St. George Sunshine In Our Soul (say that 3 times fast!)

Hello Everyone-

 

Time marches on, and sometimes gets away from me – taken me quite a while to get back to the blog, but here goes.

 

It is now Sunday evening, November 4^th, and we unexpectedly find ourselves spending the night at my Dad’s house in Cedar City (thanks Dad  --  he’s in Florida).  How did we get here?  Well, it’s actually good news as far as Brooke is concerned.  She has improved so much over the last week or so that she felt well enough to travel to St. George this weekend and watch Kelsie, Seth, and the AF marching band compete in the state championship competition Friday (called Red Rocks), and the western regional competition yesterday.

 

Warning:  shameless parental bragging detour ahead:  After this weekend, Kelsie, Seth, and the American Fork marching band can now claim to not only be the best band in the state, but also the best band in the western U.S.!  It was great therapy and a good time for Brooke and all of us to cheer on the band this week.  Here’s a picture of 2 of the 230 champions from AFHS!

 

So, Brooke, Jake, Lisa, and I had a great weekend in St. George (Jordan and Derek were working and didn’t make the trip), and were on our way home today when the transmission in our van decided it was time to kick the bucket.  Not exactly what we had planned for the day, but we were grateful for a couple of tender mercies along the way. 

 

First, we were blessed that it happened where it did or we could have been stranded in a bad way.  We were just a couple of miles south of the first Cedar City exit and were able to limp into town (which is how we ended up at my Dad’s house for the night). 

 

Second, we were also blessed to be able to find someone to look at the car today so we know what we’re dealing with.  The short version of that tender mercy is that, after arriving at Dad’s house, Lisa had a strong feeling that we should get some things out of the van.  As she and I were unloading the car, a tow truck pulled into the next door neighbor’s house, which lead to a conversation with them, that lead us to finding a mechanic on a Sunday afternoon in Cedar City.  Very fortunate indeed.

 

So back to Brooke, who is after all the star of this show (the blog I mean).  The last two weeks have been much, much better for her than the two weeks before that.  She has had multiple doctor’s visits, but the best news is that she simply feels so much better and more “normal.”  She has still had a couple of days where there has been significant pain or she has tried to do too much, but overall this last week or so have been very positive.

 

During the day she has been up and doing things more than she has been down and in bed.  I wondered how she would tolerate the trip to St. George, but with the ability to lay the seat back and get some rest along the way, she did great.  She sat through a couple of hours of band viewing both Friday and Saturday.  By the end of both days, she was tired and sore to be sure, but she did it nonetheless.

 

It was a nice weekend for her and for all of us, notwithstanding its surprise vehicular ending.  We enjoyed cheering on the kids, enjoyed the wonderful St. George weather, and also really enjoyed spending quite a bit of time with the Ettingers (Jake’s mother and father-in-law to be – thanks Locke and Carol Sue!).  A good time was had by all, including Lisa gathering eggs and Jake herding chickens!  Here are a few pictures from our weekend.

 

 

 

As far as the doctor visits go, Brooke saw her oncologist and got more information from her about treatment.  There were no real surprises there, although we did get some new information.  Dr. Prystas confirmed that Brooke will not need radiation, which is wonderful news.  She will need infusions every three weeks for a year, with the first six times including the heavy duty chemo with all of its lovely side effects, while the rest of the year will be infusions of a drug called Herceptin, which we are told does not have the same horrible side effects as the heavy duty chemo. 

 

Brooke will also get an injection the day after each chemo treatment that is designed to boost her immune system.  Dr. Prystas also reiterated or confirmed what we heard previously about staging and grade of tumor.  She also started Brooke on a very minor dose of a blood thinner to keep her port from clogging.

 

That was the news from her doc at LDS hospital in SLC.  Having said all that, Brooke still has to make a decision about changing doctors and having the treatment in American Fork.  She has an appointment with a Utah County based oncologist, Dr. Bott, on Tuesday, and she will then decide once and for all.  She’s leaning toward changing doctors and getting chemo locally, but we’ll see how it goes this week.

 

Brooke has also had a couple of additional follow-up visits with the plastic surgeon, Dr. Jensen.  These were the first two visits where they began the process of injecting saline into the tissue expanders.  She has also had fluid drained on both of these visits – a lot of fluid the first visit about 10 days ago, and a smaller amount on the second visit a few days ago.  Going forward, this process should generally not be too painful, but she was actually in a lot of pain after the first visit, probably because they had to drain so much fluid from several places – they basically stuck needles in a few different spots and wrung her out like an orange. 

 

The second visit was generally uneventful, except for one moment when one of the needles happened to inadvertently hit a nerve.  She was laying there calmly and then suddenly jerked in pain (and she has a high pain tolerance).  It has bothered her off and on since then and particularly hurts if she’s laying flat on her back.  Hopefully they’ll miss that nerve going forward!

 

So that’s the report from the homefront.  After deciding for sure which doc and where to have chemo after Tuesday, Brooke will set a date to have her first chemo treatment.  We expect that to be either later this week or the week after at the latest.  She’s trying to look at timing chemo so that she can feel as well as possible for certain days or events, most importantly Jake’s wedding on December 28^th. 

 

Thanks as always for checking in on Brooke.  All the best from here-

 

John