Over the past several months I have been amazed how much everyone, including strangers to Melanie and I, have reached out and offered/provided support to us in many different ways.  We continue to get asked what we need or what can be done to help out, well here is a way:

A colleague of Melanie’s from Frito Lay, Ginger Rogers, has joined up with Team In Training for the 2nd time, and is training to participate in the Rock & Roll San Diego Marathon this June.  For those that aren’t aware, Team In Training raises funds to help stop leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma and myeloma from taking more lives. Ginger has graciously offered to run the marathon in honor of Cutler.

Please check out her website at http://pages.teamintraining.org/ntx/rnr10/gingerrogers if you would like to learn more about how you could donate to her efforts or just to check in often and track her progress.

We are working with Ginger to become as involved as possible and to help support the team by including Cutler in the Honored Heroes program that we are still learning more about.  Naturally we will provide updates on that as we learn more, but please check out Ginger’s efforts and support her effort to raise money and awareness in any way possible.

And a fresh attitude to fight comes along with it.  Today has been an up and down day for Cutler as we try to get his stomach adjusted to having food in it.  From what I understand, the objective is to have the pump up to 50 ml per hour before he can head home and we can’t get to 20 ml per hour without him vomiting. 

So far he has had three big vomiting sessions today and leading up to the vomit, he is in tremendous pain crying out like I have rarely seen from him.  However once he vomits, he is usually happy go lucky and the pain is gone.  After the last episode, we turned the pump down to 10 ml per hour and at midnight, when he gets more medicine to help with the nausea, they will bump it up to 15 ml and then we will keep increasing by 5 ml every four hours to see how he goes. 

Based on today, I find it highly unlikely that he will get home tomorrow, but that’s alright as we want him home only when he is ready to come home.  Dr. Ghisoli is doing everything he can to get him home, but I did warn him that once he gets home the house calls (reminder: he lives right around the corner from us) will soon start and he said that as long as there is beer we should be good.  🙂  Now that’s a health plan the congress should look into passing.

By the way, thank you to everyone for their thoughts, prayers, comments, and reaching out to me.  I would like to be as positive as possible at all times,  but I also want this blog to truly represent what we are experiencing so that we can use it against Cutler when he starts to give us grief in his teens.  🙂