When life hands you lemons .....

..... throw them back in the bastard's face and hope at least one bursts in his eyes!!!

As you may or may not have heard, life has recently handed us a big ole sack of lemons. My wonderful hubby has been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer which started in his stomach and has spread to numerous other parts, including his liver, lungs and some bones, and as you can imagine, we are pretty fucking devastated about it!!

He had been having back problems all year which were diagnosed as arthritis in April and had been losing a shitload of weight which we had attributed to an ulcer caused by taking too much ibuprofen for the back pain. Sadly this was proven false after he was sent for an endoscopy while on holiday in the UK for his sister's wedding.

Anyhoo, here we are back in sunny California and dealing with a new future. He has started his chemo and is currently on round 2. He will be on a two weekly routine of one day at the chemo centre for a 4 hour infusion, followed by 48 hours of take home chemo, then 11 days to recover before the party starts all over again! This will go on for 6 months and then we will re-evaluate.

He seems to be recovering a lot quicker from this round of chemo which we are very relieved about, but the good painkillers are causing him a lot of digestive problems and it is hard to find the right balance. It is still early days though, and I am confident that we will figure it out soon!

All in all, we are staying pretty positive and doing our best to get on with it. I am so proud of how Hubby is dealing with it - I'm fairly sure I would have gone to pieces by now if it was me!! Luckily we have the best friends anyone could possibly hope to have, and they've been keeping an eye on both of us and have been absolute God-sends giving us lifts to all his appointments and making sure we have everything we need. There really aren't enough words to express how grateful we are to everyone and how lucky we are to have you all in our lives - if love and support cured cancer then Hubby would be cured already with bags to spare!!

Our oncologist has said that he should start feeling an improvement in 3 to 4 cycles so hopefully in another month or so he will start feeling a bit better and be able to get out and about a bit more -  I bloody hope so as he will be off work for the next 5 or 6 months and it will be rather intense if the two of us are stuck in the house together the whole time!! On that note, if anyone has any suggestions for Hubbyish books, movies, games, hobbies or other pass times we would LOVE to hear them - he is not used to being house bound and I suspect it wont be long til the boredom kicks in!!

On a happier note, today is our 12th wedding anniversary - hurrah! We wont be celebrating with our usual fancy meal out, but that hasn't stopped me dressing up (who says I cant sit around the house in a leopard print dress and wedges with spikes?!?! ;-) ) and we will be making a nice romantic dinner to have at home. You can expect to hear about that tomorrow ...

A wee silver lining (sometimes you have to really dig deep to find one, but when you do you should grab it!!!) is that Hubby needs some serious feeding up and that will let me indulge in my hobby - cooking and baking!! Although we do have the unfortunate situation where Hubby is trying to gain weight while I am trying (as always!) to lose some, yet I seem to be the one eating most of the goodies! Bah!!

Well, that's probably enough for you to digest for now! I will be posting updates about Hubby's treatments and general health and adventures here, and please feel free to ask any questions or post any messages for him - I will be sure to pass them on!!

Laters .... xxx