Valentines

Today I got chemo... surprisingly i'm not feeling as bad as I usually do so I thought id post about Valentines day.

I know there are people out there that think Valentines day is a commercial holiday that forces you to spend money but i just want to tell those people to just focus on the good. Is it really so bad that theres a day in our year that people are reminded to appreciate the loved ones in their lives? Granted you should always appreciate them but what's so wrong with a day that its mandatory haha.

anyway last year on Valentines I was in the hospital with e coli. I ended up begging the nurses to let me go home with a portable antibiotic pump so that i could be with my wife at home and it worked...but in the middle of the night I got a ridiculous nose bleed that wouldn't stop so we ended up back in the hospital anyway...the nurses figured something might go wrong so they kept my bed.

Im relieved that this year was different. NO cancer to ruin the day. My wife has this funny quirk where she gets too impatient to wait for the actual day and ends up doing what she had planned at midnight.. so on the 13th of Feb I wasn't allowed in the kitchen at all while she prepared everything. Every now and then she'd come out with flour on her face and her hair a giant mess....i loved it.

what I had planned for valentines isn't going to arrive for another 2 weeks....and although my wife sort of caught me in the act of trying to buy it (she knows what it is now haha....i was kind of relieved because shes very unique in the things that she likes so I was happy to find out that she loved it) im not going to say what it is until it arrives.

anyway at a little before midnight my wife forced me out of the

living room and when she called me back this is what was waiting for me:

She had spent the whole day baking a mini 5 layer lemon ( my favorite flavor) cake:

She made chocolate covered strawberries:

And biscuits ( I was obsessing about them for days) and 3 different types of butter. Honey/cinnamon, raspberry, and lemon.

Needless to say it was AWESOME! And after giving her a kiss and stuffing my face with a biscuit I grabbed my wife and we danced to some Frank from the valentines day playlist I made her (cheesy i know but she loves cheese)

No matter what we've been through and how life is at the time...I will always be grateful that I married my best friend. To this day I still would rather spend my time with her...alone... eating cake.

We're not always bald

So i'm sorry for abandoning this blog for the past month.... with traveling and the worst cold known to man it was really hard to even think about writing.

So lets catch up:

In January my wife and I went to my cousins wedding in vancouver. It was a lot of fun and it was really nice to see my family after this long year of getting treatment.

Since my parents live in China, they don't get to see me that much, so it was nice to see my mother( she came to vancouver). Anyway when we were on the plane (on our way home) my wife and I sat next to this lady who was coughing like crazy...and I laughed at the thought of my wife holding her breath everytime....she does that around sick people haha, anyway I guess the lady must have noticed or something because she turned to us and said:

" dont worry about my cough...i have allergies"...... we shouldn't have believed her.

Just when my cc treatment was getting ok, and I was starting school again I came down with the worst flu EVER! Thank you lady who lied to us! So i was looking forward to doing something nice for my wife's birthday ( Jan 17th) because last year i was crazy on steroids and didnt talk to her, but we ended up both being sick. So we spent her birthday asleep....i thought our luck was so bad that it was pretty funny so i HAD to take a pic of us...

Anyway believe it or not i've been sick with this flu for 3 straight weeks, my wife got better... but i'm still getting my chemo.... so i haven't. If you don't remember...chemo brings your immune system down, along with other things like your platelets( things that clot your blood) so because of the flu AND the chemo i've had a lot of really scary things happen the past month.

I've had a lot of nose bleeds from blowing my nose ( sounds normal but if you've ever relapsed with leukemia you'd know that a bloody nose can just as easily mean a relapse...especially if you have it for a couple days)... then i woke up one morning with a weird tingling in my arm.

So i told my doc and ended up having to rush to the hospital to get a lumbar puncture to check to see if the leukemia came back in my spinal fluid... in my case its something to check up on because when i relapsed last year... it was in my spinal fluid.

Needless to say that was a really stressful day for my wife and I. We were sitting in the hospital and all i could think about was how cancer doesn't care whats going on in your life...it's not going to give you a time out just because you've got the flu and you've started school again...it can come back whenever it wants and there's nothing i can do about it.

I know that sounds depressing but its really not. let me explain. the first time I was diagnosed..it was like getting punched in the gut. My wife and I were so caught up in the disease and what it meant that it was hard to focus on each other in that very moment. The same thing happened the second time....i have to admit...when i heard that i relapsed...i didn't take it well and took it out on my wife by shutting down emotionally...and she went into her ninja " ill fix you" mode haha. We didnt care about the moment....we just freaked out.

So THIS time....i have to say i was really proud of my wife and I...instead of freaking out and caring more about what we were about to find out from my lumbar puncture...we just accepted the fact that we don't have control over the answer....so there was no point in even caring about it. Its a not feeling defeated....but content. We just don't want this disease to throw us around anymore....to make us lose control and have emotional spikes that go from really scared to really sad. I think we've had enough of that. We sat together and acted like it was just any other day. I think we talked about what movie to go watch haha.

Anyway the good news is that my lumbar puncture results came back negative...so no relapse :)

Thats not to say that we still don't have scares....just a couple days ago i woke up in the morning and coughed up blood....It's amazing what you have to deal with with this stupid disease. I almost cant remember what its like not to have this stuff happen. Anyway i talked to my doc and it seems that because my platelets are low...when i cough it scratches my throat and TADA bloody cough.

So like a said...this flu has caused us ALOT of little problems....so next time you are on a plane...and you're coughing up a storm.....DONT LIE to the people sitting next to you because you never know if that person is a leukemia patient or not.

we're not always bald!

anyway im feeling better.....so last night.....at around midnight the wifey and i got a mad craving for biscuits....

....they were delicious so sorry i don't have a picture of the finished product :)

anyway hope everyone is happy and healthy.