Christmas for us was a mixed bag this year.
We (and many others) did everything we could to make it a memorable Christmas for the kids, and to that extent we were successful. Jake had an awesome day playing with all his new toys while I constantly followed behind reminding him to clean up. We’ve been working on “everything has its place” and putting toys away before getting new ones – and I’m happy to report that he’s slowly getting it and this morning called me into his room to show me how he had put his new Spiderman toys away. As for Joshua, well he’s too little to grasp any concept of Christmas, but he also seem to have had a decent day watching his brother and giggling. Personally, I’m glad we celebrated our Christmas early this year because I wasn’t able to take any pictures or video yesterday. I had all the equipment out and accessible, but it just didn’t work out.
Christmas morning started with some technical difficulties that came really close to completely ruining our Christmas altogether. When we learned that Jamie would most likely be away from us during Christmas, we setup some webcams so she could join our Christmas morning through Skype. This setup had been working very well for the past few weeks…. that is until yesterday morning. For reasons that still perplex me (I’m leaning towards network issues at Moffitt), Jamie could not connect to Skype. I was on the phone with Jamie’s mom for about 30 minutes trying to bring them online while holding a crying baby and trying to keep Jake from ripping open the presents.
Luckily, prior to her leaving for Tampa, I had installed a program on her machine that allows me to control it remotely, called Teamviewer. Using this program I was able to access her machine and eventually bring up our live feed through Google Talk.
For the next hour or so, Jamie was able to watch as we opened our gifts. It was something I know she didn’t want to miss and I could tell she was really forcing herself to sit-up and watch. She was in a great deal of pain and her face was visibly swollen. After we had finished opening all our gifts, she started feeling nauseas so we disconnected and let her get some rest. I had planned on visiting with my sister’s family and our parents later in the day, but after seeing how bad Jamie felt, I just didn’t feel much like celebrating and decided to spend the day at home and focus on my kids. Thankfully, my sister and parents understood and came by the house later in the evening to bring us food and our gifts.
I was able to speak with Jamie’s mom last night and then again this morning. She had a fever of 100.7 yesterday evening, but it had broken during the night. Fevers are, yet again, another expected side effect of treatment. Right now the name of the game is pain management until she starts bouncing back hopefully early this week. To that effect they have her connected to a pain pump and are tweaking the doses as necessary to relieve her pain as much as possible. This morning they also detected some fluid in her lungs that had accumulated overnight. This puts her at risk for pneumonia, so they are having her do more breathing exercises and gave her a mouth vacuum she can operate as necessary to pull fluids from her mouth as she brings it up throughout the day.
Jamie has one final chemo treatment tomorrow and then we should hopefully be able to focus strictly on the recovery process. According to the doctor, the additional treatment will not make her worse, but will most likely prolong how she’s currently feeling for a few more days. Even through all this pain and discomfort, she still went for a walk yesterday pulling her IV pole along. She understands this exercise is necessary to expedite her recovery and is determined to continue for as long as she is able.
As for her white blood cell count, the last I heard it was .13, but today’s numbers weren’t in yet. Her platelets are also pretty low: under 20, so they’ll probably give her some platelets later today or tomorrow. From everything we’re seeing and hearing from the doctors, I believe she is either near or at rock bottom and we should expect to see the declining counts start heading upwards this week.
Thanks to everyone who went out of there way to make this Christmas special for Jacob and Joshua. Also, thanks to those who were thinking and praying for us during your Christmas celebrations. I’m so looking forward to spending next Christmas with her. Christmas has always been her favorite holiday and it was not the same without her here celebrating it with us.
Your prayer assignment for this post is to ask for the fluid to leave her lungs and for the mouth soreness to subside. We also need to pray for her continued strength and protection from any infections or bugs that could try and take advantage of her very weak immune system. My prayer and faith is that by the end of this coming week she will be feeling well enough to post a personal update for us.
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Joel…you and your wife have been and will continue to be in my prayers….I hope to hear that she is doing better and cant wait to hear a post that she is going home! I wish many blessing for your family…….
I don't know how you do it. You guys are in my prayers.
Hang in their Joel you are doing a fantastic job holding things together for all of you it seems. Thank you so much for the specific things for us to be praying for and we'll continue to check in. Our prayers continue to remain with you and your family. Take care.
we're with ya in every way, every second friends.
Kudo to the post and the interesting comment, i also bookmarked your RSS feeds for more updates.
Joel, thank you so much for giving us an update on Jamie. I know this must be so difficult being away from her. My family and I will be lifting all of you up in prayer.
Thank you so much for the update….sorry I am just now reading it…sheesh! Love you guys!
Sometimes words are difficult, so I will just say I appreciate your specific prayer request and my family and I will continue to keep you all in prayer. Let Jamie know I am thinking of her.