update

Dane is in St Louis and started another new chemo today.  A dear friend from church has taken chauffeur duties for this trip so I am at home with the kids and the pack.  Gabe just walked through the door playing something annoying and electronic.  Lucy is in the front yard in a swimsuit playing with water balloons and a gang of neighborhood girls.  The pack is scattered across the messy living room floor sleeping.  Her fence jumping days behind her, that's really all Britney does these days.  I am reclining in Dane's chair, whining about the headache that refuses to go away and now typing away on Dane's computer.  Typing what I see is my first blog post in seven months.  Oops. 

In my defense, our family computer is fried and I haven't bothered to get it fixed.  It is the one with my comfy ergonomic keyboard.  My carpal tunnels don't appreciate much time spent directly on a laptop, so I've given myself a pass anytime I've thought about blogging. But I've been busted,which I guess is one of the purposes of friends.  (I will dedicate a future post to her, I promise) 

Since my last posts, I did complete the half marathon in October.  In November I managed to mess up my back and haven't been able to get passed it.  I have since sunken into a funk, laying on the couch binging on cookies and junk food watching TV when I used to work out to deal with my stress.  It's not been pretty.  I have managed to expand beyond usually expandable yoga and sweatpants.  The good news is I have eaten through all of the Girl Scout cookies so it must be coming to an end.  The bad news is I have nothing to wear in public that should in fact be worn in public. 

Last fall Mr. 1inamillion's cancer progressed a bit so he was changed to a different treatment regimen.  It was not surprising as he had remained on the same one for nearly a year and at some point they all fail.  He was changed to one that was just oral pills, a nice but short break.  There was growth with the next scans so in January he started a new regimen, one lovingly known as the red devil.  He landed in the hospital after his first treatment and again with his third.  This time it was pneumonia and RSV virus (yes, that one that babies get).  This chemo had proven to work, he was on it with another drug in 2007 with success and it showed successful again on the biopsy done last October.  His scans last week only showed minimal growth (within the margin of error) so it's considered stable and responding to the drug.  The ultimate goal is to of course keep him out of the hospital and well, so in that respect it is clearly failing. 

He spent 15 days in the hospital with the pneumonia and came home still on oxygen.  Surprisingly, not one member of the pack has done a thing to an oxygen tube and I overcame the anxiety that came with it rather quickly.  He's pretty much been in treatment of some sort since 2007, so it is getting harder to find therapies that will work and harder for him to handle them.  The drug he started today will hopefully be easier, but they all seem to list the same side effects. 

This will need to suffice as our update for now.  The gang of girls with water balloons out front have taken on a gang of boys and together they have woken and riled up the pack.  I think it is time to find excedrin, my referee whistle and a super soaker.  I pray I don't come across any cookies along the way.