Mileage Accounted for

On Tuesday we waited for a break in the rain to get out walking! We finished our goal of walking and measuring every trail in Lambert Park! We now know how many miles of trails there are! Please enter our Miles of Trails contest that closes at the end of April!

I'm still feeling good, despite the fact that my WBC continues to go up every day! I am apparently camera challenged, however. Since my last software upgrade, the default on my Samsung S9 is to cut off people in my selfies! Whose bright idea was that?

No Pickelball for You!

It rained almost all day today, so we had to cancel our big pickelball date with my brother and sister and their spouses! We met up at Dodo's for lunch instead! We'll try again in a few weeks when Jon is done flying around the world. We had fun talking about his unusual job, where he actually flies pigs, cows and anything you can imagine to exotic locations!

We also had a blood test this morning. My WBC continues to rise slowly. We're at 126 today. While it would have been nice to go down, it is also good that it is not increasing rapidly. My potassium was low, so they gave me some giant pills to take. I was barely able to swallow one!

It stopped raining long enough for Ed and I to get a 3 mile walk in this evening! We're hoping to finish mapping out the mileage in Lambert Park before I get too sick to walk!

Feeling the Love

Thank you to whoever went to all the work to decorate our door and put love notes all over it! We love the poems and sayings you chose. I think we'll just have to take the decorations to the hospital when we go for the BMT. (So far unscheduled)! Ed and I are feeling the love today, and believe me it helps give us courage for our ordeal ahead!

We had a great group at choir today and afterwards enjoyed a walk in Lambert Park. The good news is that I am feeling fine. Maybe because the medicine from Friday has not fully kicked in yet! My white blood count has continued to rise since Tuesday, and is now at 118. It has slowed down and we're hoping tomorrow to see a downward trend. We go in every day now for blood testing. We are happy that our doctor is keeping a close eye on the numbers!

Thanks to all of you who have sent us notes of encouragement and who have given us hugs in person! It means a lot to us!

Saturday Concert and Outdoors

Ed and I went to the last kids' concert of the season on Saturday. Mabel got to explore a lot of instruments after the concert, including a bass clarinet! Just when you think you've seen everything!

We went to Noodles and Company for lunch and were excited to have nice enough weather to eat outside!

We followed that up with a three mile walk in Lambert Park. I was so happy to see the glacier lilies in bloom! We intend to suck all the beauty we can out of spring before I need to head to the hospital for my BMT!

Record Treatment

Yesterday I had a treatment of  700 mg of Rituximab and got to a record speed of 350 mg per hour. This was pretty much a record for me, as last year I had a severe reaction when I reached 200! My WBC continues to climb (it has doubled since Tuesday) to 112, but hopefully will start to go down once the medicine kicks in. I am having no side effects and feel great still.

I also had a CT scan yesterday, where we found I had a collection of nodules in my abdomen just like the cysts on my arm. We don't really know what they are. They could be a side effect of the leukemia or something else... Isn't uncertainty the worst?

In the evening we drowned our sorrows in hot chocolate and a delicious chocolate braid bread that my neighbor Jane brought over.

We also watched one of my favorite tv shows, The Orville. They had a great episode on a Moclan women's planet! That was enough to take your mind off your troubles!

The View from the Infusion Center

We're back in the infusion Center at Huntsman, sadly enough. Yesterday was a rainy and overcast day, to match our mood!

My monthly blood draw on Tuesday clearly showed that my lymphoma is active again. This means that I'll need to get back in remission, and then have a stem cell transplant. I should be in remission in several weeks, then go to the hospital for the BMT. Fortunately, my white blood count is only 80k, while last time I started treatment it was 585K! (Normal is 5-10). We are NOT pleased with this development, but hope that the course of treatment will be successful and we won't have to live in fear worrying about when the cancer will return. Also, when I go off Ibrutinib I can eat grapefruit again!

On another note, I have a large cyst and a small cyst in my left arm. They started growing in March, about the same time my cancer went rogue. I was planning on having them removed yesterday, but had to cancel the surgery, as the cancer took precedence! Dr. Halwani says there is a chance it is related to the lymphoma, and might go down on it's own with the infusion treatments. If not I'll have to get it taken off before we get the BMT. What a house of cards!

Butterfly Biosphere

On Wednesday we went to the Butterfly Biosphere at Thanksgiving Point. Mabel and Clementine had a fun time crawling on the caterpillar before we went into the actual butterfly containment area.

Clementine enjoyed getting up close to the butterflies.

Mabel, on the other hand preferred if they kept their distance.

My favorite butterflies were the blue morphos, which were everywhere!

I liked trying to get selfies with the grandkids. This one had John as a bonus shot!

We enjoyed lunch at Pizza Studio afterwards!

To top it off, Brittany brought the girls over in the afternoon and we made (and ate) Easter sugar cookies. Mmmm!

The kids burned off some of their calories on the trampolines. It was a happy way to spend the afternoon!