Thursday 23rd February 2012

Wow...I have been really slack. It's been over 2 months since my last post! So what's been happening. We had a great Christmas. My brother and all the family came down from Gosford and brought everything with them to make us a beautiful Xmas Eve dinner. They said we had done lots of work to get Mum & Dad moved so this was their thankyou for our hard work. We then had a lovely Christmas Day lunch/dinner at Murray's sisters place with all the family (including my Mum & Dad). Mum and Dad are settling into the retirement village and starting to join into the activities. Dad is a member of the Men's Shed and today went and did some woodwork. He is also playing Kelly pool with a group of others and going to the gym every now and then to exercise his knees. Mum & Dad have also been going along to movie days and happy hours and meeting lots of new people. They had terrible trouble getting a land line phone put on. It ended up taking over 2 months. After lots of investigating and many, many phone calls (I felt like the Erin Brochovich of the oldies) it was discovered that a section of cabling within the village was missing. I took it up with the CEO and within hours of getting my 5 page report on what I'd found there were 'suits' everywhere in the village and the CEO came over to apologise to my parents and say they would try and get it fixed as soon as possible. It still took a while as Mum and Dad wanted to lock into TPG not Telstra. But all is good now and they have a phone and the internet. Yay! We went to New Zealand on the 16th January for 2 weeks. We had a fabulous holiday. The weather was really good at 23 degrees most days and nice and sunny. We only had 1 day of drizzle in Rotorua. We flew into and out of Auckland, then went to the Bay of Islands, Coramandel Peninsula, Bay of Plenty, Rotorua, Lake Taupo, Napier, Palmerston North (where we caught up with our brother-in-laws family), Wellington, Wanganui, New Plymouth and Waitomo Caves. We had lots of fun with a few key highlights. 1. Murray getting stung by a wasp and having an elephant foot for a few days. 2. In Rotorua we went up the Skyline (gondola) and then came down the massive hill on a luge (like a toboggan on wheels with a brake). The only problem was Luke was too tall for the luge and had his knees up round his ears (not quite but that's the best way to explain it) therefore he couldn't get his brake to engage properly and on one of our last runs down the mountain he lost control and had a stack in the sand barrier! 3. We went on a Jetboat over rapids near Lake Taupo - lots of fun and somehow I managed to get soaking wet from all the spray on my side of the jetboat and Murray hardly got wet at all on the other side. 4. We went black water rafting at Waitomo Caves - which involved getting into a wetsuit with a miners type hat on with a light and then going to the underground caves. Once we walked quite a fair way down through the cave we came to water and then sat on black tyre tubes, linked feet in a chain and floated along in pitch black looking at the glowworms. It was very serene, until we reached the waterfall that we had to jump down! Amy hates the dark so she really conquered her fear full on with this activity! We then came back to Australia and straight back into it. Back to work, university and college. Luke has returned to DAFF part time 3 days per week and university for 2 full days. Amy started Year 11 at college and has juggled a few classes around but seems happy now. I'm still at Defence in HR but have moved areas to Graduate Recruitment. I certainly started in a very busy time with new graduates starting for the year as well as heading into career fairs and assessment centres for next years grads. So how is Luke doing? We'll after thinking that his liver function levels had settled down and the chemo doses were finally right we were proved wrong the week before we went to NZ. Therefore he was on hold for over 2 weeks while in NZ (which was actually a good thing for him) and as soon as we came back they have juggled once again with his chemo levels. He is now taking 50% of the daily Mercapturine chemo tablets and 50% of the weekly Methotrexate dose. His levels went up a bit again but the doctor wanted to see if the levels were high 2 weeks in a row. They came down, so he has continued at these levels for now. He did have a day off work on Monday as he was feeling really nauseous and after a blood test today things seem to have settled back down again. So for now we will keep going on this dosage and monitor things till we get the levels right. He is due to finish this 3 month cycle on the 4th of March and will go straight into a new 3 month cycle on the 5th starting with a lumbar puncture.