Hello everyone,  I am sorry for taking so long to get an update out.  I know that a lot of you have been wondering why she hasn’t been in school or out and about.  If we have learned nothing else from cancer, we have learned patients.  Its been a long story and we have been waiting on answers.  We don’t have them all, but hopefully I can give you enough information that you will understand.

In the last update I told you that there has been growth.  She does have a rib that is fractured due to one of the tumors that is next to it.  It can become very painful at times, but she can control it pretty well with medications.  At the time of my last post we were giving the trial one month to see if it was going to work or not.  It went pretty well for about a week and then Tammy started feeling bad, had a lot of pain, was nauseous, not eating and was extremely tired.  For two weeks she stayed in bed as we tried to figure out what was going on.  We finally had an appointment with her oncologist here and he narrowed it down to problems with the adrenal glands not producing cortisol.  The blood test showed she had none in her body.  So he put her on a high dose of steroids to try to counter act.  If you have seen her wearing a mask it is because of the high dose steroids.  They really affect your immune system so she has to be careful.  Last week we went to St. Louis for testing.  Things have progressed more so they removed her from the trial.  She has been doing her radiation to her head, and somewhere in this time frame a bump started to form over her right eye.  She has seen several doctors to try to figure this one out.  It needs biopsied but no one wants to do it.  The proximity to the eye is what is scaring everyone away.  She has an appointment next Tuesday with an ophthalmologist in Wichita.  At this point no one knows what it is.  The MRI is inconclusive.  It could just be a fluid pocket from all of the steroids.  Hopefully next week we will be able to find out.  She is starting to feel better with the steroids and has been to a few of the kids games.  She doesn’t have a lot of stamina yet but hopefully that will come.  Her treatment for right now will be Stivarga.  It is a pill that she can take at home.  They say that it can pack a pretty good punch so we will see.  She also started some high dose vitamin C treatments in Wichita.

I would be lying if I said that the last month has been easy.  It was not.  It was an emotional and physical roller coaster for all of us.  There were some long nights, long weeks and long days.  I have written some about hills and valleys in some of my stories and this was definitely a long steep hill.  Hope fully we are getting up to the top and will have a nice plateau to rest and gather our light.

I really don’t know how start this next section so bear with me as I stumble though it.  As I sit here and try to write I am humbled and speechless.  I can not describe how low life gets us sometimes,  but in the same breath I can not describe to you what love from every direction feels like.  I really don’t know how to begin to thank all of you.  Thank you for lifting us up when we are down.  You have all done so much that it is too much for me even to list here.  We are so blessed to have all of you around us.  Just writing the words seem so meaningless, because you all have had such a meaningful and profound affect on our life.  For us, You are the meaning of what a good life is.  A good life is, “A life full of US.”  All of us together.