And I'm back

To the maybe one person who actually read this blog, I apologize for disappearing off the map for the past year. Everything just got to be too much and this was one more thing to keep up. Here's a quick synopsis:

~Katie is fine. She finished chemo about 2.5 months ago. She did have her surgery down at S-K in July and it was a huge success. Her surgeon managed to save both the ulnar nerve and the main artery that runs along the ulna. plus get out all of the cancer with a negative margin. Upon analysis, they determined that it was, in fact, an undifferentiated sarcoma of the bone, with osteoid tendencies, which explained why Syracuse read the biopsy results as osteosarcoma. Basically, it was a bubble of "stem-cell mush", mostly messed up skin cells, inside the bone of her arm. Because of the change of diagnosis and because of a lower necrosis rate than they wanted, they had her undergo 32 localized radiation treatments as a precaution. This, in turn, stretched out the length of the chemo, as they had to stop adriamycin treatments during the radiation because of the risk of radiation recall. During the radiation, they continued chemo but replaced the adriamycin with ifofsomide and etoposide. But, because of type of cancer, she still needed to be treated with the adriamycin for more treatments, pushing the end of treatment from after Christmas to end of February. Amazingly, despite her blood counts dropping to almost nil (yeah, really, she had no blood), she never needed a transfusion and was able to continue working, mostly from home but still going into the office occasionally. Every doctor that she met with was amazed that she was even able to get out of bed, as anemic as she was on several occasions. She only had one more fainting spell, brought on by a sudden drop in blood pressure, which is what, in combination with dehydration, they determined caused the seizure. Luckily she was actually in the hospital when she fainted and they were able to figure out what was going on in time to prevent it from getting any worse. But, yeah, she's fine, she's getting her hair back, including really long eyelashes and multi-colored eyebrows that grew before anything else. 5 more years of good behavior on the part of her stem-cells and we can say she is cancer-free officially, but we say it anyway now cuz it sounds so good!

~On the personal front, I managed to turn a need to control some of the craziness going on in my life in the last year into something positive....I have lost 50-60 lbs and am only 13 lbs shy of my goal weight. I have been following Dr. Furhmans Eat to Live plan, which is a low fat, whole foods, mostly vegan diet. I started it mostly to help force myself to get the junk out of the house to help Katie stay healthy (as sugar and other white bad-f0r-you-stuff like processed flour and dairy feed cancers!) but it ended up working wonders for me too. We are both doing the six week plan right now, Katie for the first time, though she has been on the life plan since July, and me for the second time, as I get a little off track and started to get back into bad habits again.

~Obviously a lot of other stuff happened in between last july and now, but thats the main stuff. Right now we are just trying to get back on track after a year on hold and trying to get used to not being in crisis mode.

I will attempt to post here or on by food blog on a semi-regular basis...really, I promise.