Long time, no post! I know that drives some of you crazy, so my apologies. There have been plenty of things to post about, so let me see if I can get caught up. This one will be a three parter, so just keep clicking the “Older” button until you get to last Wednesday’s post.
Wednesday night after my post, we were offered tickets to the Little Mermaid on Broadway! They had a whole stack of them, so we grabbed 3 seats that were together and jumped in a cab to the Time Square area. The ride was rather uneventful with the exception of getting into an argument with the cabbie as to which way was the best way to get there (if you’re a tourist, they tend to find 5th Ave and crawl at a rate slower than walking while you watch the meter climb). Once we got there, we started to head in and the lady taking the ticket said, “Um, we have a problem.” She pointed to Isaiah and said, “He needs a ticket.” I looked at her with wide eyes and said, “Are you serious?” Yep, EVERYONE needs a ticket. We walked over to the ticket booth (kicking ourselves for not grabbing a 4th ticket, but who would have ever thought we’d need one for a 4 month old) and they confirmed that “EVERYONE needs a ticket.” Then she asked where our seats were. I knew what she was getting at, she wanted to sell me an Orchestra seat for $120 since that is where the rest of our seats were. I said, “The Ronald just gave us the tickets, I’ll take a nose bleed section seat please. He’s obviously just going to sit on our laps.” She conceded and sold use the cheapest ticket they had, $51.50. Sigh, oh well, in all honesty, it was an amazing show and Eli loved it, so it was well worth it. No pictures were allowed, but if you’ve ever seen the Lion King’s Broadway show, the Little Mermaid is nearly as impressive with the outfits, so you’ll have to use your imagination or go see it for yourself. I think the Ronald is taking everyone again at the end of the month and I’m sure we’ll be in attendance again, this time with FOUR tickets!
Thursday was Valentine’s Day. We started out by visiting with the Radiologist about Eli’s upcoming radiation. The doctor was amazingly nice and you could tell she was well versed in making radiation fun for kids. She even had Eli intrigued when she talked about making a mold of his body with warm goo and called it an “art project”. She explained that we’ll want to do radiation twice a day for seven days (Monday-Friday then Monday and Tuesday) after his 3F8 and beta glucan round. They always want to radiate the area where the tumor started (the abdomen), which should cover the spot that lit up on his spine. They’ll also want to radiate above and below his knees since there are spots lighting up there. That’s all they want to do for now because that is the most significant on his MIBG scans and the most his body can handle at one time. There really won’t be any side effects, except sometimes radiating the abdomen causes nausea. It should take about 15 minutes to do the actual radiation, and the two sessions need to be separated by 4-6 hours. Pretty easy, except we have to be in another room, talking to Eli through an intercom, so that could be interesting. Anyway, tomorrow (Monday), we are going in to do a radiation simulation, which means they’ll create his mold and mark out the exact spots they are going to radiate. How do they mark them out? Tattoos! They are actually just little tiny dots that they put on his skin (that are permanent) so they get the radiation spot exactly right each time. The actual radiation won’t start until March 10th, but this was yet one more thing we could get done while we were here anyway.
Click “Older” for Part II…