The past four months…

Once again I've been bad about keeping the blog up to date, so I'll try to give an overview of the past few months with Mom and the fam.

First an update on Mom… since September she has had four rounds of chemo. Each round is five days then she has

23 days off. The chemo is in pill format so she is able to take them at home before she goes to bed. The chemo definitely wears her down the week she is taking the meeds and the following week.

On December 9th, she had her checkup at Duke. Dr. D was very excited with the progress as the grade 3 portion of the tumor is shrinking from the chemo. She changed Mom's meds around some to try to help out with the headaches Mom was having. Dr. D also wanted Mom to get back into exercising more, which we all loved to hear. Mom's next appointment at Duke is February 24th.

Unfortunately, we rang in the new year with a trip to the ER. New Year's Eve we started our vacation at Massanutten and Mom's meds got messed up a little. She took an extra dose of one of the meds, which resulted in a very drunk sounding Mom. To be on the safe side we went to the ER for a CT scan just to make sure nothing else was going on. The scan was fine and within a few hours Mom was sounding a lot less drunk.

Mom finished her most recent round of chemo this past Tuesday and had been feeling pretty rough. She hadn't been able to eat for several days so Dad took her to her local oncologist yesterday for an IV of fluid. The doctor decided it was best to have her stay at the hospital so they could monitor her. They are currently treating her for pneumonia and it looks like she'll spend the weekend at Lewis Gale.

What the family has been up to…

Matt and I spent a week in Australia! I was lucky enough to get a paper accepted at the Requirements Engineering conference, which just happened to be in Sydney this year so I had to go present it. (I know… such a rough life ;) ) We were able to add a few vacation days before the conference and had a chance to explore Sydney and venture out to the Blue Mountains.

Along with presenting in Australia, I had the opportunity to go back to Roanoke College and give a talk. Since it was the first time I'd presented my work close to home I had a very large fan club :)

We now have a doctor in the family! On December 10th Matt had his PhD defense. He did an amazing job and his whole committee was very impressed.

Matt has accepted a job at MIT Lincoln Lab and will be moving up to Boston next month.

We had a great Christmas at home with all of the family in. Before Christmas we spent a weekend with Karla and Jason and were able to see Karla's job site. We spent a week at Massanutten snowboarding :) We also celebrated Jason's 30th birthday with a great surprise party that Karla planned.

We are looking forward to going home next weekend to celebrate Mom's 50th birthday. We are hoping to keep this birthday hospital free.

Oh yeah! Mom's hair is growing back and looks super cute.

jdy