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: