R and R

Now that Joe's treats aren't being irradiated anymore, he and I caught up with friends over the weekend...Joe is actually beginning to look and feel like his old self again, I'm very happy to report (though he describes himself as running on 5 cylinders instead of 8).


On Friday, Rosa and Clark came up with Desma to meet us for dinner and over the weekend we heard from a variety of Joe's friends via email and telephone.


(Incidentally, those of you who have not been introduced to the cuteness of Elvis, the son of our friends Ann and Pete...voila...

...Elvis created and sent the cancer crab that's worked miracles on Joe.) Ann, Pete and Elvis sent greetings and the above picture from a day out in NYC.


On Wednesday Joe meets with his oncologist to see about the course of treatment now that radiation has stopped. We'll let you know when we know. We really don't know if it's a "good" thing or not that the radiation treatments were stopped. The tumor is so close to vital organs that one of the reasons they decided to stop was so as not to damage heart tissue, etc. Of course, the fact that the tumor reacted so well to radiation IS a good thing, so we'll see what's next on Wednesday.


By the way, Rosa asked if we were sugar-coating things on this blog to keep his friends from worrying. I guess to a small degree we probably ARE just out of our natural personalities, but the episode that prompted the question was when every day we'd blog that Joe was supposed to get out of the hospital "tomorrow" and tomorrow turned into a week.


That really WAS the info we were getting from the doctors...if we'd known he was going to be there a whole week we would have started whining WAY earlier. And made him drink more water so they could have unhooked the IV earlier.