Reflections on a Rainy Afternoon

Today is Saturday (March 8th), and it is raining.  I'm inside wandering around feeling trapped.  For the first time since the diagnosis I'm feeling normal, and all I can do is lay around.  Lucky for me however, the past week has been anything but normal.

 

Last Sunday the family (minus Izzy) and I went to Boston, not for medical reasons, but in order to see Kevin Garnett and the rest of Celtics play the Atlanta Hawks.  It was a great game, and the view was amazing from row 7 seat 3.  (this must have taken a lot of ice cream sundaes...thank you, CCLCS, for eating them all for me!) 

Less than 12 hours later, I was on a Cape Air flight back over to Boston.  Once in Logan Airport I met up with the Dana Farber Jimmy Fund group and I started my next adventure: a trip down to Fort Myers (where it is 80 degrees and sunny every day.) Monday was just a travel day, the real fun started Tuesday morning.  After breakfast we 32 teens from the Jimmy Fund and the 15 chaperones (a combination of doctors, nurses, and social workers) headed by bus to the field.  Before the game started we all got to meet some of the players.  Manny and Ortiz didn't come by, but I did get to meet: Alex Cora, Tim Wakefield, Kevin Youkilis, Clay Buchholz, Doug Mirabelli, Jon Lester, Mike Lowell, Hideki Okajima, and Dustin Pedroia.  After meeting the players, getting autographs and photos, we headed for our seats.  Well actually we headed for the air conditioned owner's box.  John Henry wasn't there, but there was all the free food a person could want: even an omelet bar complete with a chef waiting to make a custom omelet. The box itself was almost right behind home-plate. The only better seats were the announcer's box right next to us.  It was an exciting game with Dice-K pitching, and the Sox pulled out a win 5-3.  On the way back to the bus (which was waiting for us in the player's parking lot) one of the most memorable and unexpected things happened on all the trip.  Red Sox legend Johnny Pesky (as in  the "Pesky pole") came out to meet with our group .  He is a great guy and was more than happy to sign baseballs and take pictures.  Wednesday was mainly a travel day, but it did end with pad thai with our friends in Cambridge, so I would call it a good day.

 

Thursday I was expecting to go into my next round of chemo, but I was neutropienic (not enough white blood cells.) Being neutropienic, I couldn't get my chemo.  However my mom and I were not going to waste a day in Boston.  We ended up going to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, followed by hot chocolate.  The next day I finally got home, thus ending a great week. 

Now it's Saturday and it's raining.  Now that my spring training trip is over, and I'm back home I find myself missing all of my friends.  One of the worst things about everything that's going on is that most of the time people don't know where I am because of all the unexpected schedule changes, and I don't know where they are.  When a situation has both of those two things going on, the end result is me sitting around the house on a Saturday with nothing to do, but feeling ready to do anything.  The re-scheduled chemo is Monday-Wednesday (if my white blood cell count is up) and the next big step after that is surgery (April 7) to get rid of the tricky tumor. 

 Thanks again for all the support, hearing from all of you can make all the difference between a good day and a great day.

-Logan      

fun is good medicine

let's start by reporting that logan ate ALL of his pad thai when friends ruby and phil, along with ruby's mum heidi and sister zoe, took him to lunch at the royal thai restaurant last saturday.

then sunday was the boston celtics-atlanta hawks game, to which we were treated by the kind and generous charter school students in mr. williams' seminar class. 7th row loge seats, 4 of 'em, and i DID tell logan he could invite whomever he wanted; he was not required to bring his parents and sister! luckily (for us), he invited us, how sweet is that? logan will write a short note soon, but suffice it to say he had a raucously good time, as did we all. thank you CCLCS!

tonight, as i write this, logan is in fort myers, florida, on a 3 day teen-trip organized by dana farber's jimmy fund, to spend a day at red sox spring training. that will be a blog entry unto itself, one that logan will need to write, too...

these fun outings work wonders on a cellular level, it seems. logan is the strongest he has been since december. for 3 months he has been losing weight steadily, going from an athletic 160 to a disconcertingly low 120 lbs a few weeks ago. now, his appetite has returned big time, and he has bounced back to 135 lbs. this is a fantastic measure of his vitality, the reassuringly right direction to be heading.

or maybe it's the frequent home tutoring he is getting which is strengthening him, the energizing acupuncture treatments he is receiving in home visits by the generous arthur teubner, and always the fortifying emails and visits from friends. whatever the reason, something is working, or everything is working, and logan is looking and seeming a little more like his old self, albeit still bald, every day.

thursday we will start 3 more days of chemo, this time outpatient, meaning logan is not actually admitted to children's hospital. we will go in every morning, receive the chemo through the implanted broviac catheter, and stay with friends nearby every night. on milder days logan has taken little walks, or done some gentle time on the rowing machine. he even strapped some ankle weights on one day to walk around the house. therapy such as this is a full time job, with rewards as gratifying as it gets.