Back from my travels...

Hi All,
We got back from our trip to Ohio late last night. I was able to continue reading the digests from the HCG2 site during the past week, but I wasn't able to post the whole time I was gone, either because I didn't have access to the Internet, or the privacy or the time. So I have a lot of stuff to talk about so BEWARE, this may be a lengthy post!
Although this trip was for a very sad reason, I think I'll go with the good news first. As you may know, I decided to transition to P3 two weeks early for this trip, so that I didn't have to go through the difficulty of managing the P2 diet that I suffered through on the trip earlier this month. I stopped the injections on Thursday morning and continued with the VLCD through Saturday, which was our travel day. I brought diced chicken and sliced cucumbers for my travel food. It was late when we arrived and we were all hungry but I just snacked on an apple, knowing that i could eat a good breakfast in the morning. So we wake up Sunday and someone is in the kitchen cooking pancakes! Arggh! I had to wait until it cleared out a little and snuck in to make a couple of scrambled eggs with cheese. And it really did hit the spot! And that's kind of how it went for the next 4 days. There were so many family members there that someone was always in the kitchen cooking. I was usually able to eat some of what they were cooking, but always had to skip the goodies that I knew I couldn't have. Fried potatoes, fresh muffins, cinnamon rolls, etc. Plus all the nearby relatives and friends were bringing the family so many delicious dishes. Stuffed pasta shells, cheesy potatoes, lasagna, brownies, homemade cookies, and breads of all kinds. Luckily they also brought some homemade sausage and peppers, meatballs, and roast pork, so I had many dishes that made my mouth water and kept me filled up with good protein. So did I ever cheat? Well, yes I must admit that I did a few times. I had a few little bites here and there of some homemade breads and once a small bit of an onion roll, but the closest I came to cheating with sweets was the homemade applesauce. I had a bowl of that with some sugar free cool whip. MMMMM! So how did I do with my weight? Well, I didn't bring my scale, but I did weigh myself on my MIL's analog scale when I first got there. I weighed every morning and I saw that it did go up and down a little some days, and one day it looked like it was up close to 2 lbs but it being an analog I couldn't tell for sure. So the next day, I just stuck to lots of proteins and veggies and fats and WATER and I was back down the next day. So late last night I get home and first thing, I go weigh myself just to see what the damages are. And..., drum roll please!... I'm .4 over my LIW! And this morning, I'm on my LIW exactly! Oh man, you could have knocked me over with a feather! Well, no, I'm not actually that skinny yet, but WOW! This means to me that I really feel that i can maintain the weight loss after HCG just like Dr. S and KT told us we could! Our miracle cure is true, not just a dream!
The other great part of the trip was having most of our grandchildren there with us. Most of the kids from my husband's side of the family were able to go and they all brought their kids. My husband and I travelled with our 14 month old grandson on the trip there and he was a great traveller. He was very excited about the plane ride and loved to slide the window up and then slam it down. The take off thrilled him and he was laughing out loud. Later, when it got dark, he loved looking at the city lights below. We kept him happy during the other times by letting him have a bottle whenever he got fussy. He had been transitioning to sippy cups but the bottles were comforting to him so we indulged him and it worked great, other than the few overfilled diapers we had to deal with later, LOL! We didn't have him for the trip home since we stayed a little longer than the kids, but we heard he slept most of the way. Lucky for them!
The viewing and funeral for my sister-in-law was every bit as emotionally draining as you might expect. My BIL broke down sobbing several times throughout and their three daughters and 8 grandchildren were all very heartbroken. Two of the daughters read letters that they had written for their mother that were supposed to have been given to her at a tea party that was originally planned for the Saturday after she died, so they read them at her service and there wasn't a dry eye in the place. And one of her son-in-laws stood up to say that there are countless mother-in-law jokes out there but not one of them would ever apply to Linda. He went on to say how she welcomed him into the family and always made his favorite homemade pie when they came to visit. My husband and his siblings and mother also took it pretty hard. She was the first of the 5 siblings to go and she was always the caretaker and organizer of the group. It is hard to see what direction the family will take now that she is gone. And for me, it is devastating too. I had grown to love her very much in the 12 years that I've known her. She and her husband are about 8 years older than we were, but we always said that when we retired, we'd be snow birds together. We'd go to stay with them in the summers and they could come out to Arizona with us in the winters. I'll miss her cheerful disposition and common sense ways. Her deep love for her family and her husband were always evident and we all don't know how we will cope without her. And for me, it also brought back the pain of losing my mother and my brother several years ago, because as unlikely as it sounds, they all three died of pancreatic cancer. And the first time I heard the word "pancreas" when they were trying to find out what was wrong with her, it was a dagger to my heart. Because even while I was fighting the panic and the sense of doom, I knew I needed to keep an optimistic outlook for everyone's sake. I knew that there were some cases of survivors although they were very much the minority, and I knew she wanted to fight it with everything she had. So I held out the hope that she would be the one who would beat the odds and I rejoiced in each step forward. Because for a while it did seem as though she was responding very well. She breezed through her first surgery and the radiation treatments that followed. The chemo was a little tougher, but she didn't seem to get as sick as many do with the treatments and although her hair thinned a bit, she never lost it all. So it was a big blow when we found out that the cancer had shown up in other organs and that there was no further treatment that would be feasible to eradicate it. Now it was just a waiting game and a push to give her the best quality of life she could possibly have. She looked into many alternative treatments and was using a "Vibe Machine" and various supplements that were aimed at healing on a cellular level. She also told the doctors that she didn't want anyone to tell her how much time they thought she had. She said she wanted to get stronger and live and that's what she would continue to work towards. So when my husband detoured through Ohio on the tail end of a business trip early this month, he became very alarmed when he found her so weak that she couldn't sit at the table and eat with the family and was sleeping for hours during each day. When she was in the room with other people she would nod off during conversations. So he called me and we immediately decided that I should come for a quick visit right away since it looked as though she was fading fast. So we arranged for me to come out within a day or so and by the time I arrived, they had discovered that the sleep medication she had been given was at a much larger dose than she should have been taking and that she had been prescribed two different pain medications by her doctors when she should only have been taking one. So once I arrived, they had already backed her dosage off enough that she was coherent and quite a bit more active. So that visit turned into a very nice chance for us to spend some quiet time with her. She was able to laugh and joke and talk about good times. She was still able to walk under he own power although the tri-level house made it very difficult for her to get up and down in because stairs were beyond her capability. Towards the end of our stay however, she started experiencing some swelling and bloating. This is always a big concern because the water retention can cause congestive heart failure and they had to put her on some medication to help her. Which it did for a day or two, but within days of our return to Arizona, she collapsed and was hospitalized. She died that same morning with her husband and girls at her side. So back we came for the second time this month. But so many times we remarked at how glad we were that we had made the first trip and were lucky enough to spend those few good days and that we were able to say goodbye to her properly before she died. I will be forever grateful for that opportunity. And another positive thing that happened this past week, I was able to spend some time with her daughters and my brother-in-law and talk to them about how lucky she was to have the really remarkable quality of life she did in her final days. I told them about how different it was for my brother who had been confined to a hospital bed and was in a lot of pain for the last two months and who had lost so much weight that at 54 years old, he looked like a 90 year old man. So I believe they were comforted by those thoughts. She was alert and actively participating in the world around her up to the end and she was even strong enough to hold her 4 month old grandson and have her picture taken just days before she died. So yes we are very sad, but we also feel very blessed that we had her for as long as we did and that she had a merciful ending to her beautiful life.

Thank you for taking the time to share these thoughts. Good bye for now.

Rebecca