(Update: To anybody who might be reading this for the first time, or for the first time in a while, my sister Sue lost her valiant battle with cancer in March 2009. She is missed now and forever. The following was written well before that.)
... I guess it has been a while since I've blogged. I guess it just takes getting back in the mood.
Anyway, just got back from a whirlwind trip to Little Rock to spend Thanksgiving with the family. Everybody was there, though Ed spent the weekend with his family in New York and Val stayed in Iowa celebrating there with friends/family and snow.
As for the big day itself, it was probably like 90% of every other Thanksgiving in America -- lots of turkey, lots of stuffing and lots of sweets. Oh, and the occasional bickering and picking that occurs when family members who don't get to see each other very often suddnely have to spend 10 hours in the same room together.
It was a good time regardless. And Sue looked really good. After getting down to about 68 pounds at her worst, she's now up to 95. And man did she stuff her face on Thanksgiving. That was good to see. She looks so much better than the last time I saw her, as this picture shows (she's in the pink). She's now suffering from horrible headaches because of the cancer in her brain, but she's fighting as hard as she can.
And you know what I think has saved her life to this point? Activia yogurt. The stuff with probiotics. After she went through chemo and then stopped it, it was very hard for Sue to have a good bowel movement. Doctors gave her everything, all kinds of drugs and potions that would make her go to the bathroom. But nothing worked, and it was killing her in front of our eyes. But one day she tried Activia, and the next day she was a new person. Now she eats about 10 of those little cups a day (I might be exaggerating, but maybe not). The rest is history.
All in all a good trip, made even more exciting by the Arkansas Razorbacks' 31-30 come-from-behind football victory over LSU. It was fun leaving town and seeing all the long faces on all the Tigers fans that made the trip to Little Rock to see their team lose to the Hogs for the second year in a row.
But it was a long trip. Josh and I took two days to get there, stayed Thursday and Friday, and then drove 17 hours straight back to Virginia, a lot of it in the rain, arriving home at 2:30 a.m. Sunday. Then it was back to work for the both of us on Sunday night.
We'll probably head back in the spring. But I doubt we'll do the 17-hour straight thing again. That was rough.
