I used to be angry with God.  How could He be so callous as to put so much love in me and not give me anyone to give it too?  I would try, but no one could hold the intensity in my eyes.  They would shrink from the energy in my touch.  They could not handle my burn.  I tried to drown my love with enough whisky that I could not feel it.   I tried to hide it.  I tried to convince myself that it was my destiny to be alone, to hold my love for all time.  Then I met you.

The first time I looked into your eyes you let me see into your soul.  When we touched you let my energy radiate through you.  You let me feel your heartbeat as I released my love upon you.  You did not pull away.  You did not find fear in my embrace, but found sanctuary enveloped in my love.  A love reserved only for you.

I am good at many things in my life.  I try and I work hard at whatever I may do.   I still don’t know what I am supposed to do in this life, but I do know that I am supposed to love you.  I always wondered what my true purpose in life was.    Why was I made to love so deeply?  Why does this fire burn within me only to be snuffed out?   Why was I made this way?  Then I realized I was made to love you.

No matter what else I do in life, no matter what happens to me.  My love for you will be my greatest accomplishment.  You are my reason for being here.  You are why I was made.  You are the love of my life.

ThenI met you, I found that my love was reserved only for you.  After all that time I realized that I was made for loving you.  You are the love of my life.  Let me fill you with my love, let me touch you with my soul; let me hold you until I can’t hold you anymore.  I am forever destined to be by your side.  I am yours forever! 

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.

December 27th,  2016

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas.  We had a great time with all of our families here at one time or another.  Santa was good to us all.  Tammy has been recovering well and has been in good spirits.  We received the go ahead to restart the trial last week and made some fast arrangements to get here yesterday for testing, doctor visit, and treatment today.

She had her CT scans this morning and we got the results back.  There are a couple of angry burgers that are causing some issues.  The biggest issue is that one is growing next to a rib and causing some pain.  On the CT it looked like maybe there could be a small fracture in the rib.  There is nothing right now that they can do about it except try to manage the pain.  The doctor said that sometimes with immunotherapy you can actually get some growth and then things will actually start shrinking.  That is what we are hoping for.  We all decided to give the trial one month and retest and then go on from there.  All of us are reaching out to all the doctors involved with Tammy ( here, home, MD Anderson, and anywhere else) to look for what the next option might be.  She still has one drug on the standard of care that she can go to which is Stivarga.  She will start radiation on her head on the ninth of January so this is a good time to keep trying the trial because she will have to have a wash out period after radiation anyway.  She will have five radiation treatments and will be done.  it will take about three weeks to get them all in.

January 2nd, 2017

At the end of last week we got a call from MD Anderson and they could get us in today to see her oncologist here.  We booked some quick flights on Friday and booked it down here for a quick trip.  Our flights were out of Kansas city and on the way there a nice officer stopped us to remind us that our tags were over due.  For some reason it has slipped our minds.  We continued on and made it here for her appointment today.  Here doctor here looked everything over and agrees that she should stay on the trial a little longer and see if it will work.  As of right now it is the best option.  If that doesn’t work then we will start looking at some radiation to the bigger spots to see if we can knock them down a little bit.

Tammy is looking at this as “bumps” in the road.  She is feeling really good except for the pain in her shoulder which hopefully the stuff they gave her will take care of.  She is one strong woman!  For me it is another step in the miracle, but it still makes me
angry and impatient.

We wish you all a great new year and all of the best in 2017.

Hello everyone, I just wanted to give you an update on how Tammy was doing.  I was somewhat vague with my last post and left everyone in suspense.  That wasn’t my intention, but it all happened so fast and we really didn’t have a lot of information at that time.  Over the last week we have been getting that information, trying to digest it, and trying to get the new plan in place .

The pathology on the tumor came back as colon cancer that has moved to the brain.  Colon cancer does not generally go to the brain and therefore is not usually screened like the rest of her body parts.  It does go there sometimes though.  Tammy’s oncologist told me that regular drugs for CRC (colorectal cancer) do not generally work in the brain so it is normal for her trial to be working in her lungs and a tumor growing in her head.  We are glad that this was not a new primary tumor.

Tammy’s surgery went really well.  After getting in there it only took seven minutes to remove the tumor.  I think by that time Tammy had willed it most of the way out.  She is recovering well.  She will start radiation on the twenty-sixth of December on her head.  We found out late this week that she will not be kicked out of the trial at this time and they are doing everything in their power to keep her in it.  The biggest hurdle right now is she has to be on steroids so her brain does not swell.  Steroids and immunotherapy drugs are not a good match so that is a hurdle that we are still trying to get through.  Hopefully next week we will find out when she can resume the trial.  Even though the brain is the main priority right now we have to continue to treat her lungs so that we don’t lose the gains that we have there.

I definitly wasn’t expecting to be fighting on two fronts right now, and this past week has been a whirlwind of emotion for me.  From “daring to believe,” to now, “finding my inner peace.”  The last five years have taken its toll on me and all of us, but I have tried to find the positive throughout it all.  We have no control over what is happening with the cancer so for me there is no inner peace.  I am in constant turmoil as my mind tries to “make is all better.”  Someday I will find that peace, but in the mean time I have discovered that what we cannot control still leaves us with options.  Turmoil does not forbid me to make the choice that today I will be happy.  Trials do not give me the right or the privilege to make someone else’s life worse too.  Our Circumstances may elevate us to greatness, but I will elevate my goodness in spite of my circumstances.  Kindness elevates everyone involved, and love  will carry you as far as you need or have to go.  Here is my wish for all of us.

My Christmas wish is that you find your inner peace.  I wish that we all make the choice to be happy despite our circumstances.  I wish that we choose not to be the storm, but the lighthouse that promises hope, warmth and kindness.  I wish that we love one another not in spite of our differences, but rather because of them.  I wish that we understand as a nation that we cannot heal through blame.  We have to understand that we heal through forgiveness.  I wish that no matter what happens to us, we let our love shine through us.

Merry Christmas

I have been wanting to write this for awhile.  As you all know from my last update for Tammy that this clinical trial has been working.  Since we found that out, “daring to believe” has been on my mind.  I often wonder what has allowed Tammy to fight cancer for so long.  For us it has always been kind of an unwritten rule that if you believe in something enough it will happen.  I can only contribute that to our wonderful parents that have instilled in us that anything is possible.  I’m sure some people look at our life and think that “it” what ever that is, comes easy to us.  I think that because we dare to believe in whatever we are doing, sometimes it just makes it look easy.

Sometimes it is very hard to believe.  Doubt and fear are very hard to beat.  It is so easy to give up.  I have found that every day for the last seven weeks that I must dare myself every day to believe that this is going to keep working and that everything will be ok.  This isn’t the first time we have been in this situation.  I have really lost track of how many times we have been here, but I know that if you don’t believe to begin with, it will never happen.  So as you walk out the door today I need you to do me a favor.  What ever is happening in your life, please, dare to believe.  Believe that you will be successful, believe that you will be happy, believe in whatever you need to.   Just, “dare to believe.”

This week has been a definite test, and we have had to do a double dare.  Thursday night I took Tammy to the emergency room.  She had a really bad headache earlier in the day.  She took some advil and felt a little better.  Around twelve am she woke up with another severe headache, with nausea and dizziness.  She said she didn’t feel right and we needed to go to the emergency room.  We only ran two red lights, but we got there.  They did a ct scan of her head and found that she has a lesion on her cerebellum that is causing her problems.  They gave her medicine for the pain and some steriods for the swelling that the lesion was causing.  Yesterday she felt better and is doing okay.  I am at the hospital now with family and friends.  She is getting prepped for brain surgery where they will hopefully remove the lesion entirely.

This was definitely a surprise to us.  No matter how many times we get news like this it never gets easier.  It always seems surreal.  It can’t be happening to us.  We don’t know how this will affect her clinical trial yet but this problem has to be addressed first.  After her surgery today she will have to stay in ICU over night tonight and then be in the hospital until Monday or Tuesday.

Today I am daring myself to believe.  Daring myself to believe that she will be okay and this is just another step in her miracle.  Daring myself to believe that this is God’s plan and he knows what he is doing.  I believe, and so it will be done!!!

Hello from St. Louis.  I am sure Tammy feels like this is her second home.  She has spent almost every Sunday and Monday here for the last six or eight weeks.  Everything has been going well for the most part.  She did have a pretty major reaction to the drug on her second go round, but after talking with Doctors here and at home she decided that she would try it again.  They gave her the drug slower and added some extra premeds and it worked.

Morgan, Tucker and Tammy flew here on Friday night so Tammy could be here for her CT scan on Saturday morning. Then they had some play time. They went to the zoo and the arch.I dropped them off at the airport on Friday night in Wichita and then drove to Lawrence to spend Saturday with Tanner for Dads day for his fraternity.  We had a good day Saturday and then I drove on to St. Louis to be with Tammy for our first results of the trial.  Like normal we were pretty nervous so the distractions definitely helped.

As a side note, I am sitting here in the lobby with the kids and an older gentleman just rang the bell.  You get to ring the bell when you are cancer free.  There is always a lot of clapping and cheering.  Miracles do happen!

So what did we find out today?  The trial is working,  Many of the smaller nodules have shrunk and the larger ones are stable.  Good news!  Chalk one up for the home team!

Tammy is finishing up her treatment now and then we will hop in the car for a short six-hour drive home.  Its back to the daily grind of work and school for another two weeks until we get to come back.

One final thought.  In this time of anger and turmoil in this country, I need you all to remember something very important.  If you smile at someone they will more than likely smile back at you.  You have more in common with the person you disagree with than what separates you.  I made my choice.  Today, I think I will just smile!

Thank you for all of the support and prayers.