First round completed

We made it!  Ramsy finished all 30 radiation treatments with no cancellations due to illness, closed highways, or fatigue!  Hooray!  He did finish up by getting some kind of stomach bug on Thursday night, so he felt terrible on Friday, but was determined to get to his last treatment.  When we got home at noon, he slept for pretty much the rest of the day, and it took him until this morning (Monday) to feel better.  He is thrilled to have a break from taking the chemo pills- they were starting to taste pretty gross to him.  He is also busy making plans in his head for this week, and next week, and next week.... he's trying to balance things he wants/needs to do with his continued need for rest.  We learn as we go, I tell you.  (Does anybody read Junie B. Jones?)

True story: I drove Ramsy to Winnipeg for his treatments twice a week, plus to numerous other appointments, as well as driving the kids to most of their lessons and so on, plus errands to Portage- all without accident or mishap.  Of course, Saturday night I drove down our alley to park in our driveway as I have done thousands of times, and completely miscalculated my turn.  Fencepost, meet van.  We have two lovely big scratches down the passenger side of the van.  Figures!

So we are now in a waiting period for 4 weeks with no radiation or chemo, so that the healthy tissues in Ramsy's body can recover from the treatment and the swelling around his tumor will go away.  His family doctor says that we will likely see more improvement in his symptoms as his body recovers over the next few weeks.  At the end of 4 weeks he will have an MRI (which the oncologist says will not really show any improvement, because there will still be swelling there.  It will be used as a standard to compare later MRIs to.) and then he will go back on the same chemo pills (temozolomide) on a schedule of 5 days on, 23 days off.  We are glad it's a drug that we already know, and that Ramsy had very few side effects with. 

We really have to finish off with more thanks to all of you who have been praying, doing errands, giving gifts of money, food, or other things, driving, talking with our kids, sending words of encouragement- we just cannot imagine doing this without you.  Thank you, thank you.