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A few people have asked me for periodic updates about Dave and his family and since so many of you were nice enough to add him to your prayer/good thought/good karma lists I figured I would post here in the forum instead of emailing seperately
Dave did get home for Christmas! They had a very busy Christmas since obviously everyone wanted to see them.
Caleb and Noah made a HAUL this Christmas. I wrote to one of the local radio stations who do Christmas wishes for people who need a little extra help. They dropped off a bunch of money and gift certificates for Dave and Darcy and a whole bunch of toys for the boys. They opened all the radio station toys at Darcy's mom's house and left them there. In a few months she'll go get them and it'll be a whole new toybox! Caleb is being a typical 3 year old and throwing tantrums over things like dinner and bathtime etc. Unfortunately everyone is feeling the stress and Caleb is just lashing out in the only way he can. It's not like 3 year olds know a lot of stress reduction techniques.
There was a bit of an upset on New Years when Dave snapped at a room full of friends and family. Thankfully they had two close family friends staying with them. One of them had a lot of experience with palliative cancer patients and pointed out to Darcy that it was the medication that probably caused him to act like that. 4 months ago Dave would have punched out someone that talked to his wife like that. She then went and told Dave that what he did was Not Cool. There were many sheepish apologies and that is when he started looking into cancer yoga and other programs where he could have a space to vent in an appropriate manner. None of us deny that he needs a space to vent, but that place is not in front of the kids. Nobody expects this road to be smooth and there will probably be more blowups along the way but they both made their mantra that God will never give what they cannot bare and continue to plug along.
Shortly after New Years he called Chad and I and asked if we could take him out to the mall. We went and got him and off to the mall we went! Turns out he hadn't had a chance to get Darcy a christmas gift so he was sneaking out to do that. We stopped at a jewellry store by the mall and he picked out a very nice diamond ring that fit within his "allowance"
He figured she was owed a new "sparkley" for all her caretaking. It is a family tradition that she gets a "sparkley" (diamond jewelry of some type) whenever they have a new baby... but he decided this counts too Dave had dislodged his feeding tube when he first got home and had to have it put back in. At that time the NG team said he was no longer allowed anything by mouth (no juice, no water, nothing.) This made for a crummy week and a bit because eating by mouth is a huge quality of life thing. We don't really consider how much enjoyment food brings to our lives until someone can't have any. A week later they mentioned this to his oncologist who basically said "Yes, we are still fighting this and if you were stage 2 or 3 I'd tell you to suck it up but frankly you are considered a palliative patient. This means quality of life ranks over what the NG team tells you. As long as it's not making you sick you can eat whatever you want. Start with water and juice and work your way up." To celebrate this Chad, Dave and I all raided the food court for milkshakes. They were delicious.
Today Dave is having a central line put in for his chemo. This hopefully means they can take the far more "yankable" lines out of his arms. With two young children having random medical appliances hanging out of your extremeties is a bit of a hazard!
Both Dave and Darcy would like to send huge thanks out to all the praying/good thought folk. It is definately helping them through this tough time. Dave still plans to beat this thing and thankfully he has had minimal chemo side effects aside from fatigue. After 3 weeks of chemo the first (and only) time he got sick was yesterday and it was fairly mild. He attributes this to all the well wishes and prayers from caring people all over the world who have added him to their list
Hopefully his side effects stay mild! He has also in the last week returned to the land of the living to re-take the duties of bathtime and stories before bed for his kids. This was always his job and had gone off the tracks a bit with all the chaos. However now he is back to being the boss of bathtime!
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