Report/Lake Tahoe

Thanks for all of your comments. It really makes a difference knowing you are all out there thinking of us right now. I'm blogging from Lake Tahoe. We have been able to spend a glorious weekend here with Danny's family. Each family brought only one child so it has been a calm and relaxing weekend. Lucy has been the oldest and as LOVED playing with her cousins. Bennett is only nine months younger and they have so much fun together. It has been really nice just to relax a bit after the crazy past couple of weeks. I just wanted to report a bit on last week and give you an update on what comes ahead. Our first appointment last week was a PET scan. Danny sat in a comfy chair while they shot him up with a radioactive substance that the cancer cells are attracted to. He had to wait for an hour while the cancer cells ate it up and then they did a scan on his body to see where the cancer is. We will hear all the results next Friday when we meet with our oncologist but we do know that Danny's Lymphoma is a Stage 2 B. They label you in stages 1 through 4 (one being a lower amount of cancer and four being high-the stage is also determined by the location). I'm feeling just fine with a 2. The next day he had a bone marrow biopsy. It is just as bad as everyone says. At one point the NP was huffing and puffing as she cranked the saw into Danny's bone core. Sorry for the image but it was just that awful. The next day Danny went into surgery to receive a Port.
When I wrote about it before I was imagining something like Iron Man's energy core popping out of Danny's chest. Thankfully it is much smaller and completely covered by skin. The port is a small triangle that is connected to a small tube that feeds directly into his blood. They placed it right about his right collar bone. There is an obvious bump there so the nurses can find it easily to give him injections. He was given pretty light anesthesia but can't remember the procedure at all. That afternoon we had an appointment with our NP to go over the plan for his chemotherapy. We raced him out of the hospital when he was relatively coherent and had the meeting. I'm glad he was still pretty loopy because hearing the therapy plan was pretty hard. Somehow I had expected chemo to be a shot once every two weeks that made you sick. Danny's chemo plan is a 21 day cycle. He will have 8 cycles-so we're hoping to be done end of December (the day before our fifth year anniversary in fact). The chemotherapy includes about 8 different drugs-half given intravenously and the other half orally. Then he takes a bunch of other oral drugs to keep the chemo drugs from hurting him too badly. Then there are a bunch of over the counter drugs to keep him functioning. We also go in to get the intravenous drugs about 10 days out of the 21 day cycle. Then she went over the side affects of each drug. It was all incredibly overwhelming and pretty scary. We went out and immediately bought a huge calendar and I feel better having organized the information a bit more. It will take a lot of doing but I know we'll get the hang of it.
We are scheduled to start chemo on August 3. This week have to have an EKG and another test to establish some baselines so they can judge some of the drugs effects on Danny. He is also banking some sperm in case the chemo has a long term affect on our fertility. On Friday we talk to the oncologist about the heavy stuff like the likelihood of the cancer returning, future fertility and the PET scan results. We're excited to get this process started. Now that I've heard what it entails, I know why they call if 'fighting" cancer. We're ready for it though.
All weekend we've been joking about why having cancer is a good thing. We've come up with answers like better cable at our parents house, having DVR, the fall TV season starting (yes these were all my ideas:), having more time together as a family, having more time to figure out what we want to do after school etc. While we would probably never choose cancer for these couple benefits, we know that things happen for a reason. We feel really blessed for the timing of it all. We feel confidant that our faith will be strengthened and we will become closer to our Heavenly Father through this experience. Thanks again for all of your love.