Dragonflies and Extra Prayers

I have a very special cousin "D" who is more like my little sister. We talk for hours, she makes me laugh, she gets on my nerves... she's exactly like a little sister. She had a very hard childhood but our grandparents stepped in and took her and her brothers into their home. It wasn't ideal but they did their best and got them through school. Eventually D met the man of her dreams and started her own family. Her husband is in the service and they moved to California. That's such a long ways from home in NY state. They have four babies now, ages 11, 9, 7 and 5. They are beautiful, sweet, adorable kids. Our biggest dreams have always been to be mothers and now we are.

I haven't traveled to CA yet but they have tried to come home almost every year. We've been able to watch the kids grow and teach them all of the naughty things parents don't want them to know. (Hey, somebody taught them to my kids first.) They haven't been here in the last two years though because in February of 2007, D was diagnosed with an extremely rare brain tumor, Medulla Blastoma. This is a common tumor in children but not in adults.

The first course of action was surgery followed by chemotherapy and radiation. It worked for a while but then the tumor came back. Treatment took care of it again but recently it came back for a second time. She has maxed out her radiation and a different form of chemo only helped for a short time. The tumor grows so fast that it can't be left untreated. She will be having another surgery tomorrow, Monday.

At UCLA Hospital they have different animals that represent the different kinds of cancers. Dragonflies are the symbol for brain cancer. We now have dragonflies all over the place. Everything counts. I wish I could take her pain away. I wish I could take her cancer away. She is so incredibly tough that I am confident that she and her doctors will be able to do that together. We could use some extra prayers though. She needs to get well and go back to coaching soccer and helping in the classrooms. She needs to get well and go out to dinner to celebrate with her husband, for all of the months he's spent in Iraq and she's spent in the hospital. She needs to get well and take the kids to Lego Land and work on their scrapbooks. She needs to get well and come home to visit all of the family. She needs to get well to be a wife, to be a mom, to be my cousin and sister, to be anything she wants to be for many, many more years. She needs to get well. So if you have any of those extra prayers, could you please send them her way? We would really appreciate all of the help we can get. Cancer really sucks.