Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone is enjoying a blessed Christmas. We feel very blessed to have time to spend together in relative health. I continue to feel good and the treatment continues to progress very well. We feel particularly blessed this year with so much love and support from so many people. Thank you all.

It is Christmas Eve morning, and we are getting ready to head down to Toledo to spend the day with Megan's family. We will be in Grosse Ile tomorrow with my family. The weather here is cold and snowy, so I hope all of you that are travelling will do so safely.

I had a round of Bleomycin yesterday morning. The metallic taste is back, and my stomach is a little uneasy, but still no real nausea or sickness. Thank God for that. I had my blood drawn, again, and my white blood cell count was 3.2. That is below normal, but still pretty good. I suspect that it will continue to drop as the week goes on. They also checked my bleeding time. My INR (International Normalized Ratio for bleeding time) was 2.47. This is much better than it was last week, so the Coumadin is doing it's job of thinning my blood. I have had no further symptoms of the blood clot. It may still be there but it is not giving me any trouble.

This round of chemo has made me much more tired, but it has also affected my ability to sleep at night. A frustrating combination for sure. Some nights I sleep right through without even hearing Ethan's cries, other nights I am wide awake and only get a couple hours of actual sleep. Add to that the increased fatigue from the chemo and I have had some pretty lazy afternoons. Of course, it could be worse.

Below are a couple pictures from chemo yesterday. We took Ethan with us because all of the nurses were asking to see him. It was only an hour and a half appointment yesterday, so a good one for him to sit through.

I hope you all are doing well, and have a very Merry Christmas.