Hello, hello!
I can’t believe I haven’t written an update since the end of August. I'm so sorry! We ARE alive and we are well! Since there’s a lot to share, I’ll break it down into a few different posts. Bear with me!

September
You may remember that Stephen’s 4th round of chemo ended abruptly at the end of August with a blood transfusion and additional hospital stay to stabilize him. Things continued to slowly improve from there and his bloodwork was trending in the right direction.
We were in a long waiting period as the chemo finished working in his body and September didn’t consist of very much medically speaking as a result.

We began the process of IVF in Sept. with a long list of workups for testing! We received the wonderful news that all of my bloodwork, imaging, and overall fertility is in tip-top shape which was a big sigh of relief. This will give us the best chance at a biological child since his previous sample was poor. We also had big concerns that my autoimmune issues were somehow going to affect my fertility and learning that isn’t the case was music to our ears.

I snuck Stephen home the second weekend of Sept. for one of the high school football games. The kids did a “blue-out” theme (Stephen’s favorite color) where everyone wears blue and my cheerleaders surprised us with a wonderful run-through sign, flowers, cards, and gifts. We were so deeply touched at their efforts! I’ll include pictures below.

After he returned to Bethesda, I began splitting my time between Ohio and Maryland more frequently in late September. My mental health was really plummeting. PTSD, nonstop panic attacks… everything in Bethesda became a trigger. Stephen was much more independent and agreed that I needed to start to get back to “normal” at home with the dogs as much as I could. It was exhausting driving back and forth more frequently but it was amazingly healing for my overall mental/emotional health just being able to spend any amount of time at home no matter how short. I’m very grateful that he was encouraging and supportive of this change.

Further imaging was done to check on his tumors at the end of September. We were THRILLED to learn that the largest tumors in his abdomen (the ones previously blocking his bile duct causing all of the liver troubles) were completely gone. Undetectable! The remaining tumors in his abdomen had a mixed result. Plenty of them are gone and the changes were very visible when we compared the pictures from before but it was clear there were still many more tumors in there that will need monitoring or addressed further. The tumors that remained had shrunk so overall this was still excellent news. While the tumors in his lungs were initially among some of the smaller tumors in his body, they weren’t completely taken care of from the chemo. They did shrink and are only about the size of the tip of a used crayon now. That’s relatively small but will need constantly monitored and hopefully, by the grace of God, they stay the same over time. Removing those tumors will cause further lung damage and requires extensive open chest surgery so we are definitely following a wait-and-see approach with them.

Walter Reed began to “shake hands” with the Cleveland Clinic in an effort to begin the handoff for monitoring to shift back home. All went well and his oncologist, who we’ve grown to adore, OK’d him to fully transfer care. He officially graduated from active treatment to monitoring! It would still be another two months before he’d get to fully return home due to all of the paperwork that takes place within the military but we were beyond excited for this declaration. 

Stay tuned for an October update...