St. Jude's January 2011

Devree sang the National Anthem for the girl's Varsity Basketball game on Saturday, January 8th. She was awesome. She hit every note.

Breck is helping Jackson do his homework and Jackson is reading in kindergarten.

Beiber fever! Ah! Kallie has it bad.

Celest being Mrs. Homemaker by baking cookies for the Wednesday Young Women's party.

Talon doing lots of homework which is how he spends most nights.

Tayzia and Devree ready for the party.

Tayzia and Devree chilling on the couch.

Jackson, Kinzi and Celest

Youung Women looking at the competition of Kinect dancing in front of the big screen.

Deree dancing on her turn of Kinect. An Xbox game that uses your heat signature to see if you can keep up with the dance moves on screen. Devree did really well.

As you can see Celest has a party for us just about every time and makes things so very enjoyable for us when we come. THANK YOU GERMANTOWN YOUNG WOMEN for coming and partying with us.

We always come to St. Jude's with quite a bit of trepidation. As we drove in on that first day we saw 2 snowmen built on the tiny patch of grass at St. Jude's main patient entrance. We laughed and said this will be a good visit. Our visit this time was fly in on a Monday and leave on Friday. We have to stay a couple of extra days because this marks 24 months since diagnosis! It is a big mile stone and so therefore many tests are needed to see how and why Devree is doing so well. All of her scans came back clean but there is less spinal fluid for some reason. We will have to check with a doctor at home to see what he can tell us.

Devree also signed up for extra tests because she said "If it can help other people, I want to do it." This means Loooong psychological testing and MRI tests that look at brain function to help kids be able to read better and help kids with brain cancer so the doctors know better about what areas can and cannot be radiated. The Psycho (Devree's word) testing includes parents. I was getting a little frustrated with the lady today saying that we were having all of these written tests and a looong interview to see how we handle stress. We are going to be compared to people that have never had a child with cancer. I thought how can you even compare to the 2? I know I may offend some of you out there. But believe me there just isn't any stress out there that even compares. They talked about being in a natural disaster or a terrible accident or losing your job or house. But it just isn't the same kind of worry you have to go through every 3 months or 6 months or yearly for the next 10 years and sometimes longer to see if the cancer came back. But the other psycho lady explained that this study is going to HELP people better deal with stress by our testing to see how we handle stress. Whew that is over. But it made me cry again because I had to relive all of those moments again of finding out and going through treatment.

We have amazing interesting news. The audiologist said there is a new kind of hearing aid that goes deep in the ear canal and has an oscilator that moves with sound waves and through the bone tells the hearing ear. The brain is able to tell you where the sound came from and decipher the sound. I think this might even help my Dad.

The other amazing news is there is a doctor at Duke University that has had great sucess with nerves in the face and getting paralysis reverted. This could mean that Devree will get her full facial muscles back. I am so excited about this and I think Devree is getting excited too. But she tells me she doesn't want to get her hopes up high. I already emailed the doctor.

Sad news today. I had an accident in Brenda's car. I think it can easily be repaired but I am so very sorry about it, and hopefully we can get it repaired ASAP

We fly home tomorrow.