion of my regimen.  I think today is day 11 of the 21 day cycle, so technically I have 10 more days to go.  From this point forward, as far as I can tell, most of my activity is tied to recovering from the first 6 days of the cycle where they gave me large doses of poisonous chemicals.  I am optimistic that  soon will be the day where I can lose some of my waiting abilities, and get to a normal that isn't dominated by cancer treatment.