Easter & Hospitalization Round 3 - warning, long post!

     So many of you are wondering why I suddenly stopped posting for a week. In the beginning to be honest, it was laziness. We made it home from Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon after Mike completed two out of five radiation treatments for his hip. I think we were both very relieved to be home and excited about Easter on Sunday! If you know me at all, you know that I.LOVE.EASTER!! I used to make my Grandma Rachel hide eggs for me all year long, weird I know. :-) Anyway, my Mom and Audrey were there waiting for us because she has been taking care of Audrey at my house when Mike was admitted for his second hospital visit. She also picked up my dogs from the kennel so they could come home and here is Cash on the way home and his reaction to being home:

Mom had Audrey when she picked them up and said that Audrey laughed her head off at this guy the entire way home! He is pretty goofy :-)

Cash, so relieved to be at home on his own cool wood floor!

And Hemi was even glad to resume his old space on our couch side table with his visiting Uncle Kirby and Aunt Penny who also took advantage of the quiet moment:

 On Saturday morning my Mom and I played for Audrey for awhile before we ran out to do some pre-Easter errands.

Cash gets jealous when he isn't involved in the playing or the pictures:

And the little dogs slept in all morning long:

We finally made it out the door for errands and stopped by the PX on base to see if by any chance the Easter Bunny might be there. He wasn't but we did meet . . .

Audrey clung to my Mom like this M&M could decide she was a pretzel and gobble her up at any minute!

     We also met Scruff McGruff which was fun for me since my husband is sometimes known as "Mr. Safety." Mr. McGruff gave us a finger printing kit for Audrey which I immediately tucked in Mike's Easter basket and surprisingly she wasn't really afraid of him. I guess she's used to hanging around with dogs the size of people. ;-) We didn't get any pictures with him though :-/ Moving on now!

     After errands we went home to have a nice relaxing evening with Mike, Audrey and my brother Jeff and his girlfriend Kayla who came into town so we could have a family holiday. Unfortunately, around 9pm that night Mike called my name from the bathroom and he had blood in his urine. I don't know if I have really mentioned too many actual medical details on this blog from our first visit in the hospital, but this is what originally hospitalized him back in February and what eventually led to his diagnosis. We called UNC Chapel Hill and to our surprise they said as long as he could still pee (i.e. there were no blood clots blocking anything from coming out) that we could stay at home and enjoy Easter with our family. We had plans to return to UNC anyway to finish radiation and they didn't see any reason for us to rush up there early.

     So we all woke up Easter morning, I made cinnamon biscuits (a recipe I stole back in high school from my good friend Katy), Mike meandered out onto the couch instead of hunkering down in his favorite spot, our new giant bed and we got right to Easter baskets. What you are about to see may be disturbing to some people, and please don't believe my kid is spoiled. Well, spoiled a lot. She might be just a little, lol. I made a basket, some good friends like her old nanny Karen and my great friend Ann sent some things to add to it. Her grandmas contributed a lot as well. Here is her Easter loot:

And here is her tearing through the loot :-)

After the Easter Basket fun we took a quick break:

After our break our friends Chuck and Peggie (Audrey's Tio and Tia) came over for lunch and an egg hunt:

Uncle Jeff and Aunt Kayla hunted some eggs: 

Uncle Kirby kept rolling the eggs around with his nose because he thought they were balls and then we broke them open for Audrey to have a snack and my fat dogs came running, lol.

I'll end our story of Easter with a last picture of Audrey with Daddy. I will warn you, I struggled over whether or not to post this picture, but right now in our life this is where we are and I felt strongly about documenting.

     So now the other reason for the week long hiatus from posting. When I have good news, the words just roll off the tongue and the posts are really easy to write. When the news isn't good, it is much harder for me to write. By Sunday evening the blood in Mike's urine was clotting and he was no longer able to pass urine. This means we officially went into emergency mode and headed straight to the Onslow County ER. After being there from 9pm until 6am I headed home to try and get a few hours of sleep and they loaded him to an ambulance to send him up to Chapel Hill again. He was admitted Monday afternoon. In order to ease the bleeding in the bladder they place a special kind of catheter. Unfortunately, since we've been here the catheter hasn't been working correctly and periodically his bladder will fill up and he can't release even with the catheter. This is obviously a huge problem. After an ultrasound of the bladder this morning the doctors realized that the reason they were having so many problems with the catheter is that the tumor in Mike's pelvis has grown into the bladder in a way that the catheter was sticking right into the middle of it. We are in the process of scheduling a surgery this afternoon or tomorrow morning to put a catheter through the abdominal wall into the top of the bladder so that he can relieve himself that way. The mass isn't in the top of the bladder just the bottom, so they think this will be a good solution. I can't tell you yet what else they may do to stop the bleeding and work on the tumor, it seems like every specialist in the hospital is consulting each other for a solution.

    The other part of this is that after Mike was admitted he began to cough quite a lot of blood again. Since we have already had a broncoscopy last week we know that this is just the cancer in the outer edges of his lungs bleeding. See, Mike's cancer is called "Angiosarcoma." "Angio" means blood. So his cancer inflames and feeds off of blood vessels. Each tumor in his body is basically a mass of these inflamed blood vessels so they all have the potential to bleed. This has eased up a little on its own but the specialists are also trying to figure out away to address this problem.

    In the meantime we are forced to wait, and Mike will finish his last day of radiation on his fragile hip today. Please keep my family in your thoughts and prayers, we need and appreciate all the support we have been getting through this scary time.