Happy 2009!

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year. We had a nice and relaxing one. We didn't do everything we had planned on but that's o.k. December was so hectic, especially the week before Christmas, that it was nice to just sit back and enjoy each other's company. I will confess, we did spend quite a bit of time playing with the new Wii! It is my amateur opinion that one's hand/eye coordination seriously declines the older they get!

Gavin had a chemo treatment on Christmas Eve but had the rest of the time off from any treatments or doctors' appointments. Of course that has all changed this week! Today (yesterday? it's 12:32 a.m.) he had an appointment with Dr. Barkley, the pain doc. They are decreasing his pain meds (good thing). This decrease kind of resulted from the fact that Gavin completely missed his morning pain meds on Sunday and didn't even notice until around dinner time! He was a little achey mid to late afternoon but nothing to put up the alarm that he missed taking any of his drugs. Hopefully he can get down to near a pre-September hospital stay dosage since he is less sleepy having less pain meds. Gavin is also going in for an MRI tomorrow. He has been suffering from some neck/base of skull pain for going on 3 weeks and they just want to double check to make sure it's nothing to be concerned about. I am trying hard not to borrow trouble but prayers would be appreciated. Then on Thursday he starts chemo again. I honestly have lost track as to what round this is and my calendar isn't near me. It must be around the 4th round. That's my guess and I'm sticking with it! Unless the MRI shows something, Dr. Pal isn't planning on doing any CT scans in the near future. Gavin had so many scans at the end of summer/beginning of fall that a break from them would be a good idea. I know I haven't mentioned Dr. Sharma yet and that's because we haven't seen him since mid-December! I think we see him in another few weeks to check on Gavin's dead bone, sooner if an infection sets in, but so far so good!

I will end this with a little bit of a vent...why can't the Ohio State Buckeyes win a bowl game??? For goodness sake, after a tight first half, they came out and stunk up the 3rd quarter. Then they teased us by going ahead with only 43 or so seconds to go and blew it and let Texas score! I'm still not entire positive Texas got the 1st down on that 4th down conversion. There, I've had my say. College football season is done for me - Go Panthers!

Thanks to Linda Preston for the delish sandwiches and Pauline Muntz for the lovely desserts.

Love and Blessings,
Maria