Just to catch up, Sara’s last chemo treatment was December 21, 2015 and the liver mets surgery took place on January 25. After about 1 month of recovery, Sara started back up with chemo on February 29. As she is still recovering from the surgery, the dose of chemo was 50% of the previous level for this first (of probably 5) rounds. Still it was a bit challenging for Sara to go back to the routine of chemo on Monday, including wearing a pump for 48 hours of additional infusion, knowing that by Wednesday she would probably be feeling some of the worst side effects (nausea, cold sensitivity, rash from Eributex, etc). She also now has a long incision to deal with across her body, which makes it more challenging to manage the pump and its associated tubing.

Sara made the most of the few weeks before chemo, including visiting the elementary school where she is a teacher (Black Diamond Elementary), keeping up on horse-related activities with Rylan, spending time with her foal Star, and cooking and freezing meals to prepare for potential days where she is feeling to sick to cook. Speaking of cooking, Sara has had some feedback that sometimes the Meal Train link isn’t working. If you can help with meals this week (which would be great since treatment number 2 starts tomorrow), you can e-mail her at sgelfan@aol.com if you can’t get to the MealTrain website. 

A great idea that Sara had to motivate her recovery program was to think of the main steps the same way that she would study a jump course – so she decided to put it into a visual form, as seen in the photo below:

I like visual aids so I thought this was a great idea for her to put it up somewhere she can see it often and being able to “see” her specific goals. Here is a cropped part of Sara’s class picture for this year – so great that she was able to be part of it!

Sorry if the kids look creepy – was just to respect their privacy! So Sara goes back to chemo tomorrow; please continue to send all the help and zen her way, it is very much appreciated!