August 18, 2019
Welcome to Roz 's Village Reporter on CaringBridge. You can access this information on the web and/or on the CaringBridge smart phone App available for download in GooglePlay and the Apple App Store. I am creating a Village to help me and my family through our recent troubles. On CaringBridge, I will be reporting my progress, and on Lotsa Helping Hands, we will be scheduling support activities.
As you may know, I had a seizure on June 8, 2019 and was diagnosed with a brain tumor on July 18th. I had brain surgery on August 19, eleven weeks after this saga started. The pathology came back 10 days later and I had the worst, glioblastoma. Five percent of the those with this cancer live 5 years.
I have two paths ahead of me. The first is to recover from the surgery for 6 weeks. The other is to treat what is left behind from the surgery. On September 17th I started a concurrent 21 course of chemo and 15 days of gamma radiation with a linear accelerator. That is over now and I had five weeks of rest. After that, I will start a chemo regime at a higher dose. I finished chemo in December, 2020. I am still being treated with Optune as described in the post dated
Meanwhile, I had my 75th birthday party on November 9, 2019. Check the Journal for details and pictures.
I sent detailed emails and FaceBook posts three times and have repeated that information here. Those types of communications were not really working so I switched to CaringBridge.
Here I will update my friends and family on my continuing health condition with the help of my daughter, Laura Dudden. Click on "Follow" to receive email notifications of updates, or just stop by anytime to update yourself on your own schedule. By "folllowing" or checking in, people can decide for themselves how much they want to know. This new way of communicating also preserves communications from the past.
We are also using Lotsahelpinghands to schedule helping activities like bringing meals or providing rides. We stopped using this in November. My URL is:
https://my.lotsahelpinghands.com/community/rozsvillage. At this site, my local west Denver friends and fellow church members would sign up to help, such as providing meals and giving rides to doctor's appointments. You need to sign up and apply to be a member. After you are "approved," you can use the calendar to volunteer to help out. My sincere thanks to the members of the Pastoral Care Team at the Jefferson Unitarian Church for their help in organizing this.
It is now three years since I started my life with this disease. I have not posted for a year as nothing has happened and the cancer has not progressed. My last post was in July 2021. So this new post, July 30, 2020, updates my present life and status.
We appreciate all your support and words of hope and encouragement as we make our way through this unexpected occurrence in our lives.
Roz, Jim, Laura, and Julian
