Update on Earl

It has been almost a week since Earl's treatment. He is doing much better than we expected. He has had energy that he hasn't had since last year. He even called the doctor and wanted to go ahead with the next treatment this week! They won't do the next treatment for one month. It has really helped to have his son Charlie here.

Thank you all so much for your prayers. I'm sure that one of the reasons Earl has been feeling as good as he has is because of all the prayers that are being offered in his behalf.

Karen

Finished Dress

I have finally finished the dress that I have been working on for the past month. It has been a great experience but I am ready to move on to the next job. This dress is for a docent at the LDS Church Museum of History and Art. Some of the docents portray a pioneer that they have researched and using the museum artifacts tell about the person using first person reenactment. I have made several of the dresses for this program. This is the pattern that we started with.

My client wanted a few changes so we made it have a back closure instead of in the front. She wanted princess seaming and to have the bodice come down to a point in the front instead of going straight across the waistband. Then she wanted to have the fancy collar (called a berthe) be detachable so that she could take it off and wear it with a different collar. Finally she wanted the shirred area on the sleeves to be smocked instead so she did the smocking. She wanted to contribute something to the making of the dress.






Here is a picture of our inspiration





Finally we got it all worked out. The fitting was quite a process but we finally got it to work. In 1837 they were not using hoops yet so I made a quilted petticoat for her to give the skirt a little body without have to wear 3 or more petticoats. A quilted petticoat is like wearing a quilt attached to the skirt of the petticoat at the knees.



Here's the finished product.

The sleeves appear extra long in the pictures. They really are going to be extra poofy when there are arms and hands holding the cuff in place.






Now that it's done I can start working on the next order which is not custom so it should work up pretty quickly. I like the custom work but I also like to break it up with some straight sewing.


Earl had done really well today. He and Charlie are working to get Charlie's room cleaned out so that it's not like he's living in a storage room. They made quite a bit of progress today.

Earl had his treatment today.

Earl is very tired. He has slept most of the day. The doctor said that it may take a couple of days before we start seeing side effects. They have given Earl anti-inflammitory, antibotics, pain and anti nausea meds to counter the anticipated side effects. He will have a CT scan in a month to check progress. The doctor said that the first scan after treatment usually shows the tumors larger because they swell before they start dying and shrinking.

So now we just wait and see what happens.

I got a little emotional as they wheeled him to the angio lab. I guess I just hit reality today. On one hand I am hopeful that the doctors know what they are doing to extend Earl's life. On the other I am terrified about this not working. Most of the time I can wear the hopeful, matter of fact face. We are so lucky to live in a time when medical miracles are performed everyday. The procedures they are using are the newest, most successful yet. Someday they will have a cure and just maybe it will happen for Earl.

The rest of us are doing well.

Treatment update

Earl's treatment has been scheduled for Wednesday, October 15 at 6:30 am.

Earl's first treatment

Earl's first Therasphere treatment is scheduled for Tuesday, Oct 14th. He will be in the hospital for about 5 hours. We don't have an actual time yet.

Charlie (Earl's son) is coming on Saturday. We are very excited.

The good things in life

Now as I read through the prior posts I see how dreary and woeful they sound. We have been blessed through all of this. No one knows why the Alpha Fetal Protein test was done in May. It hasn't been part of Earl's regular lab tests. So its a good thing that they did it or we wouldn't have known anything before it was way too late.

I didn't have a heart attack. We found out some very useful information about my body before real damage occurred. I can work to get things corrected. Its not easy but I can do it.

Mary is the light of our life. She is 7 going on 27 sometimes. She makes us laugh. She loves to sing and she got a karaoke machine for her birthday. I just love to hear her playing pop star in her room.

If all this stuff had to happen it is good that it happened now instead of in the spring when business is very chaotic. Its hard to keep all the balls in the air right now. It would be impossible to handle all of this while trek season is just getting started.

We have definitely felt the hand of the Lord in all of this and it has increased our testimony that He know each of us and our struggles. He is with us and carries us daily.

General Conference this weekend was wonderful. I can honestly say that many of the talks hit home for me. I know that there are so many things going on in the world that are challenging for so many. I'm glad that I have the challenges that I have and not somebody else's.

We have good friends and good family. We are blessed.

Karen has her own health issues

On August 22, I thought that I was having a heart attack. We went to the ER (we feel like we have our own room now). After much testing, it has been determined that I have Arterial Fibrillation or A-fib. In very remedial terms, the top chambers of my heart beat faster than the bottom chambers. Because of this, my heart can not empty of blood allow it to settle on the bottom and form clots. A clot can cause a stroke. The doctors had adjusted my medication so that I have not had any A-fib episodes since I left the hospital. This is a genetic problem. I would have this problem even if I were not overweight. But since I am, it puts me at a greater risk for other heart problems. So I am trying to lose weight. I am taking a class through the hospital. I am working with the cardiac rehab unit to get my exercise up. Even though I am following the diet, if I don't exercise, I will not and have not lost much weight. I struggle to get to the rehab. I also have found out that I do not breathe efficiently when I exercise so I have to be hooked up to oxygen while I work out. I have oxygen at home for night so I can work out at home as well as the rehab but it severely limits the places I can go for a work out unless I invest in transportable oxygen.

So now you are all caught up on our family, the next posts won't be so long.

The rest of the story. Chapter 3

Next we headed to the Cancer Clinic. The official name of the cancer is Hepatocellular carcinoma. It is deadly. There is no cure. Without treatment the survival rate is less than one year. With treatment survival is longer. How much longer we will just have to see.

The treatment is very new. It is called Therasphere's. It is a type of radiation. They inject microscopic radioactive glass beads right into the tumor through a catheter in the thigh. These beads are short acting. They only kill the cells that they are in contact with. The injection is an out patient procedure. Earl does not have to be in isolation. To prepare for this, Earl had to have a catheterization done last week. The radiologist put the catheter in his leg and up to his liver. He checked for veins that were going out of his liver to other areas of the body in the region of the tumor. There were three. These had to be plugged with something they called coils. We are now ready for the treatment. We believe that the first one will happen on the 15th.

The rest of the story. Chapter 2

We met with the transplant clinic and found out that Earl's tumors (there are 3 or more) were too large to be considered for a transplant. There was the possibility of treating the tumors with radiation to get them to shrink down to the transplant criteria. We were still positive. We decided to obtain a second opinion. Some very good friends of ours have brother that is a transplant surgeon and he agreed to review our case with us. When we saw him, he told us everything in language that we could understand. He was very good at translating the medical terminology into ordinary people talk. The bottom line is that there are certain criteria for obtaining a liver transplant. If you have a tumor that is under 5 centimeters, and you can do radiation to shrink the tumor to under 3 centimeters, then you may be eligible for a transplant. Earl's main tumor is 6x9 centimeters and it is in a bad place to be able to completely remove the tumor with a transplant. Because you have to take anti-rejection meds for the rest of your life, the tumor that has not been completely removed will be allowed to grow wild. Thus making a liver transplant a terrible option. So what next.

The rest of the story. Chapter 1

Just after we found out that we were expecting Mary, Earl started getting sick. At first we joked that since I wasn't really having morning sickness, he was. Then it started not being funny. It was happening way too often. We ended up in the emergency room and were eventually introduced to Dr. Boschert, a gastroenterologist. After many tests it was determined that Earl has hepititis C, a chronic liver disease. We were told that a liver transplant was most likely in our future. There is a treatment option called pegylated interferon. We tried the treatment after Mary was born, starting in December 2001. The treatment didn't work for Earl's genotype of the disease. For the last seven years we have been in kind of a waiting mode. Waiting for Earl's liver to be bad enough to need the transplant. All the while, Earl gets very tired, very quickly. He is more suseptable to infections. Because his liver doesn't work properly he gets a little absent minded. He hasn't been well enough to hold a job. He might feel great one day, then the next day, he can't get out of bed. So that is how we have been living for almost seven years.

In April 2008, Earl had his annual CT scan of his abdomen. Everything looked pretty much status quo. Then in May, Earl was in a car accident. He broke his leg but it wasn't detected on a regular X-ray, so we made a couple of trips to the ER trying to get help with the pain. On one of those trips, they took blood for a test for alpha fetal protein (AFP). It was slightly elevated although we didn't know this at this point.

In August, we met with Dr. Boschert for a regular visit. He noted that the AFP was elevated and told us that this test is a tumor marker. He wanted to re-do the CT scan and the blood test. We repeated these and found out that Earl indeed has tumors in his liver. We thought that this might be a good thing because it would get him a transplant sooner.