Hello again!

Hi there, readers!  We are back in cyberspace after a couple of weeks.  I was busy with numerous forms that had to be filled out and other life sundries and just never seemed to get to the blog.  Sorry for the long silence!  (On the subject of forms, I had to laugh this week when I got three new forms sent to me in response to one I sent away last week, thinking it was the last one I'd have to do for some time.  Too bad I don't get paid by the page!)

Ramsy saw his doctor today in preparation for the next round of chemo, scheduled to start Wednesday.  For the first time, his platelet count is iffy- 97 instead of the usual minimum level of 100 (I don't really know 100 what, but that's the number).  He will have the level checked on Tuesday to see if it has edged up to the magic number.

We have not seen the improvement in his speech or strength in his leg that we hoped to see this week.  It is quite difficult for Ramsy to talk most days, with the odd day of getting whole sentences out in a row.  We recently met a woman who also has a brain tumor in the same location, and she too says that sometimes she can see the words in her mind's eye, but just can't enunciate them.  Ramsy is being incredibly patient with this difficulty, but sometimes it is just really frustrating.  I find that quite often I can guess what he is wanting to say, but sometimes we laugh at how far off I am in some guesses!

And, in the category of "Strange but True", we discovered a couple of weeks ago that our guinea pig had... a tumor!  It was growing on his underbelly and was already the size of an apricot!  We took him to the vet, who operated to remove the tumor, but guinea pigs are notoriously delicate when it comes to anesthetic and our poor "Piggy" died.  He was a noble and friendly beast (as the vet put it, "He doesn't bite!) and we miss him.

Thanks for your continued prayers and kind acts; they keep us going.