8 Miles, A New Hobby, and Cami for the "W"

March 5:  

Adam and I went for an 8-mile hike today along the C&O towpath and  Billy Goat trail A.  Along the way we saw 11 great blue herons, 3 bald eagles, a bunch of beautiful scenery, and a raccoon.  

Tonight Cami and the women's lacrosse team played in a home game against U of U.   They beat the Utes 12-7 and Cami got  a little playing time, which was good since she had a pretty substantial cheering section there just for her.   

And on a completely random note, I skimmed this article this morning....

and couldn't stop laughing when I got to this part....

Apparently, some people have a wee bit too much time on their hands.

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UNDEFEATED!

January 30--Our ward (church congregation) has an awesome young women basketball team!  Some teams get intense and negative when they play, but I love that our YW are good sports that genuinely just enjoy playing the game.  They've been undefeated for the last couple of years and Saturday's game was no different.  Everyone, including the inexperienced players, got equal playing time and still they swept the scoreboard.  

Speaking of teams, here's another picture of the BYU women's lacrosse team, of which Cami is a proud member.  Because of a previous commitment, she will have to miss their first game, which is this weekend, but the next weekend she will be off to California for their first away games.   She is excited to be playing again and especially excited to be playing for BYU!

We weren't originally planning on taking any trips to Utah this spring, but now we really hope that one of us will be able to get to at least one of her games eventually. 

We will see! 

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What a Difference a Year Makes

Flash back to this week last year and you will find Spencer recently readmitted to the hospital for his 2nd round of chemo.  All seemed to be going well when suddenly he was doubled over in extreme abdominal pain.  After a series of tests, it was determined that he needed to have his appendix removed via emergency surgery.  It was a scary time for us and a miserable time for Spencer as he battled the pain from the surgery and the side effects from chemo at the same time. 

Fast forward  a year later and you will find a much different picture. 

You will see a picture of a healthy lacrosse player that just made his high school varsity team and has recovered (physically and academically) from missing the entire second half of his junior year and was just accepted into BYU for this fall! 

Between all this exciting news and the roadshows being officially done (blogpost coming soon), I have a HUGE weight off of my shoulders.  I was on the verge of a complete meltdown on Friday night.  It was dress rehearsal night for the roadshows, I still hadn't quite finished the program for the next day,  and I could hear snippets of conversations of people talking about who was getting into BYU.  Spencer hadn't heard yet and I was getting more out-of-sorts by the minute.  At one point someone said they couldn't find their costume and it was the straw that broke open the floodgates of my stress and I just sat down in a dark corner and cried for a minute (not a normal behavior for me).  Shortly after pulling myself back together, we learned that Spencer had been accepted and the costume had been found.  The show went on and I spent the rest of the night much less stressed. 

I was surprised when a few hours later we arrived home and I found myself tearful again.  Instead of tears of stress this time, they were tears of relief and gratitude for how far we've come in a year.   It's been a long road and we are so grateful to be on this end of things.  We are proud of Spence and can't wait to see the bright future that awaits him! 

Leukemia in Pictures

                    Before:    The shag                                                       After: Bald is beautiful

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Before:  Will I sleep through my 5:00am alarm?    

After:  The IV's beeping for the fourth time tonight?!  

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Before:  cell phone with no data plan and one computer to share among 7 people

After:  latest and greatest technology at his fingertips 24/7

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Before:  I have a huge test tomorrow...maybe I should study. 

After:  Hmmmm....should I play Words with Friends or Scramble with Friends today?  (By the way his user name is "lsattack" if you want to challenge him.  Beware though, he's pretty good at both of them.)

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Before:  Can I go hang out with my friends as long as I'm back by midnight?   

After:  Can I stay awake the whole time my friends are visiting me? 

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Before:  Should I take a test prep class before taking the ACT and SAT?

After:  Will I be able to graduate with my class next year? 

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Before:  Will I make the varsity lacrosse team this year?

After: How many laps can I do around the hem/onc floor today? 

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 Before:  Pizza or burgers?
                      
After:  Platelets or blood? 

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                Before:  Beach bod                                       After:  Shower bod

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UPDATE

His ANC is still zero, but his blood is starting to form monocytes which docs say is indicative of counts going up soon.  He'll be able to go home as soon as his counts are around 250 and trending steadily upward. 

Other than not sleeping the greatest, he is still feeling pretty well.  :)

I've been informed that I should apologize in advance if any girls bump their heads while swooning at the second-to-last photo.   Sorry. 

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"One of the secrets of life is to make stepping 
stones out of stumbling blocks."
                                                                                   - Jack Penn

Blood + Kytril + Darth Vader = A Much Happier Spencer

After feeling cruddy for a week-and-a-half straight, Spencer is happy to announce that he's finally getting his groove back!  I'm not sure if it was the 2 units of blood they finally gave him yesterday.   Or the new 12-hour anti-nausea pill, Kytril, they gave him as a last resort when he wouldn't keep anything down.   Or maybe it was the surprise visit from Darth Vader to the hospital courtyard.   

Whatever it was, Spence is back to joking with the nurses, scarfing down food (and keeping it down), not falling asleep on his visitors, showing off his card tricks, and even giving his sister a few lacrosse pointers in the hospital courtyard. 

Darth Vader, Captain Rex (from the Star Wars cartoon), and the storm trooper came to help one of the young hem/onc patients celebrate his birthday.   Ellie was a little nervous about them, but eventually decided that the little storm trooper, who wasn't that much bigger than she was, was okay to talk to. 

Later they came around and visited all the patients in their rooms.  They said (in very non-Star Wars sounding voices)  that the vast majority of the kids they'd visited had no clue who they were.  Spence, of course, knew exactly who they were supposed to be, but still wanted nothing to do with posing for pictures with them. 

Which is why I employed a little motherly bribing to get this one. 

I've got to have at least an occasional photo of him not sleeping....for prosperity's sake!

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Random Star Wars Memory:  Star Wars Episode 2 came out right around Spencer's  birthday one year and serendipitously for us, at the same time boxes of General Mills cereals featured free tickets to the theater on them.  Being the cheapskates we were, we thought that we would make Spence's  birthday party super cool and take his friends to see Star Wars at the movie theater.  We stocked up on cereal, cut off the coupons, and traipsed Spence and about 10 boys to the theater.  Since we hadn't spent a cent on the tickets, we thought we'd buy the boys their own drinks and some popcorn to share (a treat our own kids rarely enjoy).  Too bad for us that we didn't think ahead about the fact that:

20-oz. cups of soda + young boy pea-sized bladders = peeing every 15 minutes

  To this day, when I think of Star Wars, I think of traipsing boys back and forth to movie theater bathrooms.

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UPDATE:

• Spence's hemoglobin never got below 7, the number at which doctors would automatically transfuse him, but since he was so fatigued the last few days they went ahead and gave him 2 units of blood yesterday.    Afterward, he was far happier and had more energy than he'd had in days.  Next time  I plan to request him to be transfused before he gets that worn out. 

• He received another platelet transfusion today after his platelet counts got down to 10.   Luckily he wasn't randomly bleeding like he did last time his platelets were that low. 

• His blood counts finally hit bottom today!  (yesterday's ANC=~35, today's ANC=0 )  It's expected to stay at zero for a few days before creeping back up to a point at which we can hopefully take him home for a little while again (maybe in about 10 days or so)! 

• Eating food and keeping it inside of him, helped Spence to regain some of the weight he'd lost.  (Weight yesterday=55.2 kg.  (121.5 lbs.),     Weight today=56.2 kg (124 lbs.))

• I'm quite impressed with the new anti-nausea medication (Kytril) they're giving him.  It's far more effective than any other he's gotten and it doesn't knock him out like the Ativan does. 

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Spencer's Facebook status in honor of Dr. Seuss' birthday: 

"I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!"  
                                                                                                                            ~Dr. Seuss~

Playing Hooky

 We don't do this often, and perhaps not ever before...but we played hooky from stake conference this week and made a whole weekend of Spence's lacrosse tournament. 

We went to Williamsburg. 

We got some Christmas shopping done at the outlet malls there and drove around town.

We did more than our fair share of lounging around in the hotel room, absolutely thrilled that there was no housework, no homework, and no cooking. 

 We watched Spencer play lacrosse.  His team isn't usually super competitive, but while they won only one of four games, two of the games were really close.  Spencer did his part by scoring three goals!

The wind was howling, so we got to put our winter gear and snuggling skills to use to keep warm. 

Or in Emma's and Adam's case, forget the snuggling....they wrestled to keep warm.  There were a couple of people shooting me dirty looks through their half-hour long wrestling match, but I figure, hey, they were mostly laughing and only cried a couple of times. 


And I just had to throw this one in, to show off that she's lost all four of her front teeth now.  Her two big ones are growing in so fast, that she'll probably get her wish of having them for Christmas.  :)

 And then Cami got to be Vanna White, although that description sounds a little bit more glamorous than it really was.  The coach was looking for someone cute to choose the winners of a raffle for some free lacrosse heads.  Cami's job was to pull stinky jerseys that they'd been wearing for four games out of the bag.  Ew.

She did pick her own brother's jersey though, so I was happy that she was the one getting her hands stinky. 

And then we came back home to a clean house (okay, okay so maybe it wasn't really clean, but I had mopped the floors before we left, so it was cleaner than usual)  and a happy dog! 


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