Makin' the bacon while local tanker yankin'

Thank you all for your kind words, I do appreciate them, every little bit helps.

 

My wife and I since our son's hospitalization have been overwhelmed with people's outpouring of support, prayers and best wishes. These have come from people we have never met to people we have been intimately close to over the course of our lives.

The kind words from many for my son have helped us in many ways. One of the most amazing facets is that my son's cancer is a reminder that while sometimes I lose hope that people in general suck; there are far more good willed and genuine people that outnumber the excrement craniums.

 

It's been a roller coaster, to use a gross understatement. He began chemotherapy last week and is on a highly aggressive treatment that will likely last for the balance of 2021. Fortunately, doctors are keeping ahead of the side effects with medicines to treat nausea and mouth sores developing. He'll be hospitalized for another month until his immune system can rebuild because he needs to undergo a surgery to remove a fluid drain and possibly install a shunt to drain excess cerebral spinal fluid that is still being produced. Most of the days he sleeps well during the day. When he's up, it's about a 20% amount of time that he's miserable and the rest of his uptime he's smiley and hammy and loves the attention that all the nurses give him on the oncology floor.

But even only a week into aggressive chemotherapy, his MRI today already shows a visible reduction in the cancer that metastasized throughout his brain and spine. This week makes a full month that I haven't worked, having only left the hospital a couple of times to go home to see my other kids that my mother in law has been watching since this.