A Week of Joy and Heartache

I am not even sure how to summarize our week. Camp was incredible. The week started out rough though. We came home from the hospital frantically threw our stuff together and headed out for camp. The first night everyone sat around and introduced themselves. I unfortunately was sitting by 2 parents whose kids had the same diagnosis as Jordan, but their tumors had come back. That night Jordan was up every hour screaming with cramping. His symptoms from treatment are so often the same as they were from the tumor and the events of the night made me extremely upset. Sue, our nurse practitioner helped calm my anxieties the next day and agreed to do his scans early believing that they will give us more peace of mind. So they are scheduled for tomorrow. That day was the spa and as I described before, it was amazing. Things got better with the following night as we tried a new medicine and he slept the whole night giving us more assurance that his pain the following night was due to treatment issues.

On Wednesday morning our other nurse practitioner, my friend Kristin, showed up for the day. She told me that my cousin and her husband were at Children's that day on the oncology floor and their son was being diagnosed. I was in complete shock. Ben and Jordan are about the same age and we had just been in Hawaii with them a month earlier. Even more unbelievable, her husband is a pastor at UPC the church that sponsored the camp. He had commissioned the Side by Side team that Sunday before camp. So all the people leading the camp knew and love Carin and Jeff and they too were shocked. The rest of the week was bittersweet. My family was being served by such amazing people who were going above and beyond to make it a wonderful week for us, and yet my heart was so heavy for Carin, Jeff and Ben. As the news got out to the camp staff, I realized that beyond all the fun there was an incredible prayer team and people praying constantly and fervently for our family and now for my cousin's family. I was overwhelmed. We are believing and hoping for the best for them. And the one consolation in hearing such bad news was that all the wonderful, Christ filled people we met at camp are their church body, and will love, serve and walk with them through this trial. Please pray for them. They have a long road of treatment ahead them and it is overwhelming. Please also pray for our scans tomorrow. This is the final scan that will indicate if we are done with treatment.