No Mo Chemo!


Kenzi is officially done all her chemo! It was the perfect way to end the year, but to be honest it felt like a premature celebration. While she is done chemo, we are waiting to see if she needs radiation and the chemo is still wearing her down. Once we leave the hospital with her central line gone, then we will have a big party.

We had a fairly quiet Christmas. It was nice to do gifts with our little family, but it felt pretty lonely having Christmas dinner by ourselves. Arnie and Cathy (Wes's brother and sister in law) came for 2 nights before Christmas with their girls and it was wonderful to visit with people again. We have kept to ourselves so much this year, just trying to keep everyone healthy and we are really missing in person visits. It seems that any time we plan to see people, someone has a cough or sniffle and we decide it's best to not risk it. My parents also came down after Christmas to celebrate Kenzi's last chemo with us, which was wonderful. 

We are still in Pitt Meadows, going back and forth to the hospital for appointments. Kenzi has a CT scan and an MRI next Friday, the 14th and we will not know until the following Friday probably if she will need radiation. While they got clean margins during the surgery, they are still discussing whether or not low dose radiation will be needed. Please pray that she will not need radiation and we can go home to Vernon. Since this all started in April, Kenzi has spent less than 20 days at home and we are all feeling drained from it. We are allowed to go home to the Okanagan after her scans next week, but we decided that it is too hard on Kenzi to go home and have to come back, so we are going to just stay in the Fraser Valley until we know more. Thankfully our friends have offered us their house until we can go home for good and we are so grateful for them. 

I know it's a new year and I feel like I should have some insightful or inspired feelings about it, but my brain just feels numb from this last year. We are tired of being in survival mode and are looking forward to actually living. Until that time comes, we will continue to take it a day at a time and learn how to adjust. Thanks for carrying us in your prayers and just know that we really look forward to seeing you all again soon!

 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 3

Image
 It's the third day since this all started, but it feels like a lifetime. I had intended to post a small update earlier today, but now all those things that I was gonna say feel so unimportant. We were able to take Kenzi out onto a rooftop patio to enjoy the sunshine and as we were there the oncologist came with some news: It is cancer.  They don't like to use that word with kids, because childhood cancer is very different than adults and kids are super resilient, so when we explained it to Kenzi we avoided it and used the word "mass". No matter the term, it's a part of our lives now. We don't have any words, our hearts are just broken. We will hopefully learn more next week; what type of mass it is and how to best treat it. The plan is to send Kenzi for a PET scan on Wednesday to find out if it's spread or not. The oncologist is very optimistic, but it's still too much to process. Kenzi is a rockstar! She's feeling good and taking everything in st
Read more

It has a name.

Image
 Sunday was a "quiet" day. Wes left that morning to go see the kids in Vernon and Kenzi and I hung out. She's super excited to play Minecraft and I actually had to drag her outside to sit on the patio with me. We had a movie night and we really felt God's peace that evening, so thanks to everyone praying for that.  Yesterday was hard. We had a meeting with the doctors. Her mass is called a ewing sarcoma, which is a type of bone cancer. The plan is to start chemo this Friday. Until then, they will be doing a lot of baseline tests. Yesterday she had a kidney function test, today is a bone marrow biopsy, which she will be put to sleep for and tomorrow is the dreaded PET scan to see if it has spread anywhere else in the body. Please pray that it has stayed in the chest cavity. Thursday will be a long meeting where they will lay out the "roadmap" of our treatment plan. They say to expect it to take the next year.  To be honest, it's too much to take. I don
Read more

1 Year

Image
Today marks one year that our lives changed forever. On April 14, 2021 Kenzi was flown to BC Children's Hospital when they found a giant tumor in her chest. 2 days later they confirmed it was cancer and a week later, after many more tests, she was starting chemotherapy. We are so grateful to be on the other side of treatment now, but it's not without its many scars. Looking back somedays, it feels surreal and we can't even believe it happened. Other times, the emotions are still so raw that the tears won't stop flowing.  We survived treatment by living one day at a time. From April to January, Kenzi spent 276 days away from home; 123 of those, were actually in the hospital and 50 of them were spent in Toronto. Kenzi was home in Vernon for only 13 days during treatment. Our family was separated a lot while we tried to figure out how to live in 2 completely different worlds. Childhood cancer is every parent's nightmare and it was made that much more difficult by being
Read more