Morey Mania

Brixton had his annual Christmas program at Noah's ark.  His class sang a song and Brixton was REALLY into it!  Towards the 2nd or 3rd verse he really starts going to town and he was the ONLY one you could hear!  Please forgive us for the tortuous screaming from Sawyer in the beginning of the show :) (Technical difficulties; I'll post the video later!) The next day we went to Sawyer's soccer class...we've shown so many of those photos, but Brixton took this one of Tzaddi that I thought was too good to pass up! We had planned to kickoff our holiday season with ROEL - celebrating Rowan's birthday (RO) and Christmas (NOEL).  Due to the whole cancer thing, we decided it would be better celebrated on a smaller scale with just the family.  Rowan would have been TEN this year - WOW!    This is the first year where BOTH of the boys could sing a Christmas carol - and they learned Jingle Bells.  Here's a shot of them singing together...too cute!

I had my first chemotherapy treatment on 12/12.  The port was placed the day prior and that whole procedure wasn't too bad.  I just love being in the drug-induced twilight phase!   Here's a picture of the port.  The bandage is covering up the incision and you can see the lump right under the bruising.  Basically, it's a catheter they put inside my vein so they don't have to stick me with an IV every time I go.   My Oncotytpe Dx score came back on the low end of the high recurrence rate (score was 32).  So I have a 21% chance of distance recurrence without chemotherapy...so Dr. Saleh stuck with my original treatment plan and didn't make any changes.  Hopefully the chemo does it's job and my horrible little cancer cells stop multiplying and landing in other locations! Here's the port in action.  All the nurse did was prick my skin (directly on the lump) with the needle and hooked me up to all the meds!   The whole process took about 4 hours

 I had an appointment with my Oncologist (he is the most awesome doctor ever) and we had a great visit!  He said I'm healing well and ready to start chemo next Thursday, December 12th.  I still don't have the results from the Oncotype test, but assuming I rate in the Medium category (score of 18-30) then I will be getting 4 treatments 3 weeks apart of  Taxotere  and  Cytoxan .  It's a pretty standard treatment, and more of the details (including side effects) can be found by clicking  here . If I come back with a High risk (score 31-100) then we will revisit the plan.  He will probably add in  Adriamycin  and the treatment duration/dosage will change (although it's standard with this  drug combo ). Want to hear some great news? NO RADIATION! Woot Woot! I am super ready to get this show on the road and can't wait to start.  Next week is already looking pretty busy: I have a Chemo Education class on Tuesday and get my Port inserted on Wednesday.  Thursday is

So, it's official - I am finally drain free! Everyone talked about how the worst part of the surgery is dealing with the drains and they were right! I couldn't wait to get rid of those things.   Once I got rid of the first four, I stopped wearing the apron and just dealt with a lumpy looking body.  You can see all the bumps under my shirt: I told Tzaddi I wanted him to take a picture of what it looked like under my shirt...so here is me getting ready.  You can see how long the tubes were and the bulb is peeking out under my shirt.  Once I downloaded the photos, I decided that I was NOT going to be posing the pix.  My tummy was looking a bit too soft for public viewing! The boys and I spent some time hanging in the front yard.  I love this pix of Sawyer even though his eyes are closed! This is the point where my children turned into sword-wielding samurais.  They decided that the bush was their enemy...and attacked it with their bodies.  You can