One Week

It's been one week since we found out Jill was diagnosed with breast cancer.  In that time we have visited with a surgeon, taken an MRI, and consulted with a plastic surgeon.  In many ways everything is moving very quickly.  

As of today Jill is still leaning toward a double mastectomy. The plastic surgeon said, "it's good to do this in the winter when you can wear a big heavy coat, so nobody will notice."  Even though both surgeries are performed at the same time, it will be a few weeks before Jill looks normal again. 

It's been an emotional roller coaster dealing with such a terrible disease.  People have been so kind. We have been trying to get the word out to people so they know what is going on.  It's hard to call up someone and tell them, "hey Jill has breast cancer."  Hopefully family has shared this with extended family members by now. We have felt the strength from the many prayers said on Jill's behalf, and she has been touched by the acts of kindness.  

On the one week anniversary, Jill called the doctor to schedule surgery.  We had hoped to do it the week after Thanksgiving, but the first available time the two surgeons can get together is on Monday December 3rd. It's further out than we would like, but the doctors say it isn't a problem to wait that long. Unless things change, that will be the cancer free day. 

With more and more people knowing about Jill's disease, she decided to tell the children that she has cancer.  When we first found out we told them "mommy is sick".  She gathered the children and told them that she has "cancer".  Poor Logan got very sad and said, "mommy you can't have cancer, Joseph's mom died of cancer."  Sure enough, a week ago, a boy from Logan's class' mom died.  Jill told him that there are different kinds of cancer and after explaining it, she thinks Logan understands.  It's still so hard to believe that Jill is going through all of this at such a young age and with such young kids.  As they get older, they will probably grown up not remembering that their mom had cancer.  

Alyssa will be at high risk and will need to begin checking at the age of 30 rather than at the recommended age of 40.  And Jill will have follow up visits for many years because of this, but our kids will probably not really understand the gravity of Jill's cancer until they are late teenagers.  In fact Alyssa will probably be in high school when Jill will have to go in for her "overhaul".  I guess implants have a shelf life of 15-20 years. Who knew?

Thank you to everyone for the thoughts and prayers. We hope to have this thing licked before the end of the year. 

Bigger

Monday's run will go down as one of my all time memorable runs.  My other best friend Kevin and I went for an early morning run.  It was the coldest it has been all year.  So it was cold, early, and my friend got up and braved the temperatures because he knew I needed to "talk".  I shared with him the news of Jill's cancer and he was so kind. He truly is a great friend.  

Monday night Jill heard from the surgeon and this tumor keeps getting bigger.  A recap: Thursday it was 3 cm, then Friday it was 6 cm, now after an MRI it is 7 cm.  Recommendations are that anything over 5 cm would merit a mastectomy.  Dr. Lloyd gave Jill the contact for a plastic surgeon and we had an appointment scheduled for Tuesday at 7:45 p.m. 

What kind of doctor schedules appointments that late at night?  Dr. Self is a southern doctor who is very down to earth. Come to find out a little more than half his "customers" are seeing him for elective surgery so his hours are a bit more accommodating to the working woman.  I can honestly tell you that I would never in a million years think that I would go to a plastic surgeon to talk about breast reconstruction with my wife.  

Conversation was very frank, and it was hard not to giggle like I was in Jr. High School.  He reviewed some options including taking tissue from the abdomen and placing it in the breast, and regular silicon replacement (like the actresses from Hollywood).  Dr. Self was terrific and spent an hour with us explaining our options.  

At this point the question is single or double mastectomy.  If we wait to get the gene test it will seal the decision to have a double, however there is a strong argument to have a double mastectomy anyway.    

The Roundy's are so nice they sent some flowers to Jill today which made her day.  

Logan Turns 8

My boys LOVE birthdays. In fact most any day of any given year they will often ask for a toy/game/puzzle for their birthday.  Logan's big day finally came today. He was so excited to turn 8 and get some presents.

He woke up early and watched his favorite show Lego Ninjago.  

Now Logan is 8 he can go to cub scouts.

Also he got some of his very own scriptures. Logan's cousin Brooklyn also turns 8 this month and will get baptized the first of December.  Rather than make Grandma Bryant chose which baptism she wants to go to, Logan is going to be baptized in January.  This will work well for his Grandma Bryant, but also his cousins from Omaha will be in town in January so they can be a part of his special day.

 He also got a Lego Ninjago toy.

Church was pretty emotional for Jill.  The busy time of planning a funeral was behind her, and now with a little time she could think and let all of this bad news sink in.

After church she was able to get in a little nap which was much needed because of her late night preparing the house for our company tonight. All of the Bryant's and Bunkalls came to our house for dinner to celebrate the boys birthdays.  It was nice to see everyone, and they are all so kind and generous.

We picked up a cake from Costco and let the boys customize it with some of their Ninja toys.

Aunt Kandis is always the life of the party.

This week we need to get word out to all of our closest friends so they hear about Jill being sick from us. We decided to let Bishop Burton share the news with Ward Council next Sunday. Tonight Jill went to her friend Tiffany's house to tell her.  Today at church I asked Kevin if he could go for a run with me tomorrow. I figured that a conversation like we needed to have was best done over a run. 

This week we hope to hear the results of the MRI, and begin formulating a plan to remove the cancer. 

No Cancer Talk Saturday

We had a terrific time together on our 12 anniversary yesterday.  It's only too bad the majority of the day was spent in the hospital.  Saturday was pretty great because after so much talk about cancer the last 2 days it's nice not to get more bad news.

It was also nice to have the morning together while my parents had our children sleep over last night. For over a week Jill has been planning a funeral for a woman in our ward.  She was 97 years old and lived in Riverton for over 50 years.  She had a lot of family and they asked for a meal that would feed 200 people!  Jill has been working on this all week and it's kept her mind off of the anxiety about the cancer tests.  Once we knew she had cancer, this funeral wasn't very convenient.  It took up almost her entire Saturday. 

We finally got the under-cabinet lighting all connected in our kitchen so we are mostly finished with the  kitchen remodel. I also sealed the granite countertops this afternoon. All we have left is to put up a tile backsplash.  

Here is the final product. 

This shows the under cabinet lighting.  It's a feature that looks so amazing!  It really accents the new cabinets quite nicely.

The other huge change is the central vacuum van-pan.  With a simple kick of the foot the vacuum kicks on and will suck up whatever is swept near it.

With Logan's birthday tomorrow we celebrated today by going to see the new Disney film Wreck-it Ralph.  It was a fun show and Logan loved it.  This was Alyssa's first movie.  She did pretty well.  There were times when she covered her ears when she got scared.  This is a move her older brother Logan does too which perplexes me.  Why cover ears when you are scared?  It runs in the family because they both do it.  We even got popcorn and a drink.

Then for dinner he wanted to eat a cheeseburger from Jim's Family Restaurant. Yes that Jim's.  It's the kind of diner where the waitress isn't young, smokes, and calls you "sugar" or "love".  Logan loves their hamburgers. 

He is pretty excited for his 8th birthday.  We are a little nervous because many of his gifts are "rights of passage" at turning 8.  He is excited to go to scouts and get his very own scriptures, so we hope he isn't too disappointed by not getting as many toys. 

My brother Jake and his wife are two of the kindest people.  Last night we got home late and a flier was on our door saying a gift was left at our neighbors house on our behalf.  Today we picked up a beautiful fruit gift basket from Edible Arrangements complements of Jake and Becky Jo Bryant.  The packaging was beautiful. 

The fruit was so delicious and it was presented like a bouquet of flowers, with the fruit dipped in chocolate. WOW it was amazing. 

It's this kindness that really touches us.  

12th Anniversary

It snowed today.  Much like the day 12 years ago when Jill and I were married.  It's been an amazing 12 years.  But today we had a lot to worry about, in addition to celebrate this happy event.

I worked from home so I could go with Jill to meet with the surgeon when they called us in.  It happened to be at 12:00 p.m. We called my parents to come watch the kids and we met with the doctor to schedule surgery for the next week.  Or so we thought.

The doctor had another plan.  This cancer trip has been filled with turns and crossroads that take us off of the pre-determined course.  The doctor told us that the lump which we had been told was 3 cm (just over an inch) is actually 3cm wide, but 6 cm long!  It's twice as big as we thought and the course of action for this isn't simply a lumpectomy rather we should seriously consider a mastectomy. Again we were taken off course and shocked to hear about this plan. The doctor spent a long time with us telling us things we hadn't known or thought of before.  In the end the recommendation isn't for surgery next week rather, to take an MRI and have gene testing to see if Jill has a "cancer gene". We are probably a couple weeks away from surgery.

We called Mom and Dad and asked them to keep watching our children for the rest of the day. They were so nice they put off their plans to take our kids not just the entire day, but also for the night too.  MRI's aren't the most comfortable x-ray's, so Jill took a valium to calm herself a bit and went in to find out exactly how big this lump is.

Each person we have talked to, it has been for the first time.  The only constant has been the "nurse navigator" who Jill called to get a bit of a second opinion.  We just want someone with amazing bedside manor to share with us what they think.  The nurse navigator was extremely nice and shared with Jill that she had just seen that the lump is bigger than expected too and called it a "game changer".

She went on to say mastectomies aren't the end of the world and  can be a very good option.  I remembered that a very good friend of mine reads MRI's for a living, and he happened to specialize in breast reconstruction.   I called Jonathan Shakespear and he spent 30 minutes confirming what we know and making us feel a lot better about this horrible new development that the lump is so large.  Jonathan even said he will call St. Marks hospital to find out what he can and find out who the best doctors are and make sure we are working with them.  I haven't talked to Jonathan for a number of years but he was so nice to take my call on a Friday night.

It was our anniversary, so after the hospital we rushed off to pick up some groceries for Logan's birthday dinner before joining Corwin and Judy Bunkall on our date.  An a cappella group from BYU was performing at Taylorsville High School.  It was nice to hear them, they were really good, but my mind was thinking about breast cancer.

My parents had our kids for a sleep over, which was so nice.  Everyone has been so nice throughout this ordeal.  So many people are praying for us and doing so many nice things and we really haven't even told most of the people we know.

One of the last things Jonathan Shakespear told me was "you've got a long road to hoe".  He confirmed that this is very treatable, however it's critical that this DCIS cancer isn't "invasive". If the cancer is invasive all rules are off and the treatment is much more intense.

We have so many decisions to make in the coming days ahead.  What do we do?  Until we get more information we can only pray.

It's been an amazing 12 years, and pretty great that we get to celebrate it. We only hope next year we get to celebrate it on a more happy note.

11 Years 364 Days

Each week I enjoy uploading pictures of our family activities, and at the end of each year I print the entries into a book.  This is my only form of journaling.  It's fun to see the pictures of our children grow and remember the many fun things we try and do with them.  It's not the kind of journal where I pour my soul into words or share my inner most feelings.

This entry has no pictures.

Jill has breast cancer.

Cancer is such a hard word to say let alone understand.  I have known people who have had cancer before and in fact my grandfather died of cancer many years ago.  What is cancer anyway?  I have heard once before that "cancer doesn't discriminate".  I call bull.  Somehow cancer knows who the greatest people are, and rear's it's ugly head in their lives.  When was the last time a serial killer had cancer?  What about child abusers, dictators, or politicians? It seems to always infect the best people.

Our neighborhood lost a great woman Jenny Wiscomb earlier this year to cancer.  Another neighbor was just told they have terminal cancer. Cancer cancer cancer.

A month ago Jill felt a lump in her breast.  She told me about it and because of all of the attention to breast cancer in the month of October (Delta Airlines and Football players all wear pink and raise money for breast cancer awareness). After our trip to Boston Jill went to have a mammogram.  The lump was out of the ordinary so the doctors wanted to biopsy the lump.  Tuesday Jill went to the hospital to have the lump biopsied.  It was a painful process that involved a lot of poking and prodding. Today we went to see the doctor for the results. The results were not good.

Jill has DCIS breast cancer (they think) which is one of the better cancers to have.  If it's only DCIS cancer, that is good.  Tomorrow we go and meet with a surgeon to talk about removing the lump sometime next week.  This process is happening so fast.

It's a fast growing lump a little over an inch long.  It just does't make sense because "Jill is so young"  (they said that a number of times during our visit).  When they remove the lump, we think the doctors will also remove a lymph node, to see if the cancer has spread throughout the body.  This would be really really bad. With successful surgery, after a few weeks of healing, Jill will begin a 6 week course of daily radiation.  We hear radiation isn't bad, but it's a lot worse than taking Landon to kindergarten.  After radiation, follow up tests will be performed to find out if the cancer is gone.

We went to the doctor today a little worried, but we thought "it can't be cancer."  It was.

Jill's nurse-navigator was very nice and created a binder which included sections like "questions to ask your doctor", "how to tell children","facts", etc.

It was a long drive home from the hospital.  It's all so overwhelming really.  We have a wonderful support system with loving family and terrific neighbors.  This along with faith, prayer, and the priesthood we should be cancer free at the end of the treatment right? I hope my faith is strong enough.

Tomorrow Jill and I celebrate 12 years of marriage.  What an anniversary gift huh?

I know there are only about 9 of you who actually read this secured blog, most of which are family.  We want to share this with you so you can exercise your faith and add prayers on Jill's behalf.

When we got home from the hospital we told our children that "mommy is sick".  Logan gave Jill a hug, but less than 1 second later he asked to play the Wii.  Our young kinds just wouldn't understand exactly what Jill is going through.  We want them to know, but they are at an age where they just don't comprehend.  Logan's 8th birthday is Sunday and he is pretty focused on that big event. I'm glad he is.

Tonight my best friend, running companion, and bishop came to our home.  He and his wife are our best friends in the neighborhood and we shared with them the bad news and he helped me give Jill a blessing.  I believe in prayer, I believe in priesthood blessings .... Please God help my unbelief.

As we learn more I will keep this post updated.  It's therapeutic to write things down, and we can look back on this time to see how our faith increased and we relied on God to get through it all.

Birthday Season and Halloween

It's birthday season in our house.  Poor Jill has to worry about three birthday's, an anniversary, and halloween before she can even think about Thanksgiving and Christmas.  

October 29th was the 39th time I celebrated my birthday.  It's so hard to believe that I'm getting as old as I am.  It's caused me to think about next year and entering my 4th decade.  I've been thinking real hard as to how what my midlife crisis will be.  I'm still not 100% sure, but I can't help but think that it will have a motor.  But I digress.  Back to this year, each birthday in our house the person gets a poster on the wall.

I had to go to work on my birthday, but when I came home the kids were very nice and even had some terrific presents for me. 

My big present was Bose headphones.  Because of all of my travel this month I picked them out (and used them) about a month ago.

That night the kids begged me to carve pumpkins with them.

Logan is so artistic and imaginative.  This year he wanted to carve out a bat for his pumpkin, so naturally his brother also wanted to make a bat. Logan's strength is his imagination and creativeness and Landon loved rolling up his sleeves and getting his hands dirty (Logan made us clean out his pumpkin).

Wednesday was Halloween.  For years I have taken the kids out trick or treating while Jill hands out candy from the house.  We kept our roles for this year again and it was so much fun seeing the kids run from house to house.  Little Alyssa did such a good job of going up to each house and saying "trick or treat". After stopping at one house with a dog, every house after that Alyssa would stop before going up to the house and ask "dog?".  I would tell her "no dog" and she would go up to the door.

We started as just our family, and the boys kept complaining how they wanted to trick or treat with their friends.  Halfway through the night we ran into some of their friends and they had so much more fun. Alyssa did so well at keeping up with her brothers. She loves getting "Can ee".

Saturday was Landon's 6th birthday!  For months he has been counting down days until his birthday. The night before he could hardly sleep he was so excited. He wanted to wake up with us singing "happy birthday" to him.  Unfortunately he woke up before anyone could sing to him. We sang to him plenty of times throughout the day.

Landon's birthday poster is in the background.

Poor Alyssa was so sad that she couldn't open any of Landon's presents.

Landon wanted to go to Arctic Circle for dinner and eat a cheeseburger.  Then we went down to Provo to see a BYU basketball game. At school it was Landon's turn to have Kinder-Bear (a traveling bear that kids get to take home and take on an adventure), so we took it to the game.

It was tough for Landon to focus at the game for a long period of time. Luckily there weren't many people at the game so Landon had plenty of room to run up and down the stairs and get his wiggles out.  BYU won the game in a blowout.  

Another reason Landon was excited to go to the BYU game was so he and Logan could stay up late. We try and get them to bed at 8:00 p.m. but it's usually 8:30 p.m. when they get to bed.  On his birthday it was 10:00 p.m. before they got to bed. 

Then Sunday at Grandma and Grandpa Bryant's house for dinner we celebrated Landon's birthday too. We also celebrated Kandis, Becky Jo, and Brooklyn's too. 

Turning 39 reminded me that it was 20 years ago I bought my missionary suite from Mister Mac.  One of my birthday surprises was to put on the mission suite and it still fits like a glove...... well almost. 

I did wear it to church to show off to my running friends that it still fits. The suite is still in great condition too.  I wore it in the MTC but when I got to Ecuador I checked it into the huge missionary closet full of suits and picked it up again just before I came home. I'm hoping it still fits 20 more years from now.