Into The Woods

People will sometimes qualify certain situations by saying "but we're not out of the woods yet". I wonder where that expression came from, and it insinuates that you somehow stumbled into the woods in the first place. In terms of literary references good, or should I say, normal things rarely happen in the woods. The classic example would be Shakespeare's "A Midsummer's Night Dream". And look at where Little Red Riding Hood met the wolf. Even Steven Sondheim (of West Side Story fame) wrote a musical called "Into The Woods", in which a cross-section of fairy tale characters find out that "happily ever after" doesn't really exist.

So to get out of the woods you must first be in them, and here in 8D we are all in our own personal woods. Some forests are larger than others, and so take longer to go through. Others are denser so it's hard to see where to go, and changes in direction are needed. Some families will never find their way out of their woods, while others will find unexpected paths out. I would describe our forest as large but easy to navigate, with occasional clearings - one of which we've just left behind.

All this to say that we're back in the hospital. Benjamin started his third course of chemo on Tuesday. He also had a bone marrow aspirate and they had 2 goes at a spinal tap. But because they kept on hitting a vein, he was put on the OR waiting list and went today. That was just great, because I was only informed this morning, and by then it was too late to feed him anything. By the time they got him up in OR, poor Benjamin had been over 18 hours without food or drink. But once he was back in his room he sucked back 2 bottles in 10 minutes. The results of the bone marrow are good, in that the doctors could not see any leukemic cells. That doesn't mean that they are all gone, but just that there are so few left that this sample didn't catch any. Essentially, we're back to where we were when Benjamin was first admitted in June. So we're not out of the woods yet, but we're getting there.

By the way, I'm blogging from the hospital. They seem to have lifted the restrictions off certain sites, so hopefully I will be able to continue. I'll post as often as I can from here, and periodically add pictures from home.