Last Day!!

Today was the last day of radiation!!!

We went out to celebrate.  First Mark had a fasting blood draw.  After that Mark and I went out to breakfast.  Then we met his family at the office for his last radiation treatment!  My mom and sister had come with our kids on Friday, but Mark's parents were out of town, so they came today.  It was pretty much the last chance we had to let people see what was going on.  I usually wait in the lobby and work on a puzzle or read a book or watch TV, as do pretty much all of the guests of the patients while they're in treatment, so they're not used to having visitors back in the radiation area.  The nurses were very patient with us invading their work area.

Then we came home and promptly took a nap!  :)

After feeling a little more refreshed, we continued to tackle our shed.  When we moved in we had a ton of boxes that had just moved with us from place to place and had never really been gone through.  While moving might sound like a great time to go through stuff, it's actually rather full of lots of other stress, so we just ignored the already packed boxes one more time.  Our shed was so full you could barely open the door. There was stuff in there from who knows how long ago, and stuff that really did not need to be saved and not all of it was well organized at all.  There was also lots of stuff that we had shoved in there intending to go through it later  - that hadn't happened yet.

So, while my mom was in town, we commissioned her assistance to help go through it.  She has some strange un-earthly amount of energy.  I have no idea where she gets it from, but I occasionally find it useful to take advantage of.

The shed has been a project that's been going on for a week or two now, and we are finally almost to the end.  Going through the kids' clothes took several days.  Mom and Katie were troopers and went through most of the new clothes for me (I had already gone through, organized and bagged TONS of clothes a year of so ago, but we had acquired several bags/boxes of new clothes since then that needed to be sorted).  They also boxed everything up (not in bags anymore!) and put it back in the shed in an organized manner.  No more bags of clothes everywhere, ripping every time we move it to see what's behind it to find the right size!  Exciting!

We have made 3 trips to donate stuff, have quite a large pile of stuff for the trash that might take more than one week to get rid of, emptied and broken down more boxes than will fit in our recycle bin, emptied more boxes that still need to be broken down, and we now have quite a bit of empty shelf space in the shed!  There is still some stuff in the house that needs to be organized and re-packed and put back in the shed, but as of tonight, all of the boxes have been gone through!

So, anyways, we had started to make a bit more progress on the rest of the stuff in the shed early this afternoon, but then got a call from some old friends that required us to stop what we were doing and go visit them!  Who passes up a chance to visit old friends?  Not us!  Mark stayed with the kids while Mom, Katie and I went to met them at a nearby restaurant and chatted all afternoon and finally decided we needed to leave when we noticed we were about to be late for our dinner plans.

Last night, as we were realizing that we needed to do something to celebrate Mark being done with radiation, we could not come up with anything to do.  It did not help that it was late at night and everyone was exhausted.  Finally, in our exhausted, not wanting to put much energy into anything, barely thinking state, we decided we could go out to dinner!  (yeah, super original, I know - but we were tired, and let's be honest - letting someone else cook and clean up is always on the menu!)  We were on a bit of a time crunch with various schedules that needed to be considered, so we pulled ourselves away from a fun time talking and catching up at one restaurant and moved onto the next one for the day.

And that's about it.  I can tell that it's late and my brain is not functioning at full capacity.  I'm pretty sure I told that story backwards, starting with the middle and working my way to the beginning, with random trips to the end on the way...  I hope you still get the idea:

Mark is done with radiation!!  :D



Because he's technically in a study (he's the control group, so he's just getting standard treatment, but he's part of the study anyways) he will have an MRI in 4 weeks.  The doctors are fairly certain that this MRI will not be overly helpful.  If it were up to them, they'd wait and do a 3 month MRI.  His brain should still have swelling from radiation after only 4 weeks so they likely won't be able to determine much.  The good news is that we already know what the doctors will say.  The test will come back inconclusive due to swelling.  :)

The study wants an MRI every 2 months for the first year and every 4 months for the second year and every 6 months after that, so we have our marching orders for the next while.  That will be the plan unless things change with his tumor.




Mark has been doing super well!  Most people who see him at church and other places are amazed at how well he's doing.  Aside from being a tiny bit slower physically (and I really mean a tiny bit) and having a rather large scar on his head, it would be hard to guess that he had brain surgery less than 3 months ago.  He has been working one shift a week at his old job (just one shift, it's not what he used to work, but it's good for him to be working, even if it's just a little bit right now) and he is back to school and getting going with an (unpaid...) internship again.

He is also picking up a lot of the slack that I can't do anymore.  (Gotta love my pregnancies!  Just a few more months until I can fully function again.  Yea!!  Too bad it will get worse before it gets better.  October sounds so far away still...)  Mark is amazing with the kids, does more cooking than I do, does bed time more often than me, and willingly does both big and small errands for me, just so I don't have to - and I think because it's helping get his body used to doing stuff again and using muscles that have been dormant for a while.

Mark even ran for the first time since his surgery!  We were at Cabella's looking at tents for my parents for our upcoming camping trip.  While waiting outside for all the kids to finish with (annoyingly uncoordinated!) bathroom trips, he decided to race the kids to the end of the store.  Turns out he can't outrun them yet...  But it was so fun to see him running again!  He only made one trip up and back willingly.  I came out of a second (or third) bathroom trip with some child at the tail end of his run, and was so sad that I missed it!  I wanted to see this new skill, so I convinced him that I needed a picture for memories' sake.  He did it again just for me, but that was as much as his body could handle for one adventure.



And now, I am going to see if sleep will help this headache I've been fighting all day.  Good night!  I am very much looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow with no treatment to go to in the morning!