Christmas 2008

This year we did things a little different. We did our traditional shopping after Thanksgiving. Which, I know there are some of you who think we are crazy, but we really do get some awesome sales and we usually have our family shopping done, sooo, this year we kind of shopped for ourselves.
When we arrived home with our packages, we looked at each other and said" Why don't we call this our Christmas and maybe just do stockings for each other. So this is what we decided on.
Kaitlyn had Diane, Diane had Chad, and Chad had Kaitlyn, even though Diane helped Chad quite a bit he did come up with a lot of stuff on his own. Our criteria for the stockings were, you couldn't buy anything over $5 and everything had to be wrapped individually, some of us even provided a small wish lists.
Well, each of us did go over on one item, but not by much, and Santa did bring one family gift. He brought us The Price Is Right WII game, way to fun for those who are wondering. It's like you're really playing on the show. Anyway, Christmas morning I find Chad and Kaitlyn jumping on my bed trying to wake me up, like hey, it's only like 11am leave me alone. But they managed to get me out to the living room and we proceeded to open our overflowing stockings. It was alot of fun opening all of these little gifts, most cost around a dollar, and it didn't break anybody's budgets. After all was said and done, we had agreed that we might do this again next year. It was low key, but we still had to think of things the other person would like or frequently used along with some fun stuff. It didn't detere from the Spirit of the day and I think I can speak for all of us we had a nice relaxing day.
We had our traditional Christmas breakfast. I have to say turned out great, all of the food was so good. We played, took naps and just enjoyed the day.
As the day rolled on, the snow storm came and landed around 6 to 8 inches on top of what we already had. It was so beautiful, we watched out of our front window, the wind blowing, snow coming down like a whirlwind of flurries trying to find a safe place to land, and we inside protected by the elements of weather. What a wonderful day to remember.

Life in Utah this week

Doctors, doctors.......Right now I won't see one until, umm January 8th, I hope. I am making a very quick blog entry because it is late but I promise I will give full details this Sunday, hopefully with pictures of our fun happenings on Saturday.
So stay tuned for further information..... Exciting isn't it!!!!!

Hit me with your best shot! Fire away!

I just want to start out with saying, even though I have had a whirl wind of medical issues this year, and they continue to happen, my life has been extremely blessed by the generous prayers and help of service sent my way.
I am now dealing with another turn of medical events that we are hoping will pan out to be nothing, but in this game of, wait and see if the cancer comes back or not, we are a little nervous to say the least.
I saw my regular doctor on Tuesday this week. My symptoms were very similar to the same ones I had before the surgery back in January. My first thoughts of what was going on were, "It's probably just a urinary tract infection". The nurse when I had said this was looking at me a little weird, but when I told her why I needed this to be the diagnosis, she could see why. I get in to the exam room and Dr Cook comes in and he's reading the screen on the computer of what information the nurse took. The nurse comes in and hands the doctor the results of the urine specimen. I quickly say to him "It's an infection RIGHT", he looks at me and says "no, you have blood in your urine," (sorry it's so explicit), I quickly come back with "maybe kidney stones?". He's sitting there pondering what it could be while I kept trying to say to him what I think it should be or might be. He looks at me and says I think we are dealing with something a little bit more serious than that. I'm like "what!". He then goes into "my gut feeling is that the cancer has spread to the bladder and we need to have you seen by a urologist, when is your next cancer check?", me "December 22nd, why?" ..."Who's your oncologist? "Dr Chen, I do have her number!" "Well, I want to call her and tell her what's going on and see what she thinks about this.".... So we're sitting together in the room and he calls the Huntsman center and gets through to her nurse Katie and explains what is going on and she connects him to Dr Chen's cell or something. He leaves a message with her and then tells me, "you might as well go back to work and then I will call you when I hear back from her".
I left for work and within 45 minutes he called me back and said "Dr Chen wants to move your CT scan up ASAP, so Huntsman will call you and tell you when it is". I didn't get the call until Wednesday and of all times they scheduled it for this Friday at 9:30. There was no way that I could do it, I have a Ward Christmas party to do, and my help was coming to set up at 10. We did get it rescheduled for the following Friday same time, so that works out so much better.
On top of all of this going on, Kait and I went over to Wal Mart last night to pick up a couple of things and fill up my gas tank for the weekend and we get in the car and the car won't start. I'm like "HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT! FIRE AWAY".
I'll update as I can, but no guarentee.