Chaos Chronicles

I just wanted to thank everyone for your thoughts and prayers for my mom and family. Mom passed away this morning at 9:30am. It feels weird to be without a mother. I just look forward to seeing her in heaven in the end. Please keep my family in your prayers. Ask God to give us the strength to make it through this new chapter of our lives..ok.

Not sure when a service will be. If you want to attend the service, please email me and i’ll fill you in on the details. If you want to send cards, please send them to:

(My Dad has Moved)

Again, thanks so much for your support.
God Bless,
Lisa

My Dad just called. My Mom decided not to fight anymore..the Dr.’s give her about a week.

Going to MA in the morning. Please continue to pray for my family

Well, I am back from MA. I just got a call from my aunt telling me that they did a CAT scan today of my mother. They got the results back.

The Dr.’s say that my mother’s liver is basically gone. Everything in her body is enflamed and her eye has a fungal infection. Her bowels are also obstructed. They can try and drain the liver with tubes in her back, they can drain her eye and bowels as well. They couldn’t do a bone marrow biopsy because it’s so brittle, but they said that even if the leukemia is totally gone, it may come back next week. They also don’t believe that she will survive the bone marrow transplant because of her kidney and other problems.
My mother is now deciding if she wants to keep fighting or if she is going to go on comfort care…meaning, keeping her comfortable for the little time left that she would have and letting her die. They dr’s think that if she did fight this it would only buy her a couple of weeks.
I really don’t know what I’m going to do..Obviously if they decide to go with comfort care, I am going to go down to MA again. I guess what I’ll do is, leave Ben here with the kids and go to MA alone. Thank God Ben is not working right now. It would be really hard to do this if he were.

I’ll write more once I hear the final decision and know what the plan of action is.. Please keep her in your prayers.

My mom just called and said the Dr. told her that the Leukemia looks like it’s GONE! They are doing a bone marrow biopsy in 6 days to confirm!!!!!!! PRAISE GOD!!!!

This site was helpful and it helped me change the way I pray and remember promises God had made to me already. http://www.savedhealed.com/healing.htm

I close my eyes and sit here dumbfounded.  I have no idea what to do right now.  My life feels like it’s at a breaking point right now, and I don’t know how much longer it can hold together.

Let me start at the beginning….

I’m sure you all know about my mother and her leukemia.  What you don’t know is the updated story on my sister.   My sister is a 25 year old mom to 3 kids.  She lives off welfare and those around her who do things for her (which includes my parents).   I love my sister, but she really is a mooch.  Well, back in december, she met this guy.  Some guy she met online.  He lives in South Carolina.  Since meeting him, she has become withdrawn, and pretty much only has time for him.  Doesn’t even call my mother in the hospital.  Last month, she willingly gave temporary custody of her 3 children to DSS, claiming she wanted help and she was depressed.  I believed her.  I think most everyone else did also.

Well, it seems like we’ve all been taken for a ride because last night, my mother calls and tells me that Lori is missing.  No one has seen her since Friday morning, when someone saw her leaving her apt.

I make some phone calls and at the end of the night, I find out that someone picked up my sister early Friday morning, and drove her to the train station to go off to South Carolina to be with this guy she barely knows.  She said she was going to run away.

No one has heard from her since, so we don’t know if she is ok or not.   Man this is going to turn into a book, and i’m super tired from the days events. I’m going to hit the hay, but i’ll try and finish this tomorrow.  Just please keep her and our family in your prayers.  Thanks so much.

Hey everyone. I’m making a trip to MA tonight. On Thursday there was a family meeting concerning my mother’s leukemia care. They gave my parents 3 options. Option 1: Stop treatment. Continue with platelet transfusions, and let my mother live out the rest of her time. (when my father asked later about this, they told him if they chose this option, she’d have about 2 weeks to live.) Option 2: Start a more aggressive round of chemo. It has a success rate of around 12-15%. It’s also very aggressive, and it will be a lot like the first round of chemo she had, only this time she is weaker and only weights 98 lbs.(that round put her in ICU with congestive heart failure and a few other bad things, and at one point, they called my father in to be with her because they didn’t think she’d last the night.) Option 3: Go right to a bone marrow transplant. My mother’s leukemia cell count was 16 (i think that means 16,000 but i’m not sure) and they said that going straight for the transplant, most likely wont work, and it would be something like 4% chance of success. They picked Option 2. My mother was admitted to UMASS Medical Center and she is starting a new chemo regimen tonight. Please pray for her that she makes it through the 6 days of chemo and the weeks after, and that the leukemia goes into remission. Once it goes into remission they can do a bone marrow transplant which will have a MUCH higher success rate. Please remember to keep her in your prayers

If you want to send her a card (she cannot recieve fresh fruit or REAL flowers), the hospital address is

Sheila V.
c/o
UMASS Memorial Medical Center
University Campus
Bone Marrow Transplant Unit Room 835
55 Lake Ave North
Worcester, MA. 01655

Thanks for your prayers in advance,
Lisa

Hey everyone ! Could you please vote for my mom? I posted before about her being diagnosed with Leukemia.

She is doing better now but is looking at not being home before November, a second round of Chemo, and a bone marrow transplant. This is a wish to get her some things for when she gets home to show how appreciated she is. Thanks!!!! Voting starts in 13 hours from now (11:32 pm EST Tuesday)

Even if you don’t want to vote, the video I put up of my 3 yr old singing to my mother is worth the stop over

Here is the link:
http://www.robinhoodfund.com/cast-your-votes/wish/id/13992

Well, Autumn is now in full swing.  The trees here are mostly reds and golds and the brisk wind blows every so often. The season has changed.  In more ways than one.

So many changes are happening in my life all at once.  If you’ve been reading my blog, you know about my mother.  She isn’t out of the woods yet. She needs to go into remission and stay there.   She has to have a bone marrow transplant and they are still searching for a match.

Then there is Ben’s job issue. He doesn’t have one.  Right now he is working with a temp agency and has work for 7-10 days next week but that’s it.  No permanent full time employment on the horizon.  Please pray for that.  We are willing to move anywhere he can find a good paying job.  He really needs to make $15-$20 an hour and is willing to do whatever is available (unless it’s sales. he couldn’t sell a comb to a gorilla).

I could do with one or two more customers, but I’m not sure I could keep up with more and be a work at home mom.  What I have now is sufficient to pay the phone bill and the internet bill every month, without me doing any work at all.

Our living situation is fragile and almost non-existent right now.  We basically have 30 days to move out, but Wade wants us out sooner than that.  I’m not sure where he thinks we are going to move to, since we have not enough income to pay rent or a mortgage and there really isn’t another place we can stay.   I mean technically we can’t stay here either because Wade is going to sell the house or the bank is going to foreclose on it.    We are willing to move anywhere Ben can get a job, but so far that hasn’t happend.  Please pray for this need also.

We didn’t want to be here for the winter anyway, so it’s not a big surprise for us, but still.  Being told to get out isn’t the greatest feeling.

So, I didn’t update the last few days. There is awesome news!

My mother is out of ICU! She sounds so much better. She was on oxygen after leaving ICU, but today she is off the oxygen.

Her Chemo is finished. She is eating solids again and she is walking around now. They are going to do another platelet transfusion because she is constantly low.

The day before my mother left ICU, she said to my dad that she can’t wait to go home and soak in a bubble bath and have a large glass of root beer.

I’m on the phone with her now and I could immediately tell that she didn’t have on the oxygen anymore. I was so happy.

I just want to thank everyone over and over and over for your prayers.

I also wanted to tell you all of some moments with God. When my mother was in ICU for a few days, I was praying for my mom and my dad and out of nowhere I heard a voice in my head say, “Don’t worry child, she will be alright.” I knew she’d be ok. So after my dad called, I told him just before we hung up that I wasn’t worried about mom because I knew she’d be ok. He said, “Yeah, I know she’ll be ok too. A couple days ago I had a parlez-vous with the man upstairs” That touched me a lot because my father isn’t very religious. Then imagine my surprise when my mother tells me that my father laid hands on her spleen and was praying over her. WOW.

God definately works in mysterious ways. The saying is definitely true: God Uses Cracked Pots; God doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called.

Just letting God in to your life can change it in ways you never expect.

Amen for that.

Well, there is good news and bad news.

Good news: She is off the blood pressure meds and her blood pressure is staying in normal range. They gave her another dose of chemo today and her blood gases are still doing good. She also received another transfusion. Her heart rate was 110 yesterday and is down to 80 today so that’s another good thing
Bad news: My mother is back on the bi pap machine (they took her off this morning and put her on a smaller mask with a bag at the end). Her Pneumonia has gotten a little worse, but they are not sure exactly the extent of the pneumonia because of the build up of fluid in her lung. She also has fluid around her heart. They are giving her lasix to get rid of the fluid.

More bad news: My mother has congestive heart failure. They did an ultrasound on her heart but the results haven’t come back yet. Congestive heart failure can be fixed and it’s not as horrible as it sounds. I believe it’s when the heart can’t pump the blood out properly to get to the other organs. It can be fixed by drugs i believe, but i don’t know what, if any, they will give her.

Please keep praying! If she can get over this infection and pneumonia i think she will be on an easier road to recovery. Put her on any prayer list you can. Thanks for the prayers.

My father is holding up and, as to be expected, has his down moments. This whole thing is just crazy for him. He doesn’t tell me much though. My aunt lois talked about Last Rights with him (my mother is technically catholic) and he went ballistic. He doesn’t want them to do that because he doesn’t want my mother to get scared. He mentioned that to a nurse and asked if it was something he should be thinking about and the nurse wanted to know who told him that and made it sound like that was not something my dad shouldn’t even be thinking about now. So I guess that’s good news.
Keep praying. That’s all we can do.