Saturday, May 26, 2007

Did well

It's been almost 24 hours since she started the chemo and so far she's doing really well. She went to bed about 9:15 pm and pretty much slept through the night. She's sleeping still right this second. They say she's supposed to start getting nausea and maybe vomiting...we'll see. In Spokane, she didn't through up that much during the 7 rounds of chemo. But with the different chemo, we'll just see how it goes. The room is much smaller than at Sacred Heart so we try not to have too much stuff in here.

I found a tennis group online that plays every other Saturday here by the hospital so I'm going to go play this morning with them. Should be fun. I demonstrated a tennis ball machine yesterday and put it almost up to maximum speed and feeding the plays every 3 seconds with a total of 45 balls. The machine oscillated so kept me moving and shaking. I was so tired after just one round. Luckily the machine wasn't fully charged and so it ran out of juice. Really, I ran out of juice before it did. Just trying to keep in good shape physically and mentally. We find that as we exercise, it keeps us in better, positive moods. Always trying to think and keep as positive as possible.

Jeannine and I talked about the hymn, How Firm a Foundation:

When through the deep waters I call thee to go, The rivers of sorrow shall not thee overflow; For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless, And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.

When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie, my grace all sufficient, shall be thy supply; the flame shall not hurt thee; I only design thy dross to consume, and thy gold to refine.

There are a lot of families that have children that are in much worse conditions than Jovee is here at the hospital. As for the deep waters that we are swimming in, barely keeping our heads above the water, we visualize those parents barely keeping anything above the deep waters of the trial, maybe just bobbing up and down. So we have to keep our heads up to give hope to those that are in deeper waters than us.

There's a really nice family from Whitefish, Montana. Brenda, the mother, was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and was at the tail end of chemotherapy treatments when they found out their 3 year old daughter had cancer. I didn't ask which one but imagine that double edge sword. Her husband can't be here with them because he has to keep working to keep insurance so she's got the 3 year old and a 2 year old and the husband has the 7 year old. She's a very, very good person; you can tell because of the good spirit that she has but she''s lost faith in God; I can tell because of the small conversations that we've had. So Jeannine and I try to keep positive when talking with her, keeping her positive about what she's going through and what we're going through. Just keep positive by trying to keep an eternal perspective.

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