Giving It My ALL

It's been exactly a month since Ryan's last update, and he continues to be amazingly resilient. He had to continue the at-home antibiotics until just a couple of days ago when the abscess from the ruptured appendix finally went away. After over a month of delays, he was able to

Hey everyone! I made it home on Friday afternoon. Very excited to be typing this on our couch rather than a hospital bed. My ultrasound on Tuesday showed an abscess where my appendix had ruptured, so I had a procedure on Wednesday to drain the infected fluid. The procedure went

Hey all - it's me, Ryan! Figured I'd try to write an update for a change and give Anna a break. :) So yeah, after that last 12-day hospital stay, I finally made it back home last Wednesday afternoon. I came home, took a long nap, and then Anna and I

After 12 days of an unexpected hospital stay, Ryan is finally home! His ANC went from 55 on Tuesday up to 135 on Wednesday, so late yesterday afternoon he was discharged. Thank you so much to all of our family members who have sent us amazing videos of your "ANC

Well, it's been a week since our last update and Ryan is still stuck in the hospital. What we hoped would be a quick visit last weekend due to a fever turned into a whole week of waiting for his counts to go up. The fever came down over the

Tired. That's been the continuous feeling over the past several weeks. It's been a month now since our last update and so much has happened, but sometimes even sitting down to write everything out feels overwhelming. So if you're taking the time to read this, thank you. Ryan ended up

Thank you to those of you who said an extra prayer that Ryan would get through Christmas without an ER visit - it worked! After getting the transfusions on December 23rd, he ended up feeling really good for Christmas Eve and Day - a Christmas miracle if you ask me.

Maybe that'll be the next big Hallmark Christmas movie... no? Doesn't roll off the tongue? Well, anyway, this past week has been one for the books. This past Saturday, Ryan was feeling pretty rough all day, which we assumed was due to his blood counts dropping again. He ended up

Sometimes things don't go as planned. I find myself constantly forgetting this and constantly being reminded. This last Monday at my outpatient clinic appointment, I learned that my blood counts were low for the first time since my diagnosis from the three new chemotherapy drugs that I was given on

And so it began... our new normal. Didn't we already have enough new normals this year? That's what we thought too. The doctors at Riley told us that pretty much every patient who had been diagnosed in the second half of 2020 had responded with something along the lines of,

(Post 1 of 3 to start.) As they say, to not bury the lede...During the last week of October, my girlfriend, Anna, called my younger-older brother, Marc (a pharmacist), because I was having yet another migraine. Over the course of the previous two months, I was initially diagnosed with