Goodbye Summer

It's been a busy week. Spent a beautiful Sunday in NH with the Burkes before Olivia's chemo treatment last week. Best way to keep her mind off chemo? Tubing! Chris is a little sore from the face-plant he did early in the day. Wish I had that on video.

Olivia was barely done with chemo when she had braces removed, then scans and tests in preparation for surgery.

So one leg of the process down. The shortest one, yes, but at least we are moving forward. The next part is surgery. Not sure what is worse. All the chemo or the thought of Olivia having to go through major surgery and extensive PT. I have tried every which way to find a loophole. However, I have now accepted that it is essential to the treatment. How many times and different ways did the doctors have to explain that to me? It wasn't until our friend (and outstanding orthopedic surgeon) George's eyes bugged out of his head (like, was I insane?!) that I decided to accept it and move forward. But one can still dream.

Olivia is doing very, very well. Her oncologist told her last Monday that she was doing better than all of the kids he sees. That was a nice send-off for a beautiful weekend at George and Elizabeth's in Maine. Great weather, food, company, fun.

Now we have two days before surgery with NO appointments. Olivia has heard from many of her teachers at school and she is in touch with a couple of girls from her classes. She won't attend but we will keep her as up to speed as possible with a tutor.

Will be back post-surgery...

(And maybe I'll take some time to figure out how to format these posts.)