You keep viewing - I'll keep writing...

Just thought I would write something for the over 100 of you who keep checking the web page. First and foremost we are 'ok'. And OK is a relative term, but we really are ok. Trish would be mad at me for the dinners I have prepared this week. Monday Matt and I had TV dinners (Boston Market chicken parmeasan) -- he was real good about it, not a single complaint. Though he did say it was just ok. Heck, on the Trish scale of goodness it was downright inedible. Last night I totally forgot I had to deal with dinner and called Matt who was waiting for Andy at physical therapy to order a pizza and I would pick it up on the way home from work. You see, Matt has every restaurant and pizza joint within 10 miles of our house programmed on his cell phone. So the food thing may indeed be the toughest part of our new life so far. I think dinner tonight may be Outback (thanks Tammy).

I still need to unpack our boxes from Baltimore and find Trish's address book so we can send out all the Thank yous to everyone. And a lot of you have been following Fr. Jeff's advice and calling and emailing me to check in. I appreciate it. Fr. Jeff's dad just passed away too.

Tomorrow we will have Thanksgiving dinner at my parents house. We are thinking about hosting Christmas eve at our house. Trish really wanted to do this this year and I would like to honor that if the boys are up to it. She knew she wouldn't be able to cook as much as she normally would and planned it to be a lighter affair, so hopefully we can make good on that.

For now, please know that we are greatful for all the love and support you have shown us through this difficult time. For me the saddest thing was that we were on our way home we knew this and expected nothing else and than bam -- we got slapped in the face with another reality.

Trish's cell phone is a good indicator of how focused we were on going home. Her original cell phone, about 3-4 years old started acting up and not working sometime in late September/early October. I wanted her to have a reliable cell phone that worked, so we went out to get one. At the time we thought we might be going home to hospice care, because the doctors weren't sure that the graft versus host disease had been stopped. we were waiting on a liver biopsy to tell us this. Because of this situation we looked for a cheap phone that would not extend our contract. A few weeks later, when Trish was in the hospital for her gall bladder issues, the SA threw her phone out with the sheets. We were pissed, but happy the phone was cheap. We had just gotten the news back that her liver biopsy showed that the GvHd had been stopped by the cytoxan treatment and that we would be going home to wait for her liver to regrow and that the prognosis would be much better. So we ordered Trish a really nice phone which extended our contract by two years. It was ok, because now we were going home to start our lives again. The phone arrived on the Monday after Trish was admitted via the ER and our hopes and plans started to dissolve.

For much of the two years we battled this thing, I lived every day knowing I could lose Trish any day. She lived knowing that she could lose her fight, but she would fight to live and be with her boys. She ended up losing the battle during a time when we finally lost sight of the fact that we could lose. A time when hope of a positive outcome far outweighed the reality of any negative ending. A time when we both were suddenly unprepared for how things would end. For me, that's what sucks most about how things ended. There is nothing you or I can do to make that better. We just need to use her example and move on.