The week that will never end...

So far the first 3 days of this week have felt like 3 weeks and not 3 days.

Sunday was a big birthday for me. The big number 30! We had some people over on Saturday for dinner and Sunday was a day for just the wife and I. We made homemade clam chowder and biscuits. It was all delicious and a wonderful night. When it was time for bed, I started feeing a sore throat come on and sure enough, I was feeling sick on Monday. I wasn't the only one feeling sick this week though.

On Tuesday morning, just when I was taking the dogs out to do their morning business, Gracie started coughing and hacking like she had inhaled some water. She's done it before, but it's always been because of inhaling water so I didn't think anything of it. When we got home from work she had a bit of a coughing fit again. It seemed weird because it lasted about 5 minutes, but I wasn't overly concerned. Then in the middle of the night, to be more exact 3:30 and 5:30 on Wednesday morning Gracie woke us up coughing and this time coughed up some mucusy saliva. We took her temperature and it was high, so I called the vet and made an appointment to take her in this morning.

Come to find out, she's got what they think is a bit of an upper respiratory infection and maybe a little pneumonia. We got some antibiotics to alleviate that, but they did do some x-rays (I wish I had an image of the x-ray to share). This was good because they could get a better look at what was going on in her chest as well as take a look at the lymph nodes since she just had a tumor removed. They did find 3 white spots on the x-ray which could either be pus packets from the pneumonia or, scarily, tumors. The Dr. said if they were tumors they weren't acting like the round cell tumors that we thought she had. Her thought was, if they were tumors, that they were so mutated that they were actually round cells that weren't acting like round cells or they were something different that were mutated enough to look like rounds cells. Let's just say that we hope by the time we get a second x-ray when this course of antibiotics are done, those white spots are no longer there.

In addition to all of this, I have failed a goal. My goal was not to drive a car to work for at least once consecutive year. Until Tuesday, I hadn't driven to work since February 2nd of this year. The culmination of feeling like death, a 60mph wind storm that was blowing through, and not having anything here for breakfast (therefore I would need to go get something), I said screw it and drove. I also drove today because I still wasn't feeling great and I had to take Gracie to the Vet this morning. More than likely, I will probably drive the rest of the week because I still feel a little crappy and I need to get healthy. The wedding and other stuff throughout the year successfully ate up all but 8 hours of pto at work.

It's One of Those Days

There are days when I wish that I hadn't started working at Nisonger and fallen for the special needs students... and this is one of them. I could be a vet right now, and maybe I might understand all of what is going on. I just want to know if Gracie is going to be alright!

I got off the phone with the vet an hour ago, and I'm more confused now than when I started trying to research the types of tumors she mentioned. Turns out Gracie did not have a mast cell tumor. We were expecting to get the histo results back today and learn if Gracie has Stage I or Stage II cancer. But all the lab would commit to without further staining was that it was a "poorly differentiated round cell tumor." They seemed to think that it was consistent with a Merkel cell tumor. The vet also threw cutaneous T-cell lymphoma out there. From what she told me about Merkel cell tumors and what information I can find, I learned that they are rare neuroendocrine tumors of that appear to be fairly benign. Cutaneous T-call lymphoma seems to be quite the opposite.

So now we are waiting on the price of the further staining to decide if we want to do that or if we just want to take her in every 2-3 months for them to palpate her lymph nodes to check for metastasis. I'm usually a "wait and see" kind of person, but I'm not so sure I handle not knowing. I am reassured that my good friend, Dr. Joel, understands. He comforted me by pointing out that, for now, it is just good news her margins came back clean and that she has no other symptoms.

On a positive note, Gracie seems to be doing much better. Her diarrhea is clearing up, and she is acting much more like herself. Now that she can go off all of the meds, she should be 100% in no time. Except for that huge incision!

It's a quiet night here at the Rosendauls. The pups are lazy, and I think poor, sick Eric just headed up to bed. Time to let this go for now and go check on him. Afterall, I was the one who got him sick. Well, my kids got him sick....hmm another reason for wishing I hadn't worked at Nisonger. But it's just one of those days :-)

Gracie's Surgery

Yes, Gracie had surgery.  About a month or so ago we found a little hard lump on Gracie's lower neck.  We were first hoping that it was just a bug bite or something and that it would go away.  A couple of weeks ago, it was still there and we noticed it had changed from skin colored to red.  We made an appointment with the Vet and took her in.  The Vet aspirated it and came back with the news that it was a mast cell tumor. Sigh...  Not the news we were hoping for.

They prescribed some steroids, benadryl, and pepcid. The steroids to help shrink the tumor, the benadryl and pepcid to reduce any effects from the histamine that is in the tumor.  After a few days of taking it, the steroids really started hurting her stomach so I was actually happy to get her into surgery so we can get back to normal sooner rather than later.

It was a little tough coming home before work to see Web and Cissy without Gracie here.  To make a longer story short, this is Gracie now:

The incision was much much larger than we thought it would be.  They said they were going to take a 3cm margin around the tumor, but this is like a huge 9 inch incision!  I guess it's good because they will have hopefully gotten it all.

It'll be 3-5 days to get the results as to what stage of tumor it is, which we're hoping is just a stage 1.  Then we can hopefully put all of this behind us.

More to come as we know more.

Playing with the droid on the road

So we are on the road, headed to Illinois for Scott and Jessica's wedding. I saw Eric downloaded a blogger app. and thought I would see what it could do. Mostly though, I am playing with Swype. I love it, but it really would be better if it could capitalize appropriately without having to hit any other buttons. I am trying to figure out if I can upload pictures to the blog from the app. So here goes - Gracie doing one of her favorite things on her way to visit her cousins for the weekend.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.0

First Dance

Our very soon-to-be sister-in-law, Jessica, got a video of our first dance at the reception. It makes me nervous just watching it. I feel like we're actually doing it all again! I'm glad we didn't chicken out. We loved how entertained our guests were. Here is a link if you're interested. Enjoy :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6scJbYlfRs

Wedding Blog

Our photographer posted a very nice blog about our wedding! I thought I would share the link. She did great work, and we are so excited to start putting up photos of our day around the house! I love looking at them and remembering that it actually did happen and wasn't all a dream. I wish we could do it all again just for the fun of it. Thanks, Courtney!

http://courtneymasonphotography.com/blog/

Blog-worthy

We figured that the most important event in our lives deserved a blog, but where to even start...

I guess the best place to start is the simple fact that on August 7, 2010 we got MARRIED!!  It's been 15 wonderful days and every day seems better than the last.

It was a wonderful day!  Everything went pretty much according to plan, and it turned out more beautiful than we could have ever hoped for.  Every married couple we know told us it would fly-by and boy were they right.  From the rehearsal till the morning after the wedding, it feels as if it all went by in a flash.

Some friends had told Lynette not to forget to look at Eric during the ceremony or lose him at the reception, or we wouldn't remember being together on our wedding day.  It turned out not to be a problem, because we couldn't seem to take our eyes off of each other during the ceremony and stuck pretty close together at the reception.  We thought it was a very special day, and even our pastor made a point of telling us that "sometimes you just do a wedding, but then sometimes it is something special."  He said he wanted us to know that ours was a very special wedding for him and that he would remember it.  It really meant a lot to hear that!

The two most nerve racking parts were 1. trying not to pass out during the ceremony, 2. trying to not sound like blubbering fools during our vows, and 3. pulling off the surprise of the evening...our first dance!  We could not pinpoint a good slow song that we both really liked, and didn't have "a song" to fall back on.  At about a month before the wedding we were sitting around working on wedding stuff and the Michael Buble version of "Feeling Good" started playing.  It was sort of Eric's theme song when we first started dating and Lynette causally asked, "what if we danced to this song?"  We both kind of looked at each other and thought..."ok, but it's too fast to just slow dance to."  That night we decided to start looking around on YouTube for some videos...and the idea was born! (note: Lynette doesn't fancy herself as a dancer and thinks she's terrible at it and Eric isn't exactly a pro either).  To make a long story short, we took a few different videos from YouTube, watch them a billion times and practiced in our living room for a month.  No one had any idea!  Our guests were shocked, impressed, and thoroughly entertained (as were we on all three).  We love that people are still talking about it! :-)

The reception flew by, we didn't quite get to talk to everyone, but it was a great time!  We didn't stay out too late, knowing that we had a 10 hour drive ahead of us on Sunday.  On Sunday morning, we were heading to Maine!  We took the drive in two parts, stopping in Albany, NY for the night on Sunday.  We finished the rest of the drive to Boothbay Harbor, ME on Monday and were greeted by beautiful weather, and the perfect place for our honeymoon!  Topside Inn was exactly what we wanted in a honeymoon spot.  We spent quite awhile looking at pictures, descriptions, locations, etc. for a Bed and Breakfast.  The moment we saw Topside, I think we both knew it was the place!  Boothbay Harbor was a bit touristy, but it gave us plenty to do while we were there.  We ate lots of lobster, kayaked out the harbor to the second oldest lighthouse in Maine (Burnt Island Lighthouse), took a two hour schooner ride and saw a sunset, and went whale-watching.  We also spent a day shopping around the LL Bean flagship store and a lot of outlets, right after a quick trip to a sand beach so we could dip our toes in the Atlantic.  It all couldn't have been more perfect!

Arriving back in Columbus, we were greeted by two very confused, but extremely happy pups and an attention starved cat (her own fault).

We are loving being married and think it's all a pretty darn good deal!

-Mr. and Mrs. Rosendaul