Yesterday Julie, Simon, Hudson and I made a trip down to Madison to see Julie’s brother James.  If you haven’t heard or read, he was diagnosed a little over a week ago with APML Leukemia.  He started Chemo on Sunday December 16 and will continue through December 23rd. 

We hadn’t had the opportunity to get down and see him yet as I had a cold last week.  So we loaded the boys up in the van and headed down on Thursday to spend the day with James and Joy (Julies mother).  James is doing better and improves a little bit each day.  To date he had lost about 20 pounds before coming into the hospital and since arriving so they are working on getting him back to eating regularly which has been difficult of course because the Chemotherapy makes you very nausious.  Yesterday however he asked for a double cheeseburger from McDonalds which was a good sign. 

Of course he has great doctors and nurses taking care of him and we had the chance to meet a couple of them yesterday.  James has already found ways to have fun with them.  This time of year there are many “extra visitors” to the Childrens Hospital like Santa Claus and Amanda the Panda.  We missed seeing them both but heard they were a real “treat” on James’ wing (just not necessarily to James)

Please continue to pray for James and the treatments he will be going through over the next couple months.  He will be in Madison through mid January as they monitor his blood counts and see how the chemotherapy took.  Also be praying that he will be able to continue to put some weight back on as they know that it will all help in his recovery process.  As you can see he went ahead and shaved his head on Wednesday and has already gotten a lot of compliments on how good he looks bald.