Updates: Medical and Wedding

Well, let's get the unpleasant stuff out of the way. All of my counts have dropped a lot. Hopefully this is killing off the dysplasia that was trying to rear its head, and my DONOR CELLS, which are nice and HEALTHY, will rebound and start producing more blood cells to get my counts back up where they belong. The main thing I am noticing is that I run out of breath and am weaker than I want to be due to the low red count. I'm being careful not to cut or bruise myself and am being a hermit to avoid sick people.

There was a lot of back and forth about when to do the next chemo treatment. They started me out slowly at first: three days at 75% dose. For the second round I will have five days at 75% dose.

Looking at the calendar, the Guy, DD#2 and I have a trip to France coming up in March. In order to give me more than a week to get my counts up after the next round, it was decided that I will start the second set of Vidaza infusions on Monday 7 February. And by skipping next week, my counts will get a little more chance to come back up before being knocked down again. I will have the picc line removed on Friday 11 February. Yea! Don't want to wear that to France. It wouldn't go with my travel wardrobe at all!

Now that we have that out of the way, on to the fun stuff: WEDDING PLANNING. For those of you who don't know - my daughter, Abbey, and her fiancé, Donnie, are getting married at DisneyWorld in June. The ceremony will take place in the Wedding Pavillion on the shores of the Seven Seas Lagoon and the reception dinner will be at the Grand Floridian.

This has to be one of the most fun things I have ever done. I love spending time with Abbey and DD#2 working out all the details. One huge thing is done: I got the Fiesta favours ordered.

At least ten years ago I met Judi Noble and Dave Conley at an HLCCA Conference. Judi is Art Director and Dave is Director of Retail Sales and Marketing at Homer Laughlin China. Now I know that HLC does various advertising things on dishes for different companies and it occurred to me that something wedding-ish on Fiesta would make a wonderful favour for the guests at Abbey's wedding. At the HLCCA conference this past July I talked with Judi and Dave about having a piece of Fiesta to be said favours. Then I actually set things in motion late in the fall. The artwork is wonderful. Abbey looked at the renderings and said, "Perfect!" So I finally got everything together and placed the order on Friday. The dishes will be here in plenty of time. I for sure will have to get photos of the boxes sitting on the front porch. (Sorry, you may have to be one of my dish buddies to get the humour of that.)

When we were at DisneyWorld for Christmas we spent one afternoon meeting with the wedding planner and floral coordinator, tasting wedding cakes and fillings, choosing the cake design, and in general going over everything to do with a perfect wedding. Today we got the initial plan back from Disney with all those details in writing. It is pages long, but very detailed. I love that. Nothing is left to chance or question. Everything is spelled out so we are all on the same sheet of music. This truly is going to be a fairytale wedding.



This afternoon we worked on seating arrangements at the reception dinner and clarifying the time and date of the Magic Kingdom photo shoot. The bridal portraits and some of the wedding portraits will be made at Cinderella's Castle before the park opens.

We also went over the menu for the reception cocktail hour and dinner - just thing a food oriented person likes to do. There were many choices and Abbey and I are both really pleased with the final menu. After the fact, I will post it, along with lots of photos.

Next big thing on my agenda is going shopping for my MOB dress. Just have to get my blood counts high enough so that I can go out in public again. Thinking positively!!!

namasté,