Every few years the Pacific Northwest delivers a real summer, and it has been a fantastic one.
We did some traveling to see family in June and July. Now it is August and
family and friends are coming to see us. In between, lots of wading pool
splashing for Isaac and swimming in Lake Washington and Greenlake.
We took Isaac on his first camping trip at Fort Flagler on the east side of the peninsula and he loved it. By the end of the
weekend he was covered head to toe in dirt, sand, pine needles, and baby food. He
is not quite walking and not quite talking but it is exciting to see him get
closer every day to both of those milestones. If you could take a toddler’s
energy and bottle it, we would all get so much done. As it is, I spend my days keeping
Isaac from hurting himself and reassembling the house in his wake. The beach is one of the few places where he can tear around and mostly stay out of trouble.
I’ve also been working for an environmental
consulting company analyzing artifacts several hours each week. It feels good
to get back into my career, even if it’s a much smaller part of my life than I’d
envisioned. Despite weekly chemo treatments, I’ve been feeling pretty good much
of the time. Ran all the way around Greenlake for the first time in a long long
time! The best strategy seems to be to ignore what symptoms I can, ignore
unsolicited advice, sleep as much as possible, and avoid germy people. Isaac’s
strategy is to ignore my protests if I seem tired and to play with me as much
as possible. Matt is doing well--working hard, keeping up his running.
I don’t
really have a medical update. We just don’t know if the chemo is working and
there isn’t a way to tell unless cancer shows up in the next set of scans (and
we’ll know it didn’t work, which of course we all hope never happens, but that’s
the reality). Radiation is still up ahead but I don’t yet know the details. These
next few weeks feel difficult because we are reliving the stress of my
diagnosis just a few days before Isaac was born. Of course I’m excited that he is turning
one, but the days leading up to his birth and the days afterwards when we were
assessing the degree to which the cancer had spread were terrible. a year hasn’t dulled the memory much,
perhaps because my prognosis is still uncertain and Matt is dealing with health
challenges. And we’re tired of doctors and worrying and navigating. Isaac is
probably up to the challenge of making us laugh right through the weekend
anyway.
