Stupid, bleep beep cancer...

Lucy woke up screaming about chest pains. I assumed it was heartburn, as she got us up in the middle of the night to eat (not even steroid time yet). I gave her ranitidine. And of course she is screaming and crying and she NEVER does that...not even on vincristine. Gave me an adrenaline rush and I was ready to rush her to clinic. So I thought I'd try codeine. I put that in her mouth, and she said she was all better now. So I think it was heartburn and the meds finally kicked in when I finally decided to do codeine. Boy that really got my adrenaline going. DAMN IT! I hate when I let it do that to me......grrrrr... 

95% of the time, we live with this disease ok, and the other 5% I just want to scream and kick and punch things.  Today but be the other 5% day.   We really do try to not get "too" comfortable when things are going good, as we know any moment things could change with a fever or a bad cold or even a fall.  Anything really.  I think I must have let my guard down and that is why this morning shocked me so much.  She is fine now.  Running around in her princess dress and asking for lip gloss.  So now that my adrenaline rush is over, I feel like I may cry. And I haven't cried over cancer in a long time.  So not sure what's going on.   

I have absolutely no theme or thought process for this blog post, it was more of a vent really. And it doesn't help that I belong to a group of other mom's with ALL kids and they seem to be getting bad news a lot lately regarding relapses or major side effects of the chemo.  I'm trying so hard to stay positive, but sometimes it beats you down.  I think we need a vacation, but that too is almost impossible to do.  We would have to map out hospitals, and stay within the Mississippi belt so we could hit up a St. Jude clinic if need be, and not to mention she still gets chemo every week, so it wouldn't be a long vacation anyhow.  I feel like I want to take the kids to the beach.  She can swim in the ocean....isn't that odd.  No public pools, but the ocean is fine. I would love to just drive down to the gulf and stay for a few days and drive back.  Give us all a little break, but there is so much that could go wrong and we would be far away from our comfort in doing so.  

I also think we are getting a little overwhelmed with work, school, cub scouts, trying to maintain our marriage and time to ourselves.  And you know what, its not really any different than before cancer in that regards.  We were also on the go and always too busy for anything.  But now we have this damn cancer looming over us for another year and a half, and I don't even want to know the stress and fear that comes after she stops chemo. I'm sure the next year or so will be nail biting.  If they are going to relapse, that would be when it would happen.  I feel like we need a big time out.  like a week long time out!  to give you an example of how defeated we felt last week, we totally forgot to help Jack study for his spelling test.  We have NEVER forgotten!  The kid does great usually maybe misses one word or so and usually not for spelling but because he wrote a letter backwards or capitalized it (which don't get me started on that), anyhow, last week, totally didn't think about it all....until 5 minutes before the bus came on test day.  He comes home and I say "how'd you do on that spelling test"  He said "I FAILED".  And Zach and I just started laughing.  That is NOT appropriate behavior for parents when your child fails a test.  We apologized because it really was our fault.  

whew....I feel a little better...but I must say I still think I"m going to need to go into a padded room and scream obscenities for a while.  better yet, wish we had a punching bag.  Something about cursing and hitting things that makes me feel better.  

Thanks for letting me vent....