You would think that I would be used to this view by now.

Every time seems like it’s a surprise though.  Our expectation is that everything will always get better.  When things go the wrong way there is always something surreal about it, which is crazy because we live it everyday.  If you have not heard, Tammy’s first back surgery did not take.  She was doing really good and then boom everything turned and she started heading the wrong direction again.  Her pain started to ramp up again.  The last two weeks she has been in extreme pain and back to not being mobile again, spending days and nights in the sanctuary of the recliner where she could find a small amount of relief.

She had been in contact with her surgeon and today she finally had her appointment.  Dr. Whitlow is great doctor and a great person.  After he saw her and looked through her MRI he generously got her into surgery this afternoon.  Basically he did the same surgery over.  The same disc had ruptured again.  There is always a small chance that this might happen, and wouldn’t you know it Tammy was one of the lucky ones.  She is resting now.  She is still in some pretty good pain but Dr. Whitlow is hoping that after a few days the nerve will settle back down.  We hope that happens as well.

Its been a pretty crazy week so far.  Our oldest daughter Kylee has been having issues all summer also.  Mainly battling nausea and some pain and discomfort in her abdomen.  After running multiple tests to try to figure out what was wrong, it was determined that is was her gall bladder that was acting up.  Monday, she had surgery to remove it.  She is recovering well so far and is starting to feal much better.  Wow, Its only Wednesday.

Tired is really the only word that comes to mind right now.  I know Tammy is tired of the pain.  I know it is just exhausting for her to live with it every day.  For me, I am just tired.  Mentally and physically we are both pretty run down.  For now we will keep doing what we always do.  We will keep moving forward.  We got knocked back a step or two but we are still here.  As Rocky said,  “It’s not how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit , and keep moving forward.  That’s how winning is done.”  So that is what we are going to do,  Keep moving forward.

Thank you all for your unending support.  We will get through this, and a big part of the reason we are so confident is because we know that there are thousands of you holding us up when we don’t think we have enough strength to hold ourselves up.  We love you all, thank you.

Thank you for all of the wonderful prayer, comments, and support.  We came home from the hospital late this morning.  Surgery went very well and Tammy is recovering very well.  As soon as we were able to see her it was all smiles and the giddiness of a kid in a candy store.  For the first time in many months she was pain-free.  She has some discomfort in the area of the incision and an occasional back spasm, but that is all.

Going forward she will start her chemo in three days.  Her total recovery from surgery is expected to be eight weeks before she is fully back to normal.  She has lung scans scheduled for the beginning of August to see what been going on in there.  Her CEA has been inching up over the last couple of months but she has been on and off her chemo a lot because of side-effects and sickness.

We really don’t know what to expect in the coming days and months.  As usual life has been a roller-coaster of up and downs.  For a while now it seems that something else has come up right after she gets one thing figured out.  Right now we are just going to live for the moment that we are in, cherishing each second, minute, hour, and day that she does not have to fight through any pain.  Whatever happens tomorrow, will happen no matter how much we try to plan for it, escape it, or fear it.  Tonight as you lay down to go to sleep do me a favor.  Be deliberate, be specific, and be thankful for everyone in your life.

Hello Merica, on this pretty loud fourth of July night.  I hope you enjoyed this seemingly endless holiday weekend.  I haven’t put out any updates for a while.  May was pretty busy with Kylee graduating and Tanner moving home.  Kylee is going on to Bethany in the fall and will play basketball.  August is going to be fun and I’m sure emotional for us as we have to move #1 and #2 into dorm rooms and houses.  This summer has been pretty uneventful as summer sports for the oldest two have dwindled away.  Morgan has been busy working and playing softball.  We haven’t made it too much softball but we are surrounded by a wonderful crew who have taken up some slack and helped her get to where she needed to be.  Tucker has been spending a lot of time home with Tammy and Kylee.  Kylee has been home most of the summer helping Tammy get things done around the house, entertaining her little brother and getting him anywhere he needs to go.

I think the last post left off after eye surgery and a good report about her lungs.  We were hoping to ride a nice plateau for a while and it has somewhat worked out that way as far as the cancer in her lungs go.  Some side effects have been causing some issues along the way.  I would like to say that the last two months have been great, but I probably would not go that far.  After her eye surgery things were going pretty well.  She had started her chemo up and was going along good.  She got some kind of infection and they put her on antibiotics.  She was on them for a week or so and developed very large blisters on her feet and hands.  They were very painful and she ended up in a wheel chair for a bit.  They took her off all chemo and changed antibiotics.  They started to get better and after another week or so she could start to get back on her feet and be mobile again.  She started chemo up again and after a week or so the blisters started to come back.  After this second time they decided that it was the chemo causing the problems and since then she takes the chemo until she starts to get symptoms and then takes a break for a week or so and then starts it back up.  She can stay on them close to two weeks and then she stops.

She continues to be on steroids everyday.  She tried to stop them at one point and she started to spiral down in the energy department.  Everyone thought it best to keep her on  it.  It’s a pretty small dose everyday, but without it she does not have any energy.  She has had a few infections in the last few months, but has fought through them for the most part and in general has felt okay,  except, that she has been fighting with a sciatic nerve issue for about four months.  Over the last few months this has been getting worse and at this time has made her pretty immobile.  She has had three epidural shots and nothing seems to be getting any better.  After meeting with her neurosurgeon for a check up he told her that he could fix her back problem.  So here we are now on the eve of another surgery.  Tomorrow at 2:30 hopefully she will finally get some relief.

Our brains are pretty amazing when it comes to pain.  It shoots out pain responses to tell us that something is wrong, or that we are injured, but after we are healed it kind of deletes it from our memory.  We forget about how much pain we were once in and some of us do the same stupid thing again.  We heal up and once again we simply forget.  Here a month or so ago I had a very large abscess under my chin.  It was very painful, but a month later I really don’t remember the pain.  I know it hurt, but I don’t remember the pain.  For many people they do not have this luxury.  Pain is a constant.  Pain is their life.  I have been all around the spectrum about Tammy’s pain and how I can help her deal with it.  Anger, sadness, frustration, you name it, I’ve felt it.  When I think about how she deals with it, the only thing that comes to mind is courage.  Courage to face another day through the pain.  My biggest struggle someday’s is to find my own courage, But how can I let my courage falter when she doesn’t.  That brings us to Grace.

Tammy has fought this battle with enough Grace for all of us.  I have been struggling with what I needed to say in my next update.  This is probably why I have put it off for a while.  For some reason Grace came to mind tonight.  I realized that I have been waiting for Grace to cover us, maybe just to cover me, I don’t know.  I realized through Tammy’s grace through pain that maybe sometimes it does not come straight to us.  I realized that I should not be waiting for grace.  Sometimes I am the receiver and sometimes I am the messenger for someone else.  Grace is a pretty complicated word.  Sometimes I need to extend it, sometimes I need to receive it.  I know I am not making much sense, but I know we are always covered by it.  Tomorrow is going to be a very good day.  I hope when she wakes up she is pain-free.  I can’t wait to see her smile that is not pushed through the pain.  I can’t wait to see her after her “Independence day. “

Hello from Kansas City.  We finally made it.  I am sitting in the waiting room of a surgical center while Tammy is back finally getting the surgery on her eye.  It has been a long road to get here but hopefully in about another hour we will finally have some answers to the mystery bumps that are around her right eye.

This surgery was supposed to be on February 20th in Wichita.  A few days before the surgery the doctor called and said that there was another lesion a little deeper and he was not comfortable doing the surgery.  He did give us another lead to a opthomoligist in Kansas City and so here we are three weeks later.  Hopefully by the time I get done with this I will have some information for you as to what is really going on up there.

Many of you have probably heard or were wondering about Tammy being in the

hospital this past weekend.  We received lots of messages asking why Tammy was not at Kylee’s signing for Bethany.  Last week turned into a burger for her.  The week before she had finally got through her steroid taper and was looking forward to being off of them for a while.  In the mean time she had upped her dose of stivarga(chemo).  She was having quite a few side affects after they bumped up the dose and last week it seemed that she was getting weaker by the day.  The last straw was Friday morning.  She was supposed to have an MRI and a follow-up with her brain surgeon at nine-thirty.  I called to make sure she was ready to go for her mom and dad and she said that she had cancelled the appointments.  She said that she didn’t think she had enough energy to do those and get to Kylee’s signing.  That was ok with me because I knew she was tired.  The tipping point for me was when I called to make sure that they were ready to leave for the signing and she said she could not do it.  She didn’t have enough strength to get up and get there.  As soon as she hung up I called the doctor’s office and told them that we had to do something.  Things were just not right.  We got through the signing.  Tammy did get to watch the whole thing via Skype.  Thanks Jeff for the play by-play.

It was decided that the best course of action was to head to the emergency room and hopefully get her admitted.  Our ultimate goal was to get her strong enough for the surgery today.  Long story short, her cortisol levels were very low again.  She was dehydrated and had some kind of infection somewhere that was going on.  So IV was started, steroids started, and stronger antibiotic started.  It was amazing, by the hour she started to perk up.  She just kept getting better and better over the course of two days.  The comeback kid had done it again.  She is still weak, but there is no comparison.  She came home Sunday to rest up for the big trip to KC and here we are.

Many of you have followed, played  with, coached, been coached by, taught by or watched Tammy through-out her life.  Even if you have just played cards (Chad Calahan) against Tammy you know that she has a very strong will to compete.  It goes even beyond competing.  Tammy wants to win.  If she has taught or coached you at some point you know the intensity that she possesses.  She has a singular focus to do the things that need to be done to win.  She expects it out of herself, and if you are part of her team, she expects it out of you also.  Tammy is going to beat this one way or another because she doesn’t know how to lose.  She is the comeback kid because she believes in it with a passion.  She will not give up.  If you are a part of her team, she will never give up on you.  Never count her out, because with will and passion all things are possible.

I just met with Dr.  Got both lesions out.  We will know pathology hopefully by Friday.  Thank you for all of the support.  In the hospital Tammy had a few surprise visitors.  a former student and then a friend that came all the way from Seattle.  Thank you both for taking the time to come see her.  We love you all.

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!!!