A Weekend Away

 Hey everyone, time for the quarterly update I guess ;-)

Here we are in Gimli.  We had such a great time here last year that we decided to come up again for the "sweet deal" which includes breakfasts and dinners in the hotel restaurant. 

We were basically pretty sloth-like, except for Pam going to work out on the elliptical trainer in the hotel gym.  Good for you, Pam!  I just stayed in the room and read a book. 

We had a couple of nice meals in the restaurant and sat in the hot tub, too.  The weather was super-nice so we went for some walks by the frozen lake, which was very pleasant.  On Saturday night we saw something very unusual, a ring around the Moon.  Never seen one of those before so it was pretty cool!

We took a few photos on Sunday before we came back to the city so I thought I would post them here.  Oh, and a health update - the last few scans have come back very good and Pam is feeling pretty well.  Some very minor blood clot issues continue but it is not bothersome for Pam except for having to take daily injections, that sucks.  But it is bearable.  We are just looking forward to the summer!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

I've just noticed that the blog hasn't been updated in awhile... in this case no news is good news :-)  Pam has been feeling pretty well lately and the results from her latest brain MRI were excellent - the lesions continue to shrink or disappear, and the ones that don't aren't growing, so the doctor was very happy to give us this news.  Pam continues to work four days a week but is at home today working to get the Christmas feast ready for tonight.  Pam's sister and her family, and her parents, come over so it will be a busy time at our house.  Tomorrow we will have breakfast with Pam's parents and then set off for Brandon for Christmas Day with my parents and my uncle, and a soak in the hot tub at the hotel later :-)

So in the meantime, enjoy our twinkling Christmas tree and have a wonderful holiday season and a happy and healthy 2011.

 

With love,

Dallas and Pam

So that was the summer!?!?!

Hey everyone.  Can't believe that it's now mid-September and the summer that we wait so long for, is now pretty much gone.

In any event, we had a really nice day on Saturday.  It was a beautiful sunny Fall day.  In the morning we had donuts from Tim Hortons, then ran some errands.  After lunch I worked on the P-car a bit, washed and waxed the GTI, and generally puttered.  We pulled some weeds in the driveway and then decided to go for a drive to Assiniboine Park and take a walk.  We strolled around the English Garden and even saw a fox sneaking around outside the zoo.  Watched a movie in the evening and went to bed.  It was a good day, for sure.

Anyway I guess we had a pretty busy summer and I thought I should post an update and some pictures.  I guess the most recent interesting thing we did was drive to Sault Ste-Marie, Ontario for the wedding of our friends Greg and Linda.  I was standing up for Greg.  We took the Porsche and it was a pretty fun trip. 

The first day, we stopped in Bemidji for lunch by the lake.

Then we hung out with a couple of friends:



We stopped in Duluth for the night and spent a really nice evening at the harbour front they have there, here are some pictures:

Can't drive through the UP of Michigan without a photo stop in my favourite town:

The wedding was lovely and a lot of fun.  While in SS-M we went on a boat cruise of the locks, it was very cool, especially meeting the large Great Lakes freighters.  These are amazingly large, some over 1,000 feel long... impressive!



On the way back, we drove up to Thunder Bay and then down through Rainy River back into the USA at Baudette, Minnesota.  Driving beside the lake was absolutely breathtaking, so many beautiful views.  Couldn't stop for them all but we made a few stops to take in the fantastic scenery.

And the famous Wawa Goose of course!

On the health front things have been pretty stable, thankfully.  Pam has scans and appointments on a regular basis but they have shown no radical developments, touch wood.  So we are hanging in there pretty well.  

We hope everyone enjoyed their summer and is having a great fall-time.  It's a really nice time of year here, and we are hoping to visit the corn-maze with friends and do some other outside stuff if we can.

Love to all,

Dallas and Pam

Micro-Update

Today was a nice day, Pam had a good sleep last night and was feeling well. I got my hair cut. Diane H. came over and left some delicious cookies.

We mainly stuck close to home and took it (mostly) easy. I did some overdue work in using some surplus plywood to replace the doors on our shed, and Pam puttered a bit in the garden. Good to be at home together.

Lastly, we want to give a special shout-out for our dads Gary and Lorne on Father's Day. We love you guys!

More Fun!

OK, this goes back about a month...

Pam had had a chest scan, and the doctor's office phoned back right away. Apparently the radiologist had spotted some blood clots in her lungs and this is something they want to address very quickly. So Pam had to go back to the doctor and get started on anti-coagulant drugs to try and prevent further clots. They also took her off her tamoxifen as they thought that this had contributed to the clotting.

So after a week or so of daily injections, the INR (clotting coefficient of the blood) was back close to normal, so they discontinued the injections. Big mistake ;-)

Soon Pam had developed a big clot in her leg, it was quite swollen and she ended up going to HSC Emergency on June 5. Then the daily injections had to start again.

Pam had another CT scan yesterday and it showed another large clot in her right lung. So out of caution the doctor scheduled an urgent procedure to implant an IVC filter - "IVC" being "inferior vena cava", the blood vessel that feeds the heart. The idea of putting a filter there is to stop any roaming blood clots from getting where they shouldn't. The filter is made of titanium and is inserted via a catheter through a vein in the leg. (I told Pam to make sure they used a "K&N" brand filter with the million-mile guarantee ;-)

We arrived at the hospital as required at 9am for the procedure at 11... but HSC being what it is they didn't get her in the OR until 1pm. In any event the procedure went very well, Pam was asleep through the whole thing, and just as I am writing this at 4:30pm she called me from the hospital and was sounding very good. So I will pick her up after I am done here and we will try to have a quiet weekend.

Scan

Just wanted to post a short update on Pam's latest scan she had on Tuesday.

She was at HSC at 9am for the test and it went fine, but the radiologist reviewing the films was quickly on the phone to Pam's doctor as he had spotted two blood clots in her lungs. The clots are treatable with blood thinners so we got back to Cancercare pronto and Pam had her first daily injection of a week's worth. The doctor also discontinued her Tamoxifen as it can contribute to clotting. He will be prescribing another drug therapy in its place.

Very glad that Pam happened to have her scan that day. She had been a bit shorter of breath than usual on the weekend but we really didn't think anything of it. Once the clots are cleared that should improve, and we are very thankful and lucky that the scan was scheduled when it was, and that the radiologist was on the ball.

Is It May Already??

Pam is at the movies with her sister tonight so I thought I would clean the house. Procrastinator that I am, I also figured that I should update the blog too ;-)

I can't believe that the last update was last year already! But anyway I guess no updates mean no bad news, so that's cool.

We actually had a bit of good news again with Pam's latest brain scan. Although we were worried, it turns out that the brain lesions are either the same or have shrunk again since the last scan, and that's great!

I guess we should also update readers on our mainly boring lives... we've mainly just been working, but we have had a couple of nice breaks lately too. In the winter we went to Gimli to stay at the hotel there, just for the weekend. It was very relaxing, we went for a walk, read our books, soaked in the hot tub, watched the Olympics, ate in the restaurant and were generally slothful. It was fantastic!

More recently we went on a quick trip to the west coast. We stayed for two nights in Vancouver with Pam's brother and sister-in-law and had a good time with them. I hung out with my old chum Rick and that was great as well. Then our friend Bryan very kindly drove us to Tacoma, Washington where we picked up our new old car. (I had sold the '72 Datsun 240Z I had owned for 20 years because I wanted to try something different).

In Tacoma we picked up the car, and over the next three days drove it back 1600-odd miles across Washington, Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota. The car ran great and the weather was perfect, it was a nice break for us (not to mention exciting for me to drive a longtime "dream car" of mine through the mountains, with my lovely wife there to enjoy it with me). We got back to Winnipeg about 7pm on Wednesday, April 21, and took the next day off work.

Now we're back to work... I hope that Powerball ticket we bought in Washington paid off, but I don't have the heart to check the numbers ;-)