Tomorrow afternoon Dad restarts radiation treatments at WVU hospital. Kristen and Joel will be spending the next 2 weeks at the hospital’s temporary residence for patients called “Rosenbaum Family House”. For anyone interested, the mailing address is Rosenbaum Family House, 30 Family House Drive PO Box 8228 Morgantown, WV 26506.

A few different doctors agreed upon Dad’s new treatment plan and considered it pretty typical for his type of reoccurrence of Glioblastoma. This treatment includes 3 different interventions: 

• a drug called Avastin, taken at the hospital every 2 weeks

• 2 weeks of a daily low dose of radiation

• a chemotherapy drug called Lomustine taken every 6 weeks. 

The last couple of weeks have been full with visitors and a trip to State College. Just today, we said goodbye to Nate, Heather and their family, as we celebrated Sydney Joel's 1st birthday at Rolling Ridge. While we celebrate Sydney's 1 year birthday, we're coming up to 1 year since I arrived at my parents' house, and when we moved to Morgantown WV to do Dad's first round of radiation and chemotherapy. It's strange to be writing this post now, and reflect on how Mom and Dad are headed to the same place to do a similar thing.

Dad is generally exhausted these days. He’s sleeping most of the day, he has lost a noticeable amount of muscle mass, and he comments that he feels slightly ill whenever he is awake. Like last month, there’s been a lot of change over the last couple weeks, but generally he is cognitively similar to our last updates (meaning- memory and language ability has stayed stable). 

As I'm writing out this post and feeling worried about some of the rapid changes Dad's experienced over the last few weeks, feeling some familiar helplessness feelings creep in and hoping for treatments to go well, I hear Mom and Dad visiting in the next room with Dad's close friend and roommate from Nashville Tennessee, Turley. I don't know what their conversation was about, but I just overheard Turley comment, “No need to worry about something happening. You’ll probably be wrong about what to worry about.” In this moment, this statement is a salve, and perfect reminder to me to be in the moment, and let go of the small fear. Not that anyone is asking me :) but if I were asked to summarize the lessons I've learned this last year being with my parents and going through these treatments alongside Dad and Mom, my initial response would be, I can't summarize a single lesson learned, that's too hard, why would you ask me to do that?; but a second attempt to summarize a lesson learned would be something not surprising- family and friends are healers. I've seen, and experienced, that to be true many times this last year, in the last week, couple days, in the last few minutes.