Mom and Dad arrived home from their month-long cruise, looking refreshed and ready to take the cancer head on. They barely had a day to rest before dad started his treatments. That first week back was chock full of appointments. Dad had to get a power port installed in his chest for the chemotherapy. A power port is a pretty ingenious device. It’s basically a semi-permanent IV line. They use the port to insert an IV instead of poking you in the arm. If you are going to have repeated IVs then this is the way to go. It prevents the stress on your arm veins. It is a little device put under the skin and a needle is place in a vein in your neck. Once you get used to it, it’s really not much of a problem. Dad also had to get a brain MRI to make sure that the cancer had not spread to the brain and some blood tests before the chemotherapy could begin. The course of treatment they setup for him was 7 weeks of chemo and radiation. Radiation would be each weekday and chemo would be once a week. While the chemo treatments were about 4 hours long, the radiation only took 15 minutes or so to completed. He flew through the first 3 weeks of treatment without much issue.
Jodi, and her son Andrew, came down for Thanksgiving to spend time with Dad. It was really nice having them here and Dad really enjoyed the company. Even if there was a gaggle of dogs and cats running around the house while they were here. Things seemed to be shaping up as an ordinary Thanksgiving, but then something happened that we cannot recall ever happening before. It was getting to be way past the usual time for Thanksgiving dinner and the turkey just wasn’t cooking. It wasn’t an overly huge turkey and Mom had prepared and cooked it as she always does. For some reason this damn turkey just didn’t want to cook. Eventually we had to forego the turkey and just have the other food mom had cooked. It was a strange dinner for sure, but was still as delicious as ever. That turkey finally finished cooking around 7pm or so. We decided that the thermostat on the oven wasn’t working right anymore so now we have to set it a bit higher than you normally would when cooking something.
Thanksgiving turned out successful despite the turkey issue and eventually it was time to say goodbye to Jodi and Andrew. It was also time to take the thoughts of cancer off hold and get back into the daily grind of dad’s treatments.