Family Ties

We have had a pretty mellow couple of weeks. Well, it's never really mellow around our house, but at least we have been injury free and all of our eyes are working just fine. :) It's funny though because Brooklyn just said yesterday, "Mommy, my eyes aren't blurry anymore." I'm pretty sure they've been fine for awhile but maybe she just thought of putting the ointment in and how it would make them blurry for awhile. It is strange how Brooklyn's treatment has become such a normal part of our everyday lives. Someone just asked me yesterday if Brooklyn's treatment is pretty similar for the remainder of her schedule. I said yes, and just rattled off that we give her chemo pills at home every night, she gets chemo through her port once a month and spinal taps every three months. She kind of laughed and said something about how it was just so automatic for me explaining it, but that for anyone else, hearing all she has to do, is a lot. It made me stop to think and if you would've told me a year and a half ago the list of treatment that has become so normal for us now, I would've hyperventilated. In fact, I was just looking back through a prayer journal that I had and it was from October of 2010, when Brookie was having fevers and getting sick so often and I was praying for her blood tests and that her pediatrician would figure out what was going on with her. I was of course worried that it could be something bad, and was hoping that it wouldn't be. I do think that God heard my prayers and in a way blessed us with Brooklyn getting the type of cancer that she has. The fact that the cure rate is so high for ALL and that we have such a normal life even though she is fighting such a serious disease is really amazing. I don't know if I'm ready to say that I'm thankful that she got Leukemia, but I'm thankful for the way He continues to help us through it. It is such a normal part of our lives now that I have noticed how it has affected our kids in the last couple weeks. Kelsey loves to take the thermometer off the counter and go check Brookie's temperature, and she will always point at Brooklyn's medley of medicine bottles and say she wants medicine too. Then last week, I was listening to Kayla and Brooklyn as they were playing "pretend" together. They were most likely playing "mom and sister" where one of them is the mom and the other is the daughter, or they are both sisters, which always seems so funny to me because they really are sisters, but somehow it is more fun to play "pretend sisters." It's even funnier when I am the "pretend mom." I always think, will they clean up their room if I tell them to as the "pretend mom"? Anyway, Kayla said, "Brookie, pretend you have to go somewhere." And Brooklyn said, "Okay, I have to go to surgery." Kayla replied, "No Brookie, you really DO have to have surgery and you really DO have cancer, so pretend something else." I wanted to cry. Then Mike just told me the other day that when he was talking to Brooklyn, he said, "It's pretty cool that you have a special necklace isn't it Brookie?" (we used to call her broviak tubes her 'special necklace', so we still refer to her port as her special necklace sometimes.) She said, "yea, 'cause not a lot of kids have cancer." Then, about a month ago, our kids were playing with some kids we didn't know very well and one of them said something about how Brookie's hair was so short it looked like a boy's. Braden was so upset about it but he didn't want to say anything because he didn't want her to hear what they had said. I know that our family will grow and become stronger because of how Brooklyn's cancer has affected us all and I hope that my kids will be more sensitive to others with diseases or disabilities because of this time in our lives. I know I am learning more, through them, every day.

Aye Aye Matey!

We have remembered in this last week how important our eyes are. Last Monday was Kayla's birthday. We got her off to school with cookies for her class to celebrate. Brooklyn had her monthly appointment with her oncologist so my mom came over to help watch Kelsey and get Braden to school. As I was getting Brooklyn in the car, she found her stethoscope from one of her nurses. It is a real one, and she likes playing with it, pretending to be a doctor and listening to our hearts as well as checking her stuffed animals' heart rates. However, as she grabbed it out of the back of the car, I noticed that one of the rubber ear pieces was missing so I told her she could hold it but she couldn't put it in her ears because she could get hurt. I buckled her in her seat and ran back in the house to get my keys. My mom was in the garage talking with Brooklyn and all of a sudden she started yelling. I ran out to the garage and saw the stethoscope stuck in Brookie's eye. She had had it on her head and somehow it slipped into her eye. I could see it was stuck under her eyelid so I ran to help her and she got it out right when I got there. I didn't know how bad it was but she was crying and scared and her tears had blood in them so I was worried for her. My mom got a wet washcloth and Brookie held it on her eye all the way to the doctor's office. Right when we pulled into the parking lot she said, "mom, I can open my eye all the way!" like it was the most exciting thing she'd ever done. I was so happy that we had an appointment that morning so we could get it looked at right away. The oncologist we had that morning was so nice and said she thought Brooklyn was looking really good. After her exam, she looked at her eye and put some special dye in it to see if the cornea had been scratched. We could clearly see a scratch in the white part of her eye, but couldn't tell that there was a scratch on her iris until she put the dye in. It was really cool the way it showed up, but sad that she had scratched so much of her eye. The doctor put some antibiotic ointment in it and then covered it with a patch. She said the cells in the eye multiply so fast that she expected it to be fine by the next day. As we were talking after her patch was on, I told her she was super cool, like a pirate, and she said, "like Izzy?" from Jake and the Neverland Pirates. Yes, like Izzy. Then we had to go into the infusion room to draw blood and get her chemo. That all went well and Brookie picked out a pillow case for herself and for each of her siblings. Even in her time of pain, she was thinking of them. When we got back home, we picked up Kelsey and Kayla and went to the park to have pizza and cake with her friends from school. Brookie ran and played with the rest of the kids just fine, although I was a little worried about her balance since she could only see out of one eye. It was so crazy because I kept feeling like you see shows on TV all the time where stuff like that happens to kids, but you always kind of think, that wouldn't happen to us, I'm a better parent than that. How does that happen? But it happens so quickly! The stethoscope is in the garbage now, but we will be more careful with everything I think. That night we had our family party and it was a great time to be all together. Tuesday morning we had to go to the pediatrician to have him check her eye. The scratch that had been on the blue part of her eye was already gone but I had noticed that morning that she had a scratch on the other side of her pupil as well. Her doctor said that she was really lucky that she didn't scratch the eye all the way across because she could've had vision damage if she had. He wanted us to use the ointment three times a day for a week but it was weird because when we put it in her eye, she cried and said it stung, which it wasn't supposed to. He thought it was probably just a reaction between the eye drops he had used and the ointment but he prescribed a different one for her just in case it was truly bothering her. However, when I went to the store to pick it up, they didn't have it and no other pharmacy in the area had it either. So I decided to keep the one we had and try it again to see if it was ok. She did fine with it the rest of the week although sometimes she would say, it stings! And I would say it does? And she would say - just jokin!  After a few days she started asking which eye it was that she had scratched, so I knew it was getting better. :) She was even able to do her swim lessons Wednesday and was fine. The rest of the week was pretty uneventful (thank goodness!) except for baseball games. Mike's parents came to town Friday so we got to spend the weekend with them. They got here in time to go to Mike's softball game Friday night, we had two baseball games Saturday and one last night. Baseball mania! Mike's mom is done with chemo and is on the mend and we are so thankful for that. We got to celebrate her birthday last night after Braden's game too, so that was great. Brooklyn's latest 'incident' has got me thinking about how we aren't really thankful for what we have until we don't have it anymore. For instance, we don't usually wake up thanking God for our eye sight or our ability to hear or walk, we just do it. But once one of those things is injured or hurt, it's all we can think about. When you stub your toe really bad, every step for the next hour or so hurts; if you break your foot and are in a cast, you can't wait until the day when you can walk normally again. If you had to wear a patch on your eye every day, you would count the days til you could use both eyes again. And most likely, you would pray for God to heal you quickly. We have just under a year left for Brookie's treatment. We are getting closer and closer to her being declared cancer free and I am learning to be thankful for every healthy day. One of the songs we sang in church this week said "I lift my eyes up, my help comes from the Lord." I thought it was so appropriate since eyes were our focus this week. I am thankful my eyes can look up.