May 9, 2011

Wow has it been awhile since we've posted here!  Everything has been running pretty smooth around here.  Having the new dog, Rita, helps a LOT.  The doctor has actually prescribed her as a therapeutic dog for both mom and dad.

So we took mom to the eye doctor today.  She's been having a little bit of an issue. Now you may recall early on in the cancer treatments they said that eye and ear issues can occur when doing so much radiation to the neck and brain.  Well the hearing has suffered some loss and today we discovered she has a choroidal nevus.  Sounds pretty serious, right?  Well actually right now its not - it's literally a freckle on the inside of the eyeball.  Weird, eh?  An actual freckle. But like all freckles on your skin you have to watch them because if they start to grow then we have a problem.  We have a photo of Mom's freckle...I think we'll call it....Chuck....So anyway -we have a photo of Chuck a year ago and one today and he hasn't changed or moved or built a garden or made any additions to his house.  NOTHING.  So that's really good. We'll take another photo of Chuck in about three months and keep doing that for a year or two until we can establish that Chuck is not very active.  Oh - here's a photo of Chuck.  You'll see the bright spot in the middle, looks like the sun - well Chuck is to the right of that.  Looks pretty big and as you can see, if Chuck decides to moves west one block, he'll block moms' vision and then we'll have to ask Chuck to move out.

Now, if you look north-west of Chuck, you may see what appears to be a small planet...at about 11 o'clock -- see it?  Nope - not that...there you go...that one there. yep - that's what we're going to be watching even closer than Chuck.  That my friends is a hemorrhage.  Not an issue now BUT if the little bugger decides he wants to let off some stream and start to bleed, than we'll have some vision problems for sure.

So we have these two things to watch.  Chuck the Freckle, and then a little planet we'll call...Hamlet...not sure why - it's the name that just came to me.  Hamlet the Hemorrhage.

So there you have it, folks.  The continuing saga of a tough lady named Barbara, fighting cancer and all that it has to throw at her - and she's kicking its butt!