By the way....

I'M GOING TO BYU IN THE FALL!!!!!

Updates

Hey everyone

I know it's been forever since I updated, but right now we're just using our family blog to keep everyone informed about what's happening right now. Follow the link below

holbrookchicago.blogspot.com

Thanks!

Valentine's Day!! a few days later...

So Blogger is being dumb and wouldn't let me copy and paste the post I typed up into the posting box so I had to completely retype the whole thing then I forgot that it only puts the pictures at the top of the editing box and that the box is so small you can't move any of the pictures. So all my pictures are stuck here at the top of the post completely out of order. You might want to scroll down and read the post first before you look at the pictures. Regardless, I'm sorry I haven't blogged lately - life's been kind of crazy.

Birthday gift...a horseback ride with Dad! For Christmas, Dad started this whole Barbie-presents-the-present theme, so Mom also wrapped up a Barbie in a dress for the dress she gave me (which we are going shopping for this weekend).


My birthday cake...isn't he adorable!
Megan broke her arm at a basketball game, but she's handling the whole thing really well! Ironically, I was the first kid in our family to break a bone - my right arm right below the shoulder got fractured when I missed a trapeze bar and landed on a sprinkler head.

Another one of my birthday gifts - this little adapter has six headphone jacks. One is always attached to an iPod, and the others are open for headphones for everyone! You can also attach a second iPod and play two songs at the same time.

The immense icicle that was hanging precariously outside my bedroom window.

My hair is finally growing back - it's about an 1.5 inches long now.

Happy birthday to me!

The finished cake....

The cake in the works.

Nathan trying on my wig - doesn't he look cute!

Our new ping pong table!

Christmas day breakfast - homemade cinnamon rolls and quieche. Yum!

One of my gifts was money to purchase a laptop when I go to college! Dad decided to wrap up a Barbie and the theme kind of stuck for my birthday presents, too.

Christmas morning!

My last CT scan was completely clear, and my last heart tests were perfectly fine. We're just working on adjusting some med levels. I caught laryngitis the day after finals and missed the first week of second semester, but my voice is back and I'm feeling great!

Christmas was wonderful - everyone was healthy and feeling good! I especially enjoyed the break from homework, makeup work, etc. We had so much food and treats and presents! It's always such a cheerful time of year. New Year's Eve was fun - Nathan got a ping pong table for Christmas so we played many games waiting for the ball to drop. Most of us slept under the Christmas tree.

Then we come to January 7th - My 17th birthday! I've now had my license for a year! We went to California Pizza Kitchen (my favorite - the Thai Chicken Pizza is delicious!) for dinner. Mom and Rachel (who stayed home sick that day) created an amazing horse head cake from two round chocolate cakes and one 9x13 funfetti cake. It was delicious and adorable! I got some fun presents including piano music, a dress, and a horseback ride with Dad!! Obviously we have to wait for some slightly warmer weather until that can happen. At least it's improving - today the sun was actually out as we walked home from school!

I finished off the first semester with a 4.0 GPA. We've started having college nights and I took my first ACT on February 6. I've been looking out for scholarships to pay my way through college. I actually found one for $1993 if you were born in 1993 - it's amazing the things they'll give out scholarships for. It's a little frightening to think at this time next year I'll know what school I'll be going to! Yikes!

Besides that, nothing much has happened. Mom went to Utah last Wednesday and was gone until the 16th (Tuesday night). Since they had to cancel my flight to Utah last summer, we had a free ticket that had to be used before April. So Mom went to help out my aunt and uncle and visit her family. This was probably my first Valentine's Day without her here! We managed all right at home...we had food to eat every night and didn't stay up TOO terribly late watching the Olympics.

Valentine's Day was exciting - another heart day for me to celebrate! I can't believe it was five years ago I received my second heart transplant!

This week has been pretty crazy! Monday we had school off so I went and saw the Tooth Fairy with a friend. It was hilarious and totally clean! I highly recommend the movie! On Tuesday Megan broke her arm at a basketball game so Dad had to take her to the ER while Nathan hung out with me at our Young Women's activity. He came in handy when he taught all of us laurels how to do the Hoedown Throwdown for our upcoming talent show! Wednesday I had the honor of staying at school for 13 hours while Megan was at home with her broken arm and Rachel was home feeling nauseous. Nathan even woke up with a sore throat, but somehow I managed to stay healthy - ironic, but YAY! I had a long yearbook night and then had to go to a two hour meeting to fill out paperwork for National Honors Society. We'll have to see if anything comes of it...

Hope you're all enjoying the last few weeks of winter and watch some Olympics this weekend! Spring is finally in the air. Remember to keep smiling!

What are YOU Thankful for?

In the Spirit of Thanksgiving
Please watch this video on Thanksgiving that was recently produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There is so much to be thankful for this year!
I'll post more on my life as winter vacation comes...I'm finishing up some last bits of makeup work - YAY!

My young women's adviser gave us this bit of advice in her talk last Sunday:
Ask yourself this question everyday, "What am I thankful for today?" You'll be surprised at the things you come up with and the little blessings that pop up every day in your life.

Let's remember to be thankful and express that gratitude, especially for our Savior and His sacrifice for us, as the Christmas season approaches.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Cancer Free is the Way to Be (and Stay)!

It's been forever since I last posted, so I figured I'd better do that.

First off, chemo is done and the cancer is still gone!Hallelujah! My CT scan was on Wednesday and the doctor says that all is well - except for one irritated, but non-cancerous, lymph node, but she just wants to watch it. My heart biopsy last Thursday was totally perfect as well! So transplant just wants to see us in one month at clinic for an echo and EKG, and the oncologist says we don't need another scan for three months!!! I do have to get labs done every week or so, but those are really easy.

So, of course, with this all being over and done with, I have little fuzzies growing on my head :) that are fun to feel for. They actually look blond, so it will be interesting to see what my hair grows in to look like.

The youth in my ward planned a surprise party, so my Young Women's president came up to the door just as I had switched into my comfy sweats and taken my wig off - putting it on the banister that you can see through the front door window, so she was a little freaked out when she first saw that :) She came in and warned me that people were coming, so I raced to get my wig back on. It was really fun! We played a form of pictionary where everyone wrote down something they were grateful for and then we used those words. I wrote down my wig :) They got ice cream cake for everyone - chocolate cake on the bottom with mint chocolate chip ice cream on top! Yummy! I love ice cream cake! It was such a blast and so great for them all to think of me. My one leader got balloons - black and yellow - and put bees on them along with writing B+ on them as well. We had to explain that one to everyone - most of them didn't know about my blog. It was so cute! Since I hadn't seen anyone in a while (I'd just returned to Church that Sunday) it was great to hang out with everyone! Thanks!

To celebrate, we went out to dinner at California Pizza Kitchen - probably my favorite restaurant. I absolutely LOVE their Thai Chicken Pizza. Then Mom and Dad gave me tickets to go see the Dancing Horses up in Wisconsin tomorrow! I'm SO excited!! The whole family is going, and we're going to spend the day up there, do some food storage shopping, and head back down for the ward Halloween party.

The story behind the Dancing Horses: Most of you know I'm a horse nut. I love pretty much anything to do with anything about horses (one of my favorite movies is Dreamer with Dakota Fanning). So over the summer, this show came to Chicago called Cavalia - it's basically the same thing as Dancing Horses, but it's a higher-profile, Cirque-du-Soleil type acrobatics on horseback. Of course, I was in the hospital the entire time it was here, and the tickets were outrageously expensive. So, even though my siblings are a bit skeptical about seeing horses dance, I am way excited! I've wanted to see these types of horses for years and I can't wait!!!!

After going out to dinner and opening up the tickets, Mom shared the story of the memorial made by the tribes of Israel after they crossed the river Jordan on dry ground. She wanted to make something that would be a memorial for us to remember our experiences and the miracles in our family. We ended up making the poster that's in the picture below. We all traced our hands and made a circle out of them, and then put a big red heart in the center that says "Miracles Happen." Mom's currently working on getting it framed, and then it will be displayed for all of us to see. It will be a wonderful reminder of this time of my life.

I guess I should explain the circle sign - Rachel made it. The "C" could stand for chemo or cancer, but either way it symbolizes the whole experience being done and over with! It's currently hanging upstairs in my room on my closet door.

Along with celebrating, I'm back at school full time. Next week I'll be adding seminary back in as well. I'm slowly, slowly, slowly getting caught up - the process takes forever, but I'm almost there! Math and chemistry are the tough ones, though - there's so many assignments and everything builds on previous chapters, so it's hard to stay with the class when I am in school. I'll get it done, though.

Also with exciting news, for our school's Charity Bash Week this year (we have a ton of activities to raise money for a certain charity during the first week or so of December) I nominated Make-A-Wish. So that's our charity this year. Last year the school raised over 44 thousand dollars for Muscular Dystrophy Association. SO because of that nomination, I've been asked to give a speech at the kick-off assembly (yikes!) and will be in the school newspaper, Bear Facts (double yikes!) as a main article. It will be interesting to see how everything plays out... I actually need to scan in some pix this weekend of my wish and me currently for the Bear Facts article. I had an interview with the person writing it and she had a ton of questions! The interview would have gone way longer than 45 minutes if the bell hadn't rang! She wanted to know my entire medical history (with all the wonderfully complicated technical terms) and moving around and who my siblings were and what I did on my wish and why I'm so positive and why I nominated Make-A-Wish...things like that. There's also a video at the assembly that I need to give pictures to the student council for, but no one has contacted me yet so I don't know what they want or when they want it or what they want me to say at the assembly! Again, it'll be an interesting month.

So that's pretty much everything that's going on. I'm currently eating a chocolate ice cream sandwich (Skinny Cow, very delicious!) and trying not to think too hard about the pear I have to color for art, the essay by Thoreau that I have to analyze for English, or the 100 pages of my US history textbook I need to read to get caught up. No - I'm not stressed at all. Just a little worn out. And not to mention the thirty or so seminary makeups to do.

But it will get done - eventually. Some day.

Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers - they have helped to make yet another miracle happen in my life! Here's just a cute picture of me and Rachel:

The Past Few Weeks...

So although this is the last round of chemo, the past few weeks have been less than enjoyable. I somehow managed to get a flu-viral thingy that's basically kept me out of school for two weeks. I had been going to school as much as I could before it, but I still have a TON of make up work to get done - not to mention the work from the days I'm missing now! Especially in my chemistry and AP classes, but the teachers have all been great about makeup work and getting everything done when I feel up to it.
The past two weeks have been pretty miserable: I've been congested, achy, random bouts of nausea, extremely exhausted, and running to the bathroom constantly. So of course, I haven't felt like doing any sort of school work at all. Two Fridays ago, Mom and I went to the hospital to get some fluids because I was up vomiting for a while the night before from this virus, and I ended up getting some blood which helped me perk up for a day or two. But of course it went back to worse. Last Saturday was absolutely awful - I sat around reading pointless fiction all day while I forced myself to try and drink something so I didn't get dehydrated and have to come to the ER and while I walked around the house slowly for fear of collapsing from exhaustion and wasted muscle. But by Sunday afternoon I was feeling much better.
Now it's Tuesday and I'm feeling so much better than I have for a while - not quite fully recovered so I would be able to go to school, but still a lot more energetic than before. And I'm in the hospital getting chemo for the next five days. Getting chemo certainly won't help me feel any better, and sitting in the hospital bed isn't going to make me gain any muscle mass. Oh well. At least it's the last round!!!!!! YAY!!! We're so excited this is almost over. I can't wait until it's time to go home and we can celebrate and I can recover and I can get back to school full time!
I can't believe it's already October! Mom brought some fall decorations to put up in the room instead of her summer luau lanterns. :) It brings a little cheer and variety to the same blue walls in every room.

Quick News!

Sorry I've been such a slacker. I've felt fairly crummy ever since the third round of chemo started and have been busy with school work, etc.
But TODAY we went downtown for a clinic visit and to get the third dose of one drug - velcade - to finish off the round of chemo. Dr. Weinstein (my oncologist) didn't have official scan results last Friday when we were hospitalized, so today she shared the following:

The cancer is GONE!!

So here's the plan: no more fourth doses of velcade (which will hopefully reduce the insomnia) which means I don't have to go back to the hospital for TWO WHOLE WEEKS! That's a new record for the past few months. :) Then we'll do one more round of chemo - a second preventative - just to be sure the cancer stays away. Another five day hospital stay and then the velcade a few days after that. Then after two or three weeks we'll have another CT scan to make sure the cancer is still gone. Dr. Weinstein mentioned that this was perfect timing - the following week she goes on maternity leave!

Thank you so much for all of your thoughts and prayers. This has truly been a miracle! I still can't really believe that the cancer is gone. I know that this was only possible through the faith and prayers of my family and friends. I can't thank you all enough or express how grateful I am to my Heavenly Father for helping me and my family get through this trial.

I will post more about the past week within a few days, but I thought I'd share the good news with you all!