Oh how things have changed over the last month or so. For one, I’ve missed blogging in more ways than you know but have had such little brain capacity that anything I’ve attempted to write has turned out closer to this than to this. So be glad, be thankful that I have not written much because it would have fallen into that category of not quite bad enough to be funny but bad enough to make you shed a tear on my behalf. You know what I mean? It’d be bad; bad enough to where if you didn’t know me you’d probably laugh but because you know my story it’d simply cause you to shed a tear or two on my behalf. Nevertheless, here I sit on my hospital bed that puffs up and gyrates randomly in order to make sure that I don’t get bed sores (I accidentally wrote “bed soars” which would be so much cooler than bed sores now wouldn’t it!)–’cause the makers of hospital beds obviously know how long it takes doctors to get results back to their patients–ready to share with you what’s going on in the world of the Woods’ wild ride here in the world we call Vancouver, USA.*

So I’m slowly transforming myself into the Bionic Man as I now not only sport the elbow crutch to help keep my balance but I also use an AFO that has been huge in keeping me from tripping over…tripping over…well…nothing: my own toes I guess. Here’s the reason the brace has been valuable is that quickly, over about a months time, my right leg lost most of its functionality and I began to trip much more often than before. The brace has proved invaluable in keeping me on my feet (literally) and has been much less invasive than I feared that it would be.

In addition to the AFO a new development (and much less helpful) has been the chronic headaches. It started off as occasional headaches (every two weeks) that would get so progressively painful that we’d end up in the hospital with vomiting and me pounding my head against the wall. The ER would fill me with fluids, piles and piles of pain meds, and eventually send me home. At first this happened about every two weeks, then every week and a half, then every week, then every five days, and then the headaches just never left…which is where we’re at today. Essentially for the last nine days I’ve been living off pain killers to keep the debilitating headaches at bay. The docs have ran all sorts of tests, they’ve looked all over in an attempt to figure out the cause of the headaches to no avail.

Today I find myself writing from a bed in the hospital because it was two days ago that my wife found me convulsing and unresponsive in some sort of seizure. Without going into great detail here, this seizure was followed by another shorter episode that may or may not have been a smaller seizure which led to us being admitted into the hospital for the last few days. Bad food, generally unresponsive care, and an uncomfortable bed aside by being admitted into the hospital we were able to get an MRI done that my insurance was unwilling to previously authorize. But thanks to the creativity of my oncology clinic by getting me admitted into the ER we were able to get a full body MRI scan done, get it covered by insurance, and

Thus far there’s no good answers (are there ever?), there’s nothing notable in my brain**, there’s no infections to speak of, nothing. Just me, my wonderful family, and my gnarly tumors (we should get a good Christmas card of the group of us this year!). They’re sending me home, nothing’s changed, we’ll go in for chemo next week like we do on a bi-weekly basis, and wait and see what next week brings! (hopefully some boredom right?) For now we will continue to struggle with the present reality of constant drug-masked headaches that have yet to be answered, of seemingly weekly bouts of vomiting and ER visits, and of all the fun things that go hand in hand with this stuff. Please keep my wife in your thoughts as her load to carry has multiplied by ten (twenty? thirty? maybe more?). Otherwise thank you so so much for your love, prayer, and concern.

peace.

* Vancouver, Washington. No, not Vancouver, British Columbia. No, not Washington DC. Vancouver, Washington in the county of Clark. Clark County Washington not Clark County, Nevada where Las Vegas resides. Ugh We’re the original of all three and yet we own none of them. Thus is the life of living in the original ‘Couve

** For a guy who technically has brain cancer it sure is strange to never have any cancer, tumors, aneurisms, or anything of that nature in my actual brain!