Update as of Monday April 24, 2006

Hello Everyone,

Sorry for the delay. We have moved again and will not have access to the internet until late Wednesday.

As some of you may know, our family is now together. Megan and the boys did not come down until this past Saturday. It was very difficult to find a place to live. All of the housing at St. Jude would not allow more than 4 people in it.

We looked all over for a furnished home to rent until the end of Maria’s treatment which is supposed to be early June. The problem is that anyone that is trying to rent a house only wants to rent for a year. The only other option was to rent an apartment. As you may imagine, corporate housing is very expensive but that was our only choice.

Until a miracle struck again, that same close friend that helped get us into St. Jude, called their local catholic parish, St. Francis of Assisi in Cordova, which had an extra home on their property to see if it was available. The kind pastor here, Fr. Peter, offered the home for us to rent. What a kind offer. We moved in Saturday. It is clean and in a very nice neighborhood. As we walked around the premises, the miracle continued. There is a pool in the backyard, that is up and running!! The last three days have been over 80 degrees and the boys are having a ball.

Maria had not seen her mother or brothers in almost a week and she was so happy to see them. You really don’t realize how important keeping the family together really is until it was broken apart and then put back together again.

Having to move into a home for 30 days is a lot of work. We are just trying to get into a routine. Ed's dad drove the family van down for us....13 hours. Thanks dad.

Megan’s sister, Maureen, came down with our family to help get us acclimated and to let dad and mom go to the hospital together with Maria. Having Maureen down here is another miracle. She is so much help; we don’t know how we could have made it these last few days without her. We want to thank Maureen’s family for making the sacrifice of being without their mother for a while so that she can help us. Thank you Sidors.

Now, on with the most important item, Maria.

Today was not a great day for our angel. Today Maria had surgery to have a “port” placed into her chest. For those of you that have never heard of a “port” it is an access area that is placed under her skin that gives the medical team a quick and direct access to a major vein so that they can place an IV in easier, or draw blood or give her medication faster. It will actually be better for Maria because now they won’t have to stick her every other day to put her IV in. It is just difficult for a 6 year old to have surgery, radiation and Chemo all before lunch.

Today was day 6 in her treatments. We are going to have 30 treatments of radiation Monday through Friday with the weekends off. That puts us home close to the end of May or early June.
Let me explain how these treatments work so that everyone is up to speed. We are currently using radiation with Chemotherapy (Tarceva) on the tumor in her brain. The radiation is a small dose every day. After the 30 treatments, the radiation continues to try and shrink the tumor for somewhere up to 5 months.

So what does this mean? This means that Maria will take a while to start to heal. She is still not back to anything close to normal and in many ways seems to be getting worse. But we are told that this is normal. The doctor says that if she takes to the radiation, then we should start to notice some improvement in about 4-6 weeks.

Over the next few months, the tumor will hopefully then shrink into nothing, but normally the tumor only shrinks to where it might not have that much of a noticeable affect on Maria’s motor skills. If the Chemo and radiation don’t eradicate the tumor, it usually comes back in normally about 4-6 months or more and then starts to grow again. If this happens, there is only relapse treatment to try, which usually does not have any effect. So as you can read, we are really counting on the miracle of Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II and God.

Hopefully, we can get our family back into some type of routine and get some “normalcy” into everyone’s life.

Thank you everyone for the continued prayers and love.
Thanks
Ed and Megan

P.S.
Please check out the addition to the website of the noon rosary.