Radiation Day 2

Day 2 went fine. Nothing particularly exciting happened. It really did only take about 5 minutes once I was positioned and then I went about my day. On the way home from the hospital I met up with Geoff to trade off the kiddos. I met him at his work parking lot. From there we stopped to see Aggie, our horse, and then picked up the food that was our dinner from last night which turned into a yummy lunch (with lots of leftovers for the weekend).

The day itself turned out to be pretty busy.

Overall the morning was extremely frustrating. Ella was inconsolable and only wanted to nurse. E was exhausted and only wanted to lay around and watch tv. What made it exceptionally tricky is that to calm Ella down I needed to be able to carry her or walk her in the stroller, but I'm not supposed to be lifting more than 10 lbs with my right (dominant) arm right now (just for a few more days but I have to let my port incision heal).

Esther doing her share to participate by chewing up an entire roll of toilet paper.

I'm not going to say that I haven't picked up the kids b/c I have, but I have been able to basically stick to picking them up with my left side. I can't carry Ella around the way she wants doing this and I couldn't convince E to leave the house so we could do a stroller walk.

In the end Geoff took an extended lunch and came home to help me out. I discovered this morning that Ella likes kefir (sort of like really nutritious yogurt smoothie) so that was our trick of the day.

Both kids slept a few hours for me which allowed me some study time.

Then I had a friend come over who was gracious enough to bring yummy food and to offer what I would consider to be the most generous and thoughtful gift anyone could offer right now...She graciously proposed sanity in the form of offering to nurse Ella for me to see if that would help. I can't imagine how hard it was for her to approach such a delicate subject and I can't imagine what some of you might be thinking, but I think it was completely selfless and beautiful.

Ella on the other hand, did not think this was necessary. I'm not sure if I am surprised or not, but it was what it was. I'm still eternally grateful for my friend for trying to give Ella the one thing that I can't.

My friend visited with us for a bit and then left just after E got up from his nap so her little boy wouldn't be exposed to all of E's crud. A few minutes later, Geoff came home and we left for our farm to pick up our CSA (community supported agriculture) share.

Post farm visit I did more homework, talked with another close friend, took a test and basically got caught up to where I need to be for school. The kiddos stayed up too late because of my test and were up when another friend (a previous co-worker) showed up with food for tomorrow.

It was nice to have some time to chat with her until E (well, both) started to make it apparent that they needed to go to bed NOW.

Then I stayed up and did some more homework, wrote this quick and I'm off to get a few hours of sleep before radiation day 3. As I write this Ella rolled over and is snuggled up to me. I knew she was resilient, but I had no idea she would be this strong (sorry I doubted you kiddo), this soon. I'm happy that she was able to recover so quickly (for now anyway) and at least for now I can have some normalcy.