Sad week for us, and just a bad year!

So, I know I haven't done an actual blog post in a while, it has been a really trying time for our family and especially for me. As some of you know my husband has been undergoing treatment for leukemia, specifically ALL. He had a stem cell transplant in March and has been out of town (over 3 hours away) at the cancer treatment center since early March, I have only seen him once for a couple days since then. He will have to stay there for at least 100 days past the stem cell transplant day. I am here taking care of the boys since they really cannot be around him during this time, especially after tomorrow when my youngest Zealand gets a vaccination. My husband (Shawn) essentially has a baby immune system, they completely wiped his out with chemotherapy and full body radiation and then introduced the donor cells to him during the transplant. He needs to walk a fine line to keep the new cells in check so they don't try and kill his body, but he needs to allow them to settle in and do what they are supposed to do--fight his cancer for him.

With all that said, things here at home really are just falling apart. Our heater fan in the bathroom stopped producing heat and it was so old that it just needed to be replaced. Our DVR hard drive stopped working so all the stuff I had recorded and saved for Shawn was lost since I had to return the old one for a new one. Our microwave stopped working and I just had to replace that. And to top it all off, our dog got sick with a highly resistant bacterial infection in her lungs, which caused her to have severe difficulty breathing, she eventually stopped eating and drinking because it was just to difficult to try and breath and eat/drink at the same time. She did not respond to several different antibiotics or steroid treatments and I ended up making the extremely hard decision to have her euthanized. I had her since she was 6 weeks old, and we went through so much together. She was going to be 9 next month. The hardest part of it is when my kids and I went to pick up her ashes (she was privately cremated) my 3 year old said " mommy we are not leaving without Brodie" and I had to explain to him that she was in the box I was carrying. He insisted on holding her  in the car, tucked her in and told me to turn the radio down because she was sleeping. He then was carrying her urn around petting it, and not letting it leave his side, he even wanted to take it in his sandbox so she could play in it with him. He sat on the couch and said "mommy I need Brodie" and I would have to get him the urn box which I had been trying to set up on a shelf out of the way to kind of get our minds off of it. It has only been a week but I am devastated and have been bawling my eyes out whenever I think of her. One of the worst things though, is that Shawn in Buffalo, did not get to say goodbye to her. She was actually really attached to him and would wait for him to come home every night when he was at work during the day. Even when she was sick, she would stand in the kitchen waiting for him (hoping that he would come home I bet). So, maybe it was just as painful for her as it is for all of us, she didn't get to say goodbye to him either.

Overall, this has been an awful year for us so far. The only good thing is that we were able to find a donor for my husband so quickly and I am so thankful for that! I understand that people may go years without finding donors, and that some don't find one at all. So thank you to all those who are donors, you really do not fully know how much you are appreciated!

Hopefully things will settle down for us here at the house, and everything can get back to normal by the end of summer when Shawn can finally come home. I know he will still have a lot of doctor appointments but at least he will be home with us.