We are leaving in a week for our cruise. Its been fun getting things together, preparing for it....and also very emotional. We have tried to take this trip a couple of times now and actually would have been on the cruise the week Joseph started prep for transplant had he not relapsed...It feels like a kind of sad full circle that now we get to go. And yet it also feels a bit freeing and very connected to him, as if he is saying "Here Mom..Do this". He has been with me so much this week. I continue to do the vast majority of my crying in the car. I was listening to Evanescence (I probably spelled that wrong) My Immortal yesterday though and kind of realized that I was feeding my own grief, so I stopped. The song is perfect but sooo dark and hopeless. I have to try harder to focus on things that are not so dark.

Statistics class is going well. I keep wondering where the catch is. I expected it to be unbelievably hard. Either its something I "get" more than I thought I would (which is possible..that happened to me with Economics, Business Finance and Accounting...though I would suck and instead made straight As) or its just easy in the beginning and going to get hard later or I just have a really good instructor. My first exam will be on Friday next week, Feb 8th. I will miss one class due to the cruise but my instructor tells me he will teach the class to me at the math lab if I need it. I get a little intimidated when I really think about what I am trying to do here. Me? A nurse? I have wanted to do this for years, long before Joseph got sick, but I seem to have this fear of failure. Its why I don't try to get published and probably a lot why I never finished school. It can make me quake to think too hard about what I am trying to accomplish.

Alex is doing great in basketball. He honestly is quite talented, and when I watch him doing a lay up or zipping around that court, I am stunned at the miracle of modern medicine. He had his dose of growth hormone increased a few months back and its really starting to show. He is growing and is taller now than most of the boys on his team. Granted, most of them are younger than him, but considering he lost an entire year of growing after his tumor was removed, its pretty good. Its amazing they could take out a tumor right in the center of his brain and none of his cognitive abilities or coordination be affected. The tumor was right up against his optic nerve and he could have been rendered blind, but he wasn't. He lost his pituitary gland and would die within a few days without his pills, but isn't it amazing that there are pills that can replace all his endocrine functions? So well that other than the taking of those pills and the daily growth hormone injection, he's just like any other kid? I am stunned by it sometimes. Particularly now, that Joseph's situation is over and turned out the way it did..and I didn't think about or worry about Alexander's tumor much through Joseph's cancer simply because we handle the most imminent worries first, and Joseph's situation didn't leave a lot left over for other concerns. Now I look back and realize that all through Alexander's tumor I honestly didn't grasp how serious it was...nor grasp the edge we live on every day, expecting and needing those pills to be available to us. We are so blessed that Alex is doing so well.

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