Father's Day
Renee and Tom hosted our Father's Day celebration and we girls and kids tried to do everything so that the Dads could just have fun. Here's son Jim, my Jim and Tom at bocci ball. Son Jim finally beat 'the old guy!"
It was a beautiful SoCal day so there was lots of pool activity and lots of lounging around being lazy, drinking beer. We had grilled brats, dogs and burgers along with baked beans and a new "crowd pleaser" dish that I made. I told the kids that every time we all get together I'm going to bring a new dish to try out on them. Lots of recipes sound really good but make way more than Jim and I will eat. This dish was a potato casserole of hash browns, sour cream, green onions, grated cheese, cream of chicken soup and a cornflake crumb topper. It was rated pretty good!
Jim got a Logitech remote DJ gadget that allows us to play our music from the computer on speakers inside or out and use the remote control to manage the whole thing. Pretty awesome! I guess they don't make these things anymore but Tom found one on Ebay. Jim is really enjoying accessing our music this way and not having to sit at the computer to play music. We have about 5000 songs to choose from :) !! Thanks kids!
I mentioned Jim's radiation treatment but haven't written about that. A month ago a check up CT scan showed a spot in his chest that had looked suspicious before and now looked a little bigger. PET scan showed it is probably cancer and apparently it had not responded to chemo. The first treatment the doctor suggested was 20 days of radiation. Yikes! That would mean 4 weeks of trips every day to Newport...2 hours each way. We asked if that was the only option and the doctor thought for a minute then said that there was a new radiation machine in town that Jim might be a candidate for. It's called a CyberKnife.
We were able to see the radiation doctor that same day and she gave the go ahead for 5 treatments. We feel so fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. There are only a few hundred of these machines deployed around the world and we are near one of them. The doctor (another young woman) is very confident that this will "blast away the tumor." She says there is a whole new generation of doctors using tools like this CyberKnife who look at cancer like Jim has and think that if anything new pops up...blast it away!
Maybe I'm just a Pollyanna but the doctors give us great confidence that all will be well. Jim has had 4 of the 5 treatments and has experienced no side effects. The major one would be tiredness but he hasn't even had that.
Another bump in the road...and maybe this is why I had such a strong gut feeling that we should stay put for awhile.