Coughs, Cold and the Flu

We had a nice family Christmas, spending time at home and visiting my parents nearby to drop off some gifts. My Mom cooked Pho and we all ate lunch bowls of Pho. We spent this rest of the day, just relaxing, playing and cooking dinner at home. It was nice and simple. Since the kids still are recovering from their almost two weeks cold and coughs, I'm glad we forgo the all day laboring over cooking a turkey and entertaining. Once a couple of years ago, I spent a whole day in the kitchen, cooking all day long, the turkey and everything else. It was a lot of work with tons of left over.

I'm still fighting over the same cold and cough like the kids. This miserable cold and cough, it's so hard to shake off. With a chemo body, already weak, it'll most likely take double the time to soothe it down and hopefully with lots of rest and orange juice, it'll be gone.

An Evening at the ER
Yesterday, my son suddenly woke up with awful, unrelenting stomach flu or gastroenteritis. By evening, while sick all day long, with continuous bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, we grew overly worried and finally after calls to the nurseline, they had recommended us to take him to the nearest ER. Unlucky for us, my many pages to our family pediatrician went unanswered and I guess, since Dec 25 fell on a Sunday this year, many Doctor's offices had taken yesterday, Dec 26, as a holiday. What bad timing. In the middle of cooking dinner, I had to pause everything, turned off the half cooked string beans and in 2 minutes, sipped my dinner bowl of rice porridge down my tummy so that I can rush my poor dehydrated Ethan to see a doctor. What a scary day. I was terrified with worry.
Finally after a few hours and an anti nausea medicine, he was better and we went home.  Whew! He's feeling much better today and I'm keeping a good eye on him, giving him plenty of fluids and small amount soft foods.

My condalescences to Emily Wong
A few days ago right before Christmas, I shockingly learned of a dear friend, Emily Wong had passed away peacefully from lung cancer. It shook me pretty hard. Learning of her death sadded and scared me. When I was first diagnosed with this dreaded disease, it was her that reached out to me and called me on my phone. Our conversation went on for over an hour as she told me of her story and how to cope and live with the same lung cancer. I'm forever grateful for her friendly, kind love and hope she gave us all at the Lung Cancer Support group. She will be missed.  It was her who created and started the Stanford Lung Cancer Group. She was a 5 1/2 year stage 4 lung cancer fighter and dedicated herself to helping and reaching out to almost every lung cancer patient to knew. My hearts go out to her family. You can read her incredible, detail legacy battle she kept at www.godincontrol.bravehost.com/

My Treatment
After a week break from the Gemzar chemo, I am back to my regular routine chemo and Dr Neal appointment tomorrow. I'm happy that my friend Ramona will accompany me again. Hopefully my bood counts and labs will turn out good and I will get another round of chemo.  Thanks again for your support, love and prayers. Lots of Love. I'll be writing soon about a Spaghetti fundraiser that you can help be apart of soon.  More of that soon as now I'm off to see my polmonologist.

Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to everyone! After being sick for about a week, the kids are finally better. They're still having a little bit of the cold and cough but atleast the fevers are all gone. Since they were sick, I got a little cold and cough myself. My cough isn't too bad and hopefully it'll go away soon.

We've been busy taking the kids to places around the area, like the zoo and to the SF Acadamy of Science and also got busy with a little bit of deep house cleaning. It was a bit crazy getting to the Academy of Science since we're just not familiar with all the one ways of SF driving and got a bit lost. But, we finally got a chance to visit it and it was super crowded. We zipped through it within 1-2 hours and were done pretty quickly and got home in time for the kids other academic activity, like Kumon.

Other than hanging out with the family with outings and some errands, we're enjoying every minute of our family vacation.  For the past few days, we still debated back and forth about whether or not to head to Disneyland, and finally today, we decided for sure to put it off until next year since we're all a bit sick still from our colds & coughs. It's tempting though to just quickly pack, hop in the car and just head off to the magical place of Disney to give to the kids' the ultimate fun of a lifetime. But traveling with 3 little ones, it's a lot of work.

Now that the kids are off from school, I've gotten a chance to do a bit more reading. Reading and writing, those are my favorite past time hobbies I love to do. I ordered a book on Amazon, title "Before I say Good-bye by Ruth Picardie and can't wait to read it. Like me, Ruth was young and only about 33 years old when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and just had given birth to twins. It's her own memoir on how she brilliantly, courageously battled and coped through it all. What a brave woman she was.

Well, if I don't a chance to write before 2011 ends, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to you and everyone. Thank you for your love and support! Lots of Love.

Busy Week, Team Seagate donates us Tree and Toys, CT Results

Try as I can to find some free time for myself or even to update my blog, it's always super busy. This week, I went in to Stanford Cancer Center for another round of blood lab draws and for Gemzar chemo. I was lucky to get a good nurse who poked me once and got in a IV and also fortunate to have my good friend, Ramona accompany me to my appointment. This time everything went pretty fast and we were out of there by 3.5 hours! Yay, we got out before it got dark and before the traffic rush.

When I got home after chemo Wed, both older kids got sick with fevers at night and have kept me up throughout the night for the past 3 days/nights. With hi fevers, it got me so worried, I even took them all to see their pediatrician. And as usual, we were in and out of there and were told it's just a virus and to keep give them children's acetaminophen to keep the fevers away. By Friday and still today, they're still fighting this off. Hopefully, they'll be well soon as our family vacation is starting tomorrow. The kids are all so excited to have their Dad off for a week!

With the kids being sick, we're most likely going to postpone our Disney trip since it's so much work to get there and back. Driving 4-5 hours to Anaheim, the crowds, the cold, the long lines, the high cost of everything from tickets to hotels at this time of year, it is all too overwhelming. So we're planning day trips instead to local places, going to the movies, and just hangin out and having fun and a little bit of relaxing. We're still planning to go to Disneyland but probably another time next year. I'm glad we'll have some family time and now that we're staying at home, I'm delighted.

Seagate donates to us Christmas tree with the trimmings & gifts!

Last week, we were all so fortunate and thankful for my Seagate manager and team to come and put up together a really nice, live Christmas tree with all the lights and trimmings and gifts for the kids! The kids loved it and even helped put up the hand made snowflake decorations. Each snowflake contained wonderful, warm notes to us, all hand written from my coworkers and friends from Seagate! What a blessing. We're so humbled and honored to have such a wonderful team to volunteer their time and to give us this wonderful Christmas tree and gifts! So endless thanks to Nathan and everyone from Seagate!

Latest CT Results

While I was at chemo this past Wed, I stopped by to get my CT results in hand. Reading over my neck and to knee scan results, overall, it indicates everything is stable. Stable is good but it's still awful to learn that there are "numerous tiny pulmonary nodules in my left lung measuring up to 3 mm." And in my right lung, well, there is still "Interval increase" of pleural based fluid building up and that the primary tumor grew from 2.1 x 1.6 cm from previously 2.0 x 1.4 cm. Everything else is stable and are in normal limits.

 

I'm feeling ok and doing everything like any other busy mom with the kids. It's unreal though to know that I have all these numerous tumors in me. I just hope chemo keeps all the tumors at bay and I'm here for as long as I can. Lots of Love.

My Birthday

Yesterday the kids and I celebrated my 36 Birthday with a yummy burnt almond cake that my husband and kids picked up along the way when he picked up Ellen from preschool. We didn't go out to celebrate but even just singing Happy Birthday and having them blow out the candles was just precious.

My sore throat is much better today and I'm feeling better. I can tell though that with a chemo body, I do feel weaker and my energy level is a bit low. But, as usual feeling a bit under the weather doesn't keep me from doing the routine things with the kids, like heading out shopping for things for the kids classes at Walmart and running errands (grocery shopping, picking up the kids from school).  Over the next few days, I have to find time to plan out the details of our Disneyland trip and hopefully I'll get it all done soon. With three kids, even with a little nanny help, I'm always so busy and it's hard to find time for myself and or even get to my To Do List.

Having late stage lung cancer, since there are no cure, I know my odds of living more than a year, two, three, four, five or more years are very slim and so time is of the essence to do what I must do for my kids.  And so I have to really find time to complete my To Do list.  Some of the to do list are simple things, like writing letters to my kids, doing more video recordings of me and the kids, burning a photo CD and picking songs to send to the Legacy Video Life Chronicles team that helped record my legacy video. It's always so busy though with 3 kids, so there's never a dull, free moment. 

I'm scared though to know my fate and that even with all the hope and prayers, I do feel a sence of hopelessness and sadness. But a I have met some survivors who have lived with it beyond 5 years but that's so rare. And so with having just celebrated my 36 Birthday, I hope there's more birthdays to come. Here's to my wish of continued stability and better health. Lots of Love.

Holiday fun

This past Saturday, my hubby & I attended his company's holiday dinner at the Loft in downtown San Jose. We were lucky to get to go this year since almost every year in the past, he had to work into the wee hours and always had to miss it. Luckily my nanny was able to watch the kids and we got a nice night out. It was so much fun hanging out, listen to music and chatting along with his work colleagues. The food, the drinks and the appetizers were the best! There was even a raffle and we even won a prize. What a nice time. Times like this just warms my heart and makes me want many, many more good times to come.

My hubby finally got all the lights up on the house and the kids love seeing the house all decorated. Lots of love and  thanks to him for all the hard work. With the kids out of school for the holidays, we're planning to take them to the wonderful magical place of Disneyland. It'll be alot of work getting there but hopefully we'll have lots of fun. We're excited and look forward to our family time.

This week, I woke up early at 6AM on Tuesday and got a full neck to knee CT scan. CT scans are awful due to warm fuzzy feeling from the contrast IV and having to sit still and hold your breathe as you go in and out of the circular tunnel. But, it's now become a routine I'm just used to now.

Yesterday, I was so fortunate enough to have a dear friend, Ramona accompany me to my chemo appointment. As usual, it was a long day as we left San Jose around noonish and didn't get home until almost 7PM. What a long day of waiting but it didn't seem like it as time flew by so fast with a friend coming along. It was nice of her to take time out to keep my company. So many hugs and thanks to her for her support and love. She even brought me a B-day card and beautiful poinsettias! How lovely.

As usual, my face time with my oncologist, Dr. Neal yesterday was quick and fast. We didn't view the scan results together this time but he did tell me things look stable overall and that we're going to continue with the current Gemzar chemo treatment. He did mention that the CT scan shows a 1 mm increase in the tumors compared to the last 6 weeks scan previously. With 2 weeks off from chemo now, my blood counts were now back up and I did get the Gemzar chemo infusion. I'll have to go back for another session next week and Romana promised to go with me again. I'm so grateful for her friendship. Smiles.

Aside from a sore throat and a little cold, I'm feeling good. The sore throat does worry me and hope it'll go away soon and that it's nothing serious or cancer related. Any new achy or pains and great shortness of breath I get, it's hard not to worry that it may be something worse like signs of progression. Worry. Fear. It's awful living with cancer, especially lung cancer.
I'll be getting the actual full CT scan report in the mail soon and will post the results. Hopefully it's reports nothing too serious to worry more about. As for acunpunture, I've decided to take a break from it for now. With everything going on, it's hard to keep up with it 3 times a week for an 1.5 hour sessions. Besides, I didn't like the achy feeling I get from the puncture of the needles and who likes being poked with needles on the top of one's head for hour long three times per week sessions! I'm glad I have some free time back again with my kids.

Thanksgiving

We had a great Thanksgiving weekend.  One of Ethan's parents from his class brought us a delicious home cooked dinner! What a treat. He also gave us a frozen turkey as well! So, lots of thanks to Chuck for a fabulous roast beef and potatoes dinner.
On Thanskgiving day for lunch, we were invited over at my sister's family and then for dinner, had a potluck Turkey dinner over at my brother's place. It was good to see my family and catching up with everyone. It was especially nice that my brother had it at his place since I got to see my old cat. Since my diagnosis, we adopted her out to my brother. She's turning out to be such a beautiful cat now. I'm glad she's in a good home. We fostered her temporary and rescued her and her five kittens from my nanny's yard about a year ago this time. Definitely, pets bring so much warmth and comfort. It was so warming and healing to see her.

With the holidays coming, the kids are excited about Christmas. They've been asking their Dad to decorate the house and about getting a Christmas tree, presents, Santa, Gingerbread house and have been singing all the tunes of the holiday songs.  And so, day by day, as I help watch the kids, their Dad is getting the lights and trimmings almost all up.
As for me, I'm thankful for a great Thanksgiving weekend and for everyday that I am here with my family. I'm keeping busy with the kid's activities as well as spending as much time as I can with them teaching, coaching and working with them on their reading, writing and math skills.  Mostly, I'm working very hard with each of them to help them become a beginner reader. I think it takes alot of love, patience and lots of tedious, dedicated hard work to raise educated, good readers and thinkers as well as well rounded, social, responsible kids.

As for me, I'm still going to my acupuncture appointments in hopes it helps heals. I'm not sure it helps, but hopeful it does something good. I'll being getting a CT scan again next Tuesday and will find out next week if my current Gemzar chemo is helping stabilize the tumors. It's been about 2 weeks now that I haven't had any treatment. With Gemzar, I'm suppose to get it every week for 2 weeks in a row and then have the third week off. But, last week, I didn't get it due to having low blood counts.  Let's hope for good news and stability. Lots of Love.