Football and Stomach Junk

January 25, 2009

Erin finished out the week strong. The Life Skills class at her school honored her by making a substantial donation to the Children's Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation from their Christmas craft sales. This is such a two-way blessing. The students in Life Skills have disabilities (sometimes severe), and their classes help them learn how to become independent young adults. They make a variety of crafts that they sell to fund school activities. By contributing part of their earnings to the CNCF, they demonstrate to us all that everyone can help someone else. Thanks to all those student and their teachers for putting their money where it will do real good in the world.

After school on Friday, we packed up a van full of middle schoolers and took them over to the Ross's house to help Jackson celebrate his 12th birthday. Erin and the gang played football for almost two hours before coming in for cake and ice cream (who can believe it was 80+ degrees on Friday, when it never got about 47 yesterday?). Erin even caught a pass from Jackson for a touchdown! Luckily Colton brought his little brother Weston, so that she had size and weight parity with at least one other player on the field. Otherwise, it sort of looked like Teddy playing football with a team of Willies.

Saturday turned out a little less fun and upbeat. Erin had a slow start to the day and later in the afternoon I discovered why. I thought she had just overdone it on Friday or that her lung was flaring up. It turned out that the Jane Long stomach virus eventually caught up with her (sorry D'Anna, had I known, I would never have had Noah over to share the germs all day), but not before we spread her cheer around pretty effectively. Earlier in the day we went out to support Jackson's basketball team and then went to lunch with his fan club. Noah came back to the house for legos and to keep Erin company. We even contemplated a movie. She never ran a fever, so that was good, but she didn't feel all that well most of the day. I think she seems better today. Anyway, I owe all of our friends a preemptive apology for exposing their kids to the urps and whatever your euphemism is for the other stomach virus outlet.

For those of you following the treatment side of this story. Erin successfully started oral etoposide on Thursday and we added a daily therapeutic dose of celebrex on Friday. Next Tuesday we'll zip in to Houston for an IV dose of zometa to protect her bones and make them less hospitable to tumor that might try to move into the bones. We took the early appointment so we could make it back for afternoon classes and after school UIL practice (Erin has signed up for seven events: general math, number sense, calculator, oral reading, dictionary skills, maps, charts, and graphs, and something else that I can't remember. I don't know if she will qualify in all of them, but she wanted to try.).