3F8 week

I always feel guilty when I go so long without updating! I know a lot of you are praying and wondering what is going on in New York, so I’ll try to catch you up (in chronological order).

First of all, the baseball game a week ago was amazing. We were CERTAINLY in the minority by cheering for the Pirates, but we were laughing the loudest as most of the stadium cleared out by the 6th inning because the Pirates were killing the Mets! The score ended up being 13 to 1! It was really incredible and Tom Gorzelanny did a great job (he even scored a run and got an RBI)! Tom’s wife called us before the game was over and said Tom wanted to meet us after the game at the Pirates dugout, so we waited for him and while we were waiting, some security guys let the boys (Griffin and Eli) out onto the field and into the Pirates dugout. We explained that we were waiting for Tom, so they let us hang out there until he came out to say hi. Of course, the boys were far more interested in playing in the dirt than talking to another adult, so they played shy while we parents talked to Tom. It was a great day at the ballpark. I’m working on compiling photos for a video. I’ll post that soon.

Since we didn’t have anything medically related the rest of last week, we made arrangements to get out of the city. We borrowed a car and went out to a friend’s house in East Hampton on the east side of Long Island. It was about a 3 hour drive from the city to get out there. It was awesome! The house was in the middle of the woods and we were within a 5 minute drive of the beach. We actually saw deer walking through the backyard one afternoon. We made several trips to the beach to collect shells and we were the only ones out there. The shells were actually PILED up on the beach for as far as the eye could see, it was like nothing we had seen before. Eli had a blast picking up shells. We were only there for a few days and came back Saturday night, but it felt like a great getaway. Here’s an Animoto video from the beach. He gets a LOT of comments about that Dolce & Gabbana hat he wears constantly. Fittingly, that was a gift from the Animoto.com guys when we went to their office on Eli’s fourth birthday.

So as most of you know, this is 3F8 week. Oh what a week! I think we can safely say that this has been Eli’s worst pain week yet. Monday and Tuesday was like nothing we’ve seen before, but the last two days have been slightly better. The pain is bad, but it also seems to be lasting longer. As always, his coping is great. He has been doing a lot of singing and breathing through the pain. The only coping mechanism we don’t encourage is his obsession with the Dilaudid (the pain medicine that makes him feel ‘wrinkly’). The other morning, when I woke him up, he didn’t say “Good Morning” or “Hi Daddy”. The first words out of his mouth were, “Do I get Dilaudid today, Dad?” Our little addict. He asks for it all of the time, and we don’t want him to have it too much, so we are constantly trying to distract him and delay any Dilaudid “rescues”. They say that it’s a good sign that during the weeks we aren’t doing 3F8, he never talks about Dilaudid. Thankfully he doesn’t have pain at home during the nights, because then we’d have to give him Dilaudid at home and so far he doesn’t know that’s even an option. We’d like to keep it that way.

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