Our cousins, Kathy and Bobby, came up from Texas yesterday and cooked Tanner tacos for lunch and hung out at the apartment for a few hours - and watched the Animal Channel with us. The tacos were really good and it was great getting to spend some time with them, It was a nice break for Tanner and I both to get to spend some time with them yesterday. When Tanner gets a little better and we get back to Texas, we definitely will have to go out to the lakehouse and hang out on their deck. Those are always fun times and Tanner enjoys just sitting on the deck and visiting with the family.

We are at the hospital right now while Tanner is getting his first bag of chemo. The nurse is waiting on his lab work to get back so that she can order his melphalan. We can't keep Tanner awake so that he can munch on the ice. You should see the looks I get when I try to wake him up to eat the ice. LOL!

The nurse assures me that she will tell me when the lab work comes back. After that, she can place the order for the melphalan and that will give us enough time before she starts the drip so that we can try to get an hour with Tanner eating plenty of ice before it starts. She said that the mouth sores are truly horrible and often patients just have to sit with drool running out of their mouths into a towel because they can't swallow - and much of the time end up in the hospital.

We are going to give him a little while to sleep while these first meds run and then we are going to wake him up and convince him of the importance of eating the ice for the next few hours. He will need to eat it for about an hour before it begins, while the melphalan is running, and then for an hour after they get through. It's going to be fun to get that much ice down him in the mood he is in, but I'm sure we can make him see how important it is.

He will most likely be pretty sick tomorrow (since the day after melphalan was when he started throwing up before) and for the next while. She said his system will continue to drop for a week to ten days after the last chemo treatment (tomorrow) and then he will start to build back up.

If we can just get through the next two weeks, hopefully, we will get to come home for a while. Wouldn't that be great?