Sun Feb 18th

Wow, what a long week! And it is about to start all over again. Jon was out of town in Salida all week and he is leaving again tomorrow to go to Shiprock Falls, New Mexico coming back this Friday. Monday and Tuesday were pretty uneventful and Wednesday I was able to go and help out in Olivia's preschool class. They did a valentine exchange and Olivia was pretty excited to be able to do show and tell. We had a good time together. It's a bummer I had to miss out on getting to help out during the first part of the year. I went in and did my Herceptin on Wednesday afternoon and they also started doing a blood draw to measure my tumor markers. From what the nurse said they measure protein levels in my blood and they are drawn on a regular basis. They will follow the trend in those levels and hopefully be able to determine if my body is forming other tumors elsewhere in the body. That is the general idea anyway. My mom was nice enough to have me and the kids over for dinner on Wednesday and gave me a little bit of a break from dealing with meal time alone. Let me just say I am so glad I am not a single mom with 3 kids. I don't know how people do that single parent thing. It is hard! Thursday I was able to meet up with a gal named Shari that has a daughter that attends the same preschool as Olivia that was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The kids played and we were able to visit. It was neat to be able to exchange experiences with her because she has already had her mastectomy and just started chemo. She was able to share surgery stuff with me and I was able to share chemo stories with her. It has been wonderful to meet so many amazing people because of this disease. (even though the circumstances are pretty crappy) I waited around Thursday afternoon for the cable guy, the infamous between 1pm and 5pm appointment time. What a joke. He finally called at 4:45 and said he was 2o min away. He ended up running into some problems and didn't end up leaving until 7:15. I did get my DVR at the end of all that mess though so that is exciting. I always seem to miss my shows or mess up the recording on the VCR. Friday it was incredibly windy and then started snowing in the late afternoon. I am so sick of this weather. It is depressing. Jon got home on Friday afternoon. We went to a church activity on Friday night. It was a valentine's activity just for adults and was fun to get to know some other couples in our ward. Saturday morning Jon's parents came and picked up Olivia. They took her up to Estes Park for the day and kept her overnight so Jon and I could get away for the evening. My parents watched the twins overnight for us. We went down to Denver for dinner with our friends Aislinn and Desi and also Vernon and Kira. We ate in Lower Downtown at an Italian restaurant called Maggiano's Little Italy. It was so delicious. It was a ton of fun to hang out with friends and just get away for a bit since I hadn't seen Jon all week. Here is a picture of the 6 of us at dinner.

After dinner we went to a dueling piano bar called sing sing. The piano players there are amazing and they can play pretty much anything you request. Aislinn and Kira put in a request to try and get me up on stage and have them play "I'm to Sexy" but instead the piano players asked me to come up there with a bunch of other people that had birthdays or anniversaries and do the Hokey Pokey in front of everyone. It was embarrassing but pretty funny.

Aislinn, Desi, Jon, and I also went dancing at Polly Esther's afterwards. They played 80's music and it was pretty funny to just hang out and be silly grooving to the 80's. The 4 of us stayed down in Denver overnight. It was a good way to take my mind off all the thoughts and stress of the week. We took some other pictures and I have some new pictures of the kids on my snapfish link.

I am pretty nervous about my surgery. I have been taking Ambien at night to try and sleep and not lay awake thinking about it. I still feel that having the mastectomy is the right choice for me and have felt that personal revelation from Heavenly Father. I feel at peace with this when I pray about it. I know the lord is watching over me and I have faith that I am doing the right thing, but I am still scared to live the reality of going through with it. I am scared to look different, to deal with the pain, to deal with multiple reconstructive surgeries, pretty much scared of ever aspect of it. My husband used a good analogy earlier when we had our home teachers over and were discussing it. He said that faith is like walking into a dark cave and having a candle in your hand and only being able to see the small part of the cave directly in front of you. I have to take my faith (my candle) and put my trust in that and know that while I only see the light directly in front of me, the lord is able to see everything. Even though I am scared to go through with it I have to put my trust in the lord and know that he will be there every step of the way.