John has pretty much been sick in bed for the past two weeks. On Wednesday he felt ambitious enough to help with the laundry. I didn't realize that he was helping me out and I left to run some errands. I got a text asking me to come home. I had been gone all of four minutes. During that four minutes, he was on his way to the laundry room and blacked out. He doesn't remember what happened except he woke up in excruciating pain. He crawled to bed (where his phone was and texted me) and stayed there the rest of the day and night with major back pain.
We made an appointment at Huntsman for him on Thursday morning. John's parents were so kind to come down at a moments notice to help John get to the hospital. I'm strong, but I did have to break one of John's falls (after his back was already hurt) and he required someone a little stronger than me!
When we got to Huntsman, they decided he was dehydrated, which caused low blood pressure, which caused him to pass out when he stood up. So they gave him IV fluids. They x-rayed his back and found a hairline fracture on the L1 vertebrae. Thankfully that means it's not a major injury. It should heal on it's own over the next couple months.
We are so thankful to our home teacher who helped talk us through what to do and then came to visit John Wednesday night.
We have had so many people help us out in so many ways big and small and they all make a huge impact on us. We are so grateful to all the people in our lives.
One of our tender mercies: Before we knew if Huntsman could treat this type of cancer, we tried to set up appointments with MD Anderson in Houston and Memorial Sloan-Kettering in NY. Nobody would see us until we had a more specific diagnosis than what we had. The same week we were finally able to get an appointment with Huntsman, we got an appointment with Memorial Sloan. We found out that Huntsman was confident in treating Rhabdo and so we couldn't decide if we should keep the appointment in NY or not. We prayed about it and we were still uncertain if we should spend money on a second opinion or not. We ended up going. On the airplane there were some last minute seat changes. John and I were reading through his cancer binder from Huntsman. After a while the lady sitting next to us asked us about the binder and told us that she is a cancer survivor and has been off treatments for 1 year. I was scared to hear her story, but she was so kind to us and it was good to hear the things she had to say. I think it was a tender mercy to have met her and then I knew that going to NY would be a good thing. And it really has been comforting to have a second doctor show confidence in our doctor's treatment plan.
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