3rd cycle begins tomorrow

It's about 8:45 p.m. and we've been in our hospital room now for about 30 minutes. There's a 2 hour Avatar movie Kevin's been totally pumped to see. It's the season and possible series finale of Kevin's favorite Nickolodeon animated series. I mst admit I enjoy it too. We've watched dozens of episodes together. My point is, our entire night has been predicated on Kevin missing as little of the movie as possible. Not an easy task seeing that the movie is 7 to 9, and our hospital admittance was at 8. I packed our bag, and we sprinted out of the Target House as soon as a commercial started at 7:45. Then we got to the Medicine room to wait for the nurse from to walk us to our room at BMT. When she greeted us she agreed to wait for a commerical, which was only 20 or 30 seconds following her arrival. We made it to our room before the commercial ended and Kevin's been his typical tunnel visioned intense Avatar watching self. He even shhhhhushed the nurse when she came in.....Obviously I corrected him, and he behaved and let her take his vitals. The doctor came in as well, and spoke softly so that his concentration wasn't effected. I asked the doctor if she'd seen his chart, and she said she had. I asked her how his MRI results were and she said she hadn't seen the reports, but that if something came up we would've heard. That was nice, but not the definitive information I was looking for. The doctor agreed to go look up the Preliminary reports. She came back a couple minutes later with the printouts which read a bunch of medical jargon (good delineation of the brain, vascular flow appears grossly patent, etc, etc.), but in sum the final impression read no evidence to support disease reoccurence or significant change. This is the information myself and Kevin's other loved one's hope, pray, wish, beg, and make deals with God to hear. Today I'm thankfull, but there's 5 years of MRI's to go until we're remotely out of the woods. That's okay.....Today's a victory, and we'll take joy in each one. Kevin starts chemo tomorrow and in is pretty much indifferent. Kevin actually shushed the doctor as she was telling me his MRI results. I know that sounds awful, but I'm glad he's taking joy in things. He very much looks forward to things and gets great enjoyment out of them when they occur. I apologized for Kevin and explained how he'd been waiting for this movie and it's all he's talked about since I got hear this afternoon. She smiled and said it was actually great that he's enjoying things like that.

I also want to remind everybody the Advokate 5k is 2 weeks from today (August 2nd) at Rochester municipal Park. Once again, this is a 5k event that has 100% of proceeds going to St. Jude's Brain Tumor research. My brother and I are definitely in, and I hope to see many others I know there. I forget the website, but if you google Advokate 5k 2008 you'll get the event website and registration. I've been training pretty hard, but my sleep deprivation has caused quite a few ups and downs in my running. I'm a competitive person, but I'll have to swallow my pride and run as good as I can knowing my time will be much slower then what I'm accustomed to (20:21 5k last year). Rachel and I will keep everybody posted on Kevin's chemo progress this week.

Take Care All,

Eric