Helping Cancer Families and Knocking on Wood

I’m very pleased to have a post up today over at the Dana-Farber Insight blog about how to support families dealing with childhood cancer. Take a gander if you’d like.

I’m also very pleased that so far things have gone really smoothly over the past week-and-a-half during this CNS cycle we’re in: 4 lumbar punctures over 2 weeks (the last one is tomorrow) as well as the chemo and steroids she gets every three weeks. Clio felt pretty awful  — tired, achey, cranky, etc. — for the first week. But now that the steroids are out of her system she has pepped up considerably. In fact, she’s at school (!) as I write this. Don’t know how long she’ll last, but she really wanted to go.

We’re not completely out of the woods yet. We’re still on high alert for seizures, and her blood counts are on their way down, which means the possibility of fevers. But I’m knocking — banging, hammering, pounding — on wood that everything is going to be OK. (Famous last words….)

Nothing else to report or make gallows humor about at the moment. I suppose this is a good thing!

In the meantime, I give you my everyone’s-doing-it-and-I-didn’t-because-something-seemed-vaguely-annoyingly-conformist-about-it-even-though-it’s-an-issue-I-feel-very-strongly-about-but-eventually-I-found-the-perfect-one-so-I-did-it-anyway Equal Marriage Facebook avatar.

“Why is everybody changing their profile pictures?” “Who cares? Why is everybody on Facebook in the first place?” “Har har har!”