Monday, June 15 we leave again for Tijuana. This time, all four of us will be traveling to the clinic. We're flying out of Minneapolis this time. Saved a lot of money on airfare! Carl's mom, Bonnie, will be flying out with us and staying in San Deigo with Carl's sister, Lisa and her family.
John and I are happy to go back - it'll be nice to see Elias and the crew. Personally, I'm not looking forward to the food, especially at this level of Ironman training. My metabolism is high right now and eating a leaf of catcus just doesn't cut it! Carl's feeling nervous about the violence - I told him we'd walk the three blocks up the grocery store and stock our house-apartment, but he's not too keen on that idea. I'm confident that once he gets there, he'll see it's relatively safe and all will be fine. The only thing that makes me nervous is Anj's long, blond hair. It'll make her stand out, so the rule for her will be a required baseball cap if/when we leave the clinic. I'm sure she'd be fine without it, but Momma Bear is feeling a little protective.
We have a few fun activities planned to make the trip a little like a vacation - going to visit my "pacer-sister", Kristine and her family, maybe hit a Padres game, spend afternoons at Lisa's house, a little bit of site-seeing in TJ (Revolutionary Boulevard) and a special Father's Day activity which I am not at liberty to discuss right now, should the Dad read this before we go! Of course, we'll blog about it afterward.
The focus, however, for this visit, is continuing John's upward health. He has done soooooooo good since our first visit. Unbelievably good. A sort of "pinch me, I can't believe it" kind of good. Every single day, he's pooping. Never, well, I mean prior to Dec 29, has he done that. I've even toyed with the idea of considering he might be healed! I think after the year anniversary, I might entertain that idea more, but right now, it's just dancing in my head. We cannot get over how well he's doing. He continues to stay true to his Aliviazato's diet. It's tough to be 11 and eat like that, but he educates others sometimes and feels good about what he's doing. When he has sleep overs, he bring his own food, he packs his own lunch everyday (but not for much longer!) and only pouts sometimes when he can't have something. He's so great! I guess I'm just blown away by the fact we fought so hard for 10 years to get him better with little success. All the horrible tests he's been through, time, money, etc. We spend one month in TJ at this clinic and he comes back fine and continues to be fine. As an interesting experiement, we submitted all his TJ treatments to insurance (we were wondering if they'd cover any of it, to save some money). We got the EOB back from insurance with a little letter that said, among other things, "...upon review of his case, we feel contemporary medicine can alleviate the issue at hand." Well, those of you who know me, I just about had a cow when I read that stupid statement. It still raised my heartrate and blood pressure just typing it. What bunch of idiots insurance people are (if you are one, no personal offense, I'm speaking in general terms and since this is my blog, I can type whatever I want). So, I will just leave it at "Ha! Little do they know...oh, so little!!!"
So, please stay tuned for updates on his treatment. I'm so anxious to know his "numbers." His first day he'll have blood work and a inspection of his live and dead blood cells to see how healthy his body is. We'll compare it to the info from the last visit and see how the live cell therapy worked/is working. I'm all about the data, so I'm really looking forward to the comparison.
As always, thanks for reading, thanks for caring and most of all, thanks for your support. Keep us in your prayers as we travel and change up our lives for two weeks. Please keep the other patients at the clinic in your prayers, too.
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