Jedi Mind Powers!

I want to take a moment to thank our families.  Since we've been in the hospital this time, we have painted and redecorated two rooms, taken down a huge oak in our backyard, power-washed our house and swing set, sent Dalynn on a mom's night out and dedicated our two youngest children at church.  We had most of this planned for the near future, if not this weekend just past, and so we had my mom, Susie (aka:  "Grammy" or "The Gramminator") and Dalynn's dad, Gary (aka: "Granddaddy Gary" or "Great Day Granddaddy") on tap to come on up under the auspices of seeing their grand-children dedicated.

Now, in all honesty, I was planning on doing the painting and curtain hanging, contrary to popular belief by He-Who-Did-All-the-Work (Gary), but it seems like whenever there's painting to be done around our house, Gary does the bulk of it.  I still haven't quite figured out how that works out, but I suspect it's some form of latent Jedi mind power on my part.

Then there's the Grammy-Granddaddy effect to be taken into account.  When the two of them end up in our house at the same time it becomes this mad dash to see who can accomplish the most in the shortest amount of time.  One thing Dalynn and I have definitely noted is that if one of them arrives before the other, they immediately attempt to do all of the laundry before the other shows up.  Gary was the first to arrive this time (by a full two days).  He took that opportunity to put painting on hold and spend several hours catching all of the laundry up (he is a laundry machine, I might add).  Grammy has been known to do similar things (she is also a machine).  Having two people in your house hell-bent on outpacing each other in the chores that they do can really work to your favor!  Once again, I believe it is some latent Jedi mind power on my part.

The power-washing came about when I found out that my cousin, Jeff Steele, is doing some power-washing on the side for a very reasonable price (if you'd like his info, let me know).  Our house was in desperate need of it, so we hired him to come out and do it (and what a good job he did).  He heard that I was going to sand the swing set and suggested that he could power-wash it to the same effect, so Dalynn told him to have at it.  It is now ready for staining with nary a bit of elbow grease on my part!  That's right, more latent Jedi mind powers.

Jeff, while he was at our house, heard tell that we wanted the gigantic (and sickly) oak in our backyard taken down.  Jeff recommended someone who had taken several very large pines down for him.  We called this person (Steve) and Steve said he could do it that day for the best price we had been quoted.  He did, and we now have copious amounts of oak ready to be split in our back yard.  Should you wish to retrieve some of it for your own personal use, please let me know, I'll let you have it for free (be forewarned, this is a Jedi mind power in use).

All of this was done while Cole and I were in the hospital.  It was only made possible by our families, but it illustrates a point that I've felt for a very long time now:  We cannot let cancer dictate our lives to us.  We must make some concessions from time to time, but life must go on, and it will!

Cole is doing well.  We had a "leave of absence" from the hospital today (Mother's Day, 2009) so we packed up the fam and headed out to our church.  We had Logan and Ava dedicated (we were in the hospital last Mother's Day as well, I believe, and missed the chance to dedicate Logan then) and then spent a quiet and semi-restful afternoon at home before Cole and I had to make our appearance back here at CHKD.

Cole's AHTC test came back and it showed that he does not have adrenal suppression.  This puts the spotlight on the extremely rare side effect of 6MP.  We still don't know how we're going to go about addressing it if it is the 6MP side effect (or, for that matter, how we're going to confirm that it is), though.  One thing about being on furlough today is that we didn't get to spend a lot of time talking with doctors about what to do from here on out.

Cole is NPO tonight and will have an endoscopy and a sygmoidoscopy tomorrow.  This will hopefully rule out any major GI problems which could be causing his belly pain.  The slots that we could possibly go in are 12:30 pm and 3:30 pm.  I don't really want to have to keep Cole without food til 3:30 pm tomorrow, so please pray that we get slotted into the 12:30 slot.  We may work a bone marrow in there, as well, for peace of mind.

Tuesday we are slated for a head MRI and a full-body CT scan, so Cole will be NPO again, but we are also supposed to be discharged Tuesday afternoon/night, so we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.