Darren LeBlanc

Ok, so for the next 11 days I’m going to be doing new image headers on the website each day. In honor of our 5 year anniversary, I’m taking images from our honeymoon, day by day with clips from journal entries. To view these however, you may have to refresh your browser. Here’s how:

1. Hit F5 – its at the top middle of your keyboard
2. Does the image have a date on it, that’s 5 years ago today? (for instance…today’s image should read June 9, 2003)
3. If so, you are done! If not, hold down the Ctrl key and hit the F5 button again.
4. Rinse and repeat each day

Alright, enough of that. So yes, yesterday was my anniversary and Misty’s birthday. Yes, the same day. I know…”poor girl”. I take care of her though. We usually separate one night for each event. We had a little family party with her family yesterday on her actual birthday. It was a nice day, except for the heat. I’m not too happy that today is supposed to be worse (read: “upper 90’s Monday”). Misty was feeling pretty good till the evening. She starting feeling sick and slept for a while. Overall, things are really going well though. She seems to be progressing upward with her speech (in spite of all medical predictions!). She said a bunch of words today. They weren’t all right on target, but many of them were. This is a big improvement over last week where she was nearly mute. Her spirits are pretty good (and so are mine).

Isaiah 41 reads:

28 Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.

29 He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.

30 Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;

31 but those who hope in the LORD
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.

Well, its nice to see some of Isaiah’s prophecy coming true before my eyes. A couple of weeks ago, life was bordering the despair level for many people close to Misty…and today, we are refreshed.

My Misty,

I love you.
There is nothing I could possibly say to express how sorry I am for what you have had to go through this year…I wish I could take it from you. I would trade places in a second. But you are a champion, it is obvious, and I’m not the only one who notices. I can’t wait till you are completely healed. I also can’t wait to see our little girl grow up into a woman as amazing as you. Your beauty is intoxicating; your wisdom is enviable; your compassion is moving; your strength is inspiring and your faith is immovable. I’m so excited to spend the rest of my life with you. I adore you and you have my heart.

Happy birthday.
Happy anniversary.
I’m so glad I married you…wouldn’t change a thing.

Always and Forever,
Darren

NOTE: Through June 20th, each day will have a new image in the header. Please refresh your browser if it doesn’t automatically show.

I like Chinese food.
I’ve been perfectly happy driving around the block to pick up my General Tso’s for years now. But that has all changed. Tonight I discovered the beauty and ease of what most of us call delivery.

Yes, I honestly think this was the first time in my adult life that I have had something delivered. And I gotta say, I was so happy to pay $4 to tip the nice gentleman for hand delivering hot delicious fried rice to my doorstep. I’m in love with this new dinner method….I don’t think I can go back to picking up my own food (or making it for that matter). Now we just need to get the sabrett push-cart vendor guy to deliver his hot dogs…and we are set (yes, the subject food item is often colloquially known as dirty water dogs - and I’m perfectly ok with that).

Unfortunately, the Chinese food (and of course the episode of Monk that we watched while eating it) was the highlight of the day. Other than that….it was on the order of ”pretty bad”.

We woke up at that crack and went over to the hospital. Today was Misty’s scheduled chemo day (she takes a pill every day and gets a bag via IV every 2 weeks). So we go in and get her blood drawn. Standard procedure is to draw blood and make sure all her counts are good before getting any treatment. Well, they weren’t. Her platelets were pretty low and her white blood cell count was very low as well (86 and 2.2 respectively, for those of you who that means something too). Basically, her platelets were too low for her to get the Avastin. So, we wait a week and if they aren’t back up, then I guess we probably think about a transfusion. Also her WBC was low so she had to get a Neupogen shot which makes her body ache pretty badly. We need another one of them tomorrow…so back to the hospital.

Oh well. I shouldn’t complain. Today was a million times better than most days a few weeks ago. Misty’s attitude and uncanny trust in God make life infinitely easier for me.

We met with Dr. Raval today and we were surprised to find him in an encouraged mood. Misty’s cognitive abilities may have been slightly better this week than they were a couple weeks ago when we met with him. Her weight seems to have stabilized and I explained to him that yesterday and today have both seen phrases come out of Misty’s mouth (it’s been a little while since she has said anything other than “yea” and “no” – and she doesn’t say them very much either). Yesterday she said, “So cute” as my toddler daughter modeled her new sandals that Memma (misty’s mom) bought her from payless. And today she said “Come on” to me as she was disgusted with my persistent reminders that she needs to drink fluids. I’ve never been so happy with her display of frustration toward me :) 

But yes, Dr. Raval was encouraged. He told Misty he hopes this chemo regimen works so well that she will be able to talk again. He told me to pull down the amount of steroids I have her on (Misty loves this idea) because part of her weakness may even be coming from that (she is very weak…can’t even stand up now). He even went on to talk about how if this chemo continues to work, he will use her as an example to get this regimen FDA approved and hopefully help lots of other people. For me, it’s immaterial whether this chemo brings my wife back to health, or if God pulls the cancer out of her body tomorrow without any drugs…either way, I know who to thank. People don’t recover from brain tumors like Misty has…it just doesn’t happen (you probably don’t want the statistics). But it will happen…it will happen soon…and I’m excited for it.

By the way, Olivia was so adorable tonight. After her bath I pulled the couches together so she could lay next to Misty, but I could be right there so she didn’t crawl all over her and hurt her (this is the usual problem when we attempt this). Well, before long she was picking up Misty’s hand and rubbing in on her face and smiling like she just loved it. And before we went up to bed, Misty got a kiss on the cheek and an “ah do mama” – which means “I love you mommy”.

Misty is sleeping. We had to do an early night because we have a dr appt tomorrow. Just a checkup. Today was the same as yesterday…but it should be noted that all the recent days have been a bit better than a week or so ago. So thats pretty nice.

I just went in to check on Livi. She was laying on her side, with her cute little pink blanket pulled across her chest and her feet sticking out the bottom. She makes me melt.

We have a whole routine that we usually do. We havn’t been as regular with this lately, as misty has needed more attention, so pretty much every day misty’s mom or my mom will be hleping out with Olivia. But nevertheless, we had a nice routine going for a good year or so. I miss it. It went something like this…

At 7:30pm (give or take about 20 minutes) Olivia will inevitably walk over to me and begin her polite but stern inquiries about our usual bath time (she really does know when it is time for a bath each night). She incessantly repeats the word “bath” as if her vocabulary has been reduced to but one mono-sylabic word. This happens until I move the blockade out of the way and let her run up stairs toward the tub. So we run upstairs and start the bath water. She likes to run her hand under the stream as if she is testing the temperature (and she tells me too…”hot”, “cold”). When we get a good temperature, we run into her room to get dressed for such an ocaission and while  making lots of excited noises to hype the event up (as if bath time really needed any extra hype) she gets in the bath.

Standard practice says that at this point I give her the bath toys. I hold each up and make her tell me what it is before I drop it in with her. She has them all down pat:

Duck (”gock”)
Alligator (”gador”)
Hippo (”ippo”)
Whale (”whale”)
Bird (”bir”)

as well as Marker (”makah”), Crayon (”kayin”) and another Gock. As we are approaching the end of bath time, I read her our book. Its called Rainbow Fish and it was the only bath book I could find at Borders (the story is kinda cheesy, but not many people are writing waterproof books for tub time). To seal the deal, we lean her head back into the stream of water to rinse the shampoo out. She loves this (most of the time). To dry her off I need to wrap her up in a towel of course….but it’s tough picking her up out of the tub and holding both sides of the towel at the same time. So I have started using my mouth to hold one end. Well, she loves this. Every night I wrap her up and she reaches up to pull the corner of the towel out of my mouth and laugh with this huge laugh like she played a joke on me or something. I love it.

Then we are back downstairs with mommy and drinking out evening milk. She usually wanders around the living room at first, but she always ends up climbing up on my lap to say the one word I love to hear…”back”. This means “back rub” – she loves it when we sit on the couch and I softly rub her back.  Then we go upstairs and I hold her for a couple minutes and we say our prayers:

“Dear Jesus,
Thank you for this day today.
Help us to have a great sleep
and help mommy to get better.”

I stand with her untill she says “kib” (crib). Then its over…I lay her down and tuck her in and I have to wait another day to do it again.

Just a quick reminder….tomorrow is wednesday. Please join us in praying for Misty.

Also, I’d like to say thanks for all the cards, emails and website comments we are getting. I read every note, every email and every comment, and I pass many of them on to Misty. You are all such an encouragement.

And today was ok. Nothing major to report.

Today was a pretty great day. I woke Misty around 10:30am to get ready for our big drive to the Safari at Six Flags. It’s Arielle’s birthday so we planned a day for her. Well, we don’t do much of anything really quickly anymore, so by the time we actually got out the door it was almost 12:30. I had to stop and get ripped off at kinkos for a small job I put in a while ago and that killed a few more minutes. But alas, we did manage to get down there by 2pm or so ready for the adventure.

It was a good trip. On the way there we failed miserably at trying to figure out something that Misty wanted to tell us. I hate this. It breaks my heart…she just can’t communicate. She says “uh huh”, “no”, “yes” and “because”. That’s about it. And even those get mixed up every few sentences. Sometimes a stray word comes in…but its usually off topic. Like today, she said “picture” but that had nothing to do with it and it threw us off track for a while. I did manage to get out that she felt good, like noticeably good (this was encouraging).

Then the drive through the safari was quite nice. We saw a 35 minute old American Bison (the park ranger type lady pulled over excitedly and told us the good news – she said we looked like we were interested). We had a bit of a run in with a small bear who decided to paw our red minivan’s protruding side mirrors and gnaw at our back tire (misty’s mom’s ride….no, I haven’t entered the minivan era of life yet). The ranger-type fellow had to come rescue us in his zebra striped pickup. AND, we saw an elephant swimming in a large puddle and literally twirling a log up in the air with his trunk – it was like Barnum and Bailey meets Marty Stouffer.  It was well worth the cost of admission (which was, by the way, slightly high at a whopping $80 for the 4 of us). Anyway pictures to come sometime.

After that, we dined on Alaskan King Crabs and T-Bones followed by a tantalizing Ice Cream Cake (with crunchies) with a heartfelt personalization to the birthday girl. Misty didn’t eat much for dinner….but we did ok on the day as a whole.

That’s it…nothing earth shattering, just a nice day. I wish I could help Misty communicate, but she is doing ok. She really is. We are trying to be joyful. We had a great little church service yesterday in the comfort of our living room. Olivia with off to church with grandma and we had a great time singing. In the book of Philippians, Paul says rejoice always, so thats what we are shooting for.

PS…Happy Birthday Arielle. Misty and I love you an enormous amount and we are proud of you….really proud.

PSS…We are growing increasingly dissatisfied with The Office (remember we are watching through the seasons on DVD for the first time). It seems they have run out of genius and replaced it with cheap potty humor. Oh well…hopefully this down stage won’t last.

UPDATE: After I posted this, someone emailed me a link to the video – click here

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I’m always intrigued when a largely secular news media reports on spiritual things. Take a minute to check out the following link. Its interesting.

http://www1.wsvn.com/features/articles/specialreport/MI75423

PS…things with misty today were ok….not great. Other than breakfast, she didn’t really eat and was feeling sick/weird much of the day. Oh well. Hopefully, tomorrow will be better.