Happy Thanksgiving! 

I’ve written the start of several posts, but they’ve all been roughly the same level of whiney, so I’ve held off until I had something else to say. 

I’m just super thankful that little man is ok and that treatment is almost over and things will be close to normal for the holidays. I’m thankful our older son is over the flu that kept him home from school for an entire (scary) week – trying to keep them apart was an impossible nightmare. I’m thankful for family and friends who have helped us so much since the diagnosis. And I’m even thankful that both boys want me to chase them constantly because they both have enough energy to run around the house about two hundred times a day. I have to remind myself to be thankful for that one because I usually would rather just have a sit. 

Recent weeks have been tough because of delays and inescapable illnesses. We’re finally back on track with treatment, so in some ways, we’re feeling a lot more positive. He has less than 2 weeks to go, and we’re counting down by the dose. In other and more pressing ways, we just want this phase to be over. Something that nags from the back of my mind is that the next 2 weeks will get worse before they get better, sort of like the last phase when he lost all his hair, basically all at once about a week after he was done with steroids. It took me by surprise, the hair. I had been expecting it over the summer. I thought we were past the worst part when something like that might happen, so his hair falling out really made it hit home how intense this phase actually is for him. 

He fully recovered from the steroids just in time to start cytarabine and thioguanine, a couple of drugs designed to not let cancer ever come back. I want to be grateful for these drugs. Instead, it pisses me off how miserable they’re about to make him, sick to his stomach and exhausted. But the cancer coming back would be so much worse. Duh. Just need to keep this in mind constantly. 

Now I am sitting here with my family watching Sesame Street (because the beautiful game is “boring” according to the youths in this house), but I’m just relieved and grateful. We had a house full of family for Thanksgiving yesterday (though we missed our TX family though of course!), something we didn’t think we’d be able to do because of treatment and how it affects his immune system, but his immune system is still good BECAUSE of the delays! I’m not in any way saying “everything happens for a reason” because that statement makes me want to pull all of my hair out (sometimes things are just bad and terrible for no reason), but in this particular case, the delays helped us. And I can be thankful for that too.