Fort Fun!!

We went to Fort Collins this last weekend to see Chris, Jeremy's little brother. We sold him our XTerra while we were there. We went to New Belgium with him and my brother Matt. Then we went to Coopersmiths. It was a really fun night!

The next day Jeremy found a Jeep he really liked...so we bought it!! We saved a bunch of money on it too!! How cool is that! Here's the new Jeep!! Isn't it pretty!!

Durango!

My parents took me and Jer, Shanna, Dave, Eva, Matt, and Sarah to Durango for a four day weekend. We stayed at an awesome condo and had so many fun plans!! Unfortunatly the day before I was at work and got this NASTY stomach virus. I got so sick!! I was hiding behind my teacher desk while my kids were listening to a book on tape puking my guts out. YUCK. I threw up over and over that day and was sick until Sunday. It was a bummer because we had to miss out on a lot. I did make it down to Durango though and we still managed to have fun. We went out to a fancy dinner to celebrate Valentine's Day and my 26th.

The guys went snowmobiling, the girls got massages, and it was a blast.

On our way back from Durango we went to Pagosa Springs. Those are the sweetest hot springs ever!

Afterwards we went to lunch. Eva was sticking her finger in Matt's nose and ears and then laughing so much...she is the adorable. Eva does this thing where she gives you a nose rub and a cheek rub, its hillarious!

Thoughts...

I am about to turn twenty six next week. I am contmplating how entirely old I feel. Being around kids who were born the year I graduated from high school makes me feel really old! I can't believe how much I have experienced in life up to this point. Its amazing really...how much there still is to do...hmmmm
Jeremy and I are doing pretty well. After the bomb shell news of Jeremy's parents getting divorced settled in (it still is) we started to really feel like Woodland Park is no longer the best place for us. We love our jobs we love how beautiful it is but this past year put such a black mark on this place. We are so ready for a change. We looked into moving to Alaska, and ruled it out because of no sunlight...yikes. Then we looked into a program that would take us to Antarctica (whats with the poles? and ice? ask Jer) but they wouldn't take me because of the cancer stuff. So then we started to think about what we want most...we want to be closer to our friends, family, and a church that we love. We want to move back to Denver.
Too bad its pretty crappy timing for that. The economy is terrible. We are looking and hoping that something will open up but yet again God has us in this limbo place where we don't know where we are going. We feel like we are waiting for the next answer. Hoping that God will shed some light, show us where to step, but so far nothing.
Maybe its because we are looking in all the wrong places? Who knows?

Oh and I went back to masters classes mostly because I wanted it to look good on my resume but I took on way too much and have been drowning in the work load. I am thankful each time I look at my classes though...I am thankful that I can even do it again. Amazing how God gives things back to us...

In the meantime...I got a call from my oncologists office reminding me that I need to get my next CT scan ASAP. I am dreading it. I know I should be one of those wonderful people who feels no fear, has no anxiety, and is totaly confident that God wouldn't do that to me again....but I am not one of those people. I am sure the day I go in for the scan I will be so nervous I will be sweating bullets. I know I have no control over what they do or don't find but I can't help but wonder. But it doesn't do any good to worry so until that day comes... I am going to try to ignore that reality in my life, turn 26, and pretend like I can eat whatever I want to for now...blissful ignorance. Maybe I'll get that tatoo I've been wanting...
This weekend we are going to Durango with my family for 4 days. My parents got us all a condo for the weekend. I am sure we will have lots of stories and pictures when we get back! Until then...

Favorite First Grade Quotes

Gotta love first graders...

A little boy walking out of the bathroom saw a picture of the political candiates and said to his friend "John McCain will steal all your money."

Saying the pledge of allegiance "I pledge allegiance to the flag....one nation IN God, Under- is- a- ble. With lizbery and justice for all."

Our superentindant visits the school regularly... walking through a first grade classroom in his suit and tie a little boy looked up at him and said "Are you John McCain?" He laughed and said "I wouldn't want that job!"

I looked on the spelling list on Friday morning before the spelling test and realized that "bong" was one of the spelling words. Try using that in a sentence! All I could think of was drug accessories. YIKES!

Teaching the other day I went to sit on the stool by my overhead projector and slid right off of it! The kids looked at me in total shock. :) I am such a dork!

"Are you voting for Obama?" A little girl in pink said to her friend. Her friend said "Yeah." "Well I can't be your friend then." (Isn't that sad that kids think they can't get along with another child because of their parents political views! What are we teaching our kids!? We later talked about being friends no matter who you vote for.)

Walking back into class from recess the class is quietly getting ready to start the math lesson. "Sam peed his pants in the lunchroom!" A little girl blurted.

They always keep me on my toes. Its amazing what their little minds think of.

One foot in front of the other

I was slowly getting better. We went for our post op appointment and we had to see a different doctor. He went over the whole pathology report and talked again about the problem of there being abnormal cells in the blood vessels. He wanted to do CT scans every six weeks once I was all healed and really monitor me closely. The team of surgeons were going to take my case to the tumor pannel in the springs. This is a pannel of doctors who all work with gastrointestinal tumors. He told me that he wished that he could tell me that this was all over, all behind me but he couldn't. I felt really unsettled. I didn't feel like there was a closed door there was still a question in my mind about what was happening. It was all really hard to understand. In hindsight I can see that this team of surgeons had never seen this kind of mass with the behavior that my mass had. Its such a rare type of mass that there was not much research and NO research with the types of traits that mine had.
I started working with a nutritionist to help with all of the digestion problems that came with having this surgery. She put me on a low glycemic gluten free diet which made a huge improvement in my energy levels, and with digesting food again. It was a huge change and it was and is a really difficult process. It doubled our food bill month after month but I am finally figuring out the tricks to it (thanks Lynn and Auntie Gay).

Food is such a social entity. I have felt really isolated and misunderstood by a lot of people because of the change in my diet. People who dont understand tease me about my weight, how picky I have to be, and ask if I have eating disorder problems. People are so judgemental when they don't understand that if I was to eat like most people I would be sick, and with out energy most of the time, and feeding the cancer cells in my body. I have a great quality of life when I make these better choices. I feel so amazing compared to how I felt before I started it. I have tried synthetic enzymes to help break food down but it just makes me feel awful. So by making these different, somewhat strange eating choices I can live healthy and strong and not let cancer win.
In August I got to see my brother graduate from BASIC. It was a hard trip for me but it was so good to be with the family and see all that he had accomplished.

I went back to work with a huge amount of help from my sisters, mom, jeremy, and friends. I could never have gotten my classroom set up with out all of their help. My friends Chaela and Sara were there the first weeks of school and beyond to take my class, give me extra breaks, help me teach lessons, and start the school year. It was really difficult to go back to work. The emotion of reliving all that had happened with everyone from work was a lot to handle. I found myself just wanting to feel normal but I wasn't.
Jeremy and I started having some pretty serious marital problems at this point. It was brought on by a lot of the problems we were facing and other things were being uncovered. We got some counseling and that gave us a lot of tools to work through things.

September came with more sadness. Jeremy's sweet grandma Elnora started to decline. She never recovered. Later in September she passed away. It was extreemly sad to loose such a dear person to us all. The day of her funeral I had an apointment with my surgeon to go over my latest CT scan.

It was clear but she had some hard news. She said that they had discussed my case at the tumor pannel. Rather than calling it an ok mass they started to refer to it as a low grade malignant tumor. The problem was that the cancer is in my blood. She said that we needed to see and oncologist to discuss options for chemo and radiation. She said that the cancer could come back in my lungs, liver, lymphnodes, bones, or again on my pancreas and if it did they would cut it out again. She expected this CT scan to be clear becuase this is a really slow growing mass so it may not show up anywhere for years.
We went to the funeral, put on the dinner for the family, and left to celebrate our 2 anniversary in Breckenridge.
When we got back we saw an oncologist in the springs. She was shocked at how long it had taken us to get into see her. She reviewed my case, did some research, and decided to send us to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas. She thought that by getting into one of the bigger cancer centers I would be able to get in front of a pancreatic specialist. She left it up to them to decide whether I would get chemo and radiation. She was not comfortable with doing radiation at that point because there were many places that the cancer could show back up. And by radiating the pancreas would not guarantee that it wouldn't come back.
It took me three grueling weeks to try to get an answer from MD Anderson. They were so SO AWFUL to work with. Every time I called I had to wait on the phone for 45 mins to a hour just to talk to someone. Once you got someone on the phone they were rude and transfered you all over the place and then eventually you would get hung up on. IT WAS TERRIBLE. And I was trying to do all of it while I was working because they were closed by the time I got home. Parents from my class started complaining to my principal. They made me jump through so many hoops trying to get in to see a specialist and in the end they wouldn't take my case.
So I went and saw a pannel of doctors at University Hospital in Denver. On Monday we went in thinking that we were going to see the pannel and we got scheduled with just one Radiation Oncologist. Like most people she kind of flipped out when she learned of the details of my case wanting to do a lot more tests and scans. They took more blood. She reiterated that we should have been in to see them weeks after the surgery rather than months. They gave us a lot of information regarding treatments. It was pretty frightening. The next day she scheduled us with the pannel. We went in and sat in a room with 3 oncologists, 2 med students, and a nurse. They all discussed my case and explained that there are 2 routes that they consider. The first is a survaillance route where they monitor me really closely for several years and then intermitten for the rest of my life. The other was using radiation and chemo and such to treat the cancer. In my case they decided that the survaillance was the best option. They were hopefull that I wouldn't have to deal with this cancer again. But also highly suggested staying on the diet that I am on and getting CT's every six months for 2 years. They also said that I shouldn't get pregnant for several years. They said this is going to be a part of my life but hopefully I can move on from it and get back to my life. They told me to eliminate as much stress as possible. But most of all they gave us some sense that we had done all that we could to be proactive about fighting the cancer and the rest was up to God.
So here we are. October. Our train is derailed. A lot of the dreams that Jeremy and I had as a couple are not possible right now. Slowly and with a lot of support and prayer we are getting back on our feet. Wrestling with God. Finding that he gives new desires, and dreams for our lives when the others get taken away. We don't quite know where we are going to end up in the long run but we are really open right now. We are paitently working through our struggles as a team and eventually I think God is going to show us what he has for us. We'll let you know when he does.