Mar 05 - One Year Since My Treatment Finished

19. March 2011 by David Cain.

Yippie…..   It has been one year today since the last day of treatment.

I can recall the day vividly, waking up at 4:30, injecting the drugs and morphine into the feeding tube, pouring a can of food down the tube.  It was my 35 day of radiation, the mucocitus was intense and I was worried about being sick while being bolted down to the table for 20 minutes. 

The session went uneventful, and I was done forever with Radiation on my neck.  Friends Sue and Larry drove to Toronto that morning, and they helped Janis clear us out of the house we had rented.  Larry and I took his car and Sue and Janis took our can.  It was a quiet trip home. 

I can visualize pulling in the driveway.  From where I had come, it was a great feeling pulling into the familiar spot, and finally feeling done with part of that journey.  There were cards, flowers and gifts at the house.  My B-Ball friends left an autographed ball at the front door.

Even though the roughest two weeks were to follow, it was great to be home, and on with the next part of the journey.

This last year has been a blessing.  March till June was mostly dedicated to finishing with mucositus, getting rid of the feeding tube, learing to swallow and eat again and gaining enough strength to function again. 

After that activities came back one by one.

Yes, I am doing the HAPPY DANCE all day today.

A great big thanks to my teammate, friend and wife JANIS KELLY.  She was a trooper through all of this.  Our kids were there at every corner.  Family and friends and blog friends were a huge help, 

Thanks To Everybody for their support.

David

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Feb 27 - Our Last Day In La Ceiba

19. March 2011 by David Cain.

Well, we are just finishing up in La Ceiba.  Today we fly to the resort island of Roatan, Honduras.  The flight will be about 20 minutes. 

Before we move our thoughts to beaches, snorkeling and the good life, I would like to reflect on the last part of our Primary Health Care Brigade in La Ceiba. 

Maggie Himan our friend and a Veterinarian from Peterborough spent the last two weeks with us in La Ceiba.  She ran several Vet Brigades.  Maggie has worked several times in Central America and other parts of the world with Vets without Borders.  She went on the hut to hut trips with us, and dealt with any and all animals that would allow her to touch them.  The villagers were very pleased to have her help their animals.  There are a lot of sick, malnourished, flee infested dogs and cats.  As we mentioned in the last blog, on occasion the children in the huts can get sick from having the really sick animal around.  You have to picture how hut life can be sometimes.  You could be in a living area of a hut checking somebody’s blood pressure and a duck or hen with chicks would walk in front of you.  Roosters everywhere, it is just the way it is.  Maggie also had some horse clinics where the local horse owners brought their animals to a designated field and she ran a clinic.

Click on picture to enlarge.

Anna, Iain, Ben, Ellie and Willie Jamieson just left after spending a week with us.  Iain is a Paediatrician and Anna is a Nurse Practitioner and is a job share partner with Janis.  We planned their week to include two different activities.   Firstly we went to some new villages and did more hut to hut health visits.  Also, any of the very unusual cases that Janis had encountered in the previous weeks came back for a follow-up.  At the same time, Ben and Willie were working with Jeffery and his Honduran work crew and they were busy transforming the CAMPSITE.  They replaced the wash stand with a proper stand with a cement floor and proper drainage.  They rebuilt an enlarged lean too over the stove, built a pick nick table to allow them to all sit together when they eat.  The big addition was a hand dug septic tank with a block bathroom with a shower built on it.  Can you imagine, no more doing your business in the field behind the tin hut (we think there may be up to 20 people who live at the campsite).  Can you imagine waking up in the morning and having a shower, wow?  We have now officially renamed the CAMPSITE to the COMPOUND.  They still have hardship and misery, but some of the really rough edges have been taken off. 

Oh ya, we also found TB in the campsite and lots of Asthma.  We are going to send all the untested people in the compound to get testing.

Below are some pictures of the new and improved COMPOUND

.

Click on picture to enlarge.

One day on brigade, we went to a hut and a young lady could barely move, stricken with Malaria.  Here fever was out of control and she was unable to function.  We provided the three days of drugs (Chloroquin, the same drug we take weekly while here to prevent Malaria).  A few days later, we were doing another hut visit near her home and she came out to greet us, back on her feet.  She is pictured below a few days after being down and out.

Click on picture to enlarge.

Janis found a 45 year old lady who had a Cerebral aneurysm (had surgery in capitol 3 yrs ago).  Her blood pressure was a whopping 224/128.  Immediately we purchased the appropriate drugs and Janis council led her on the fact that she was a heartbeat away from death and that she had to comply or die.  Several subsequent checks and she had more normal readings.  It appears that she understood the importance of taking the right pills at the right time.

The team found lots of hypertension and lots of asthma (many open wood stoves for cooking, including some inside the small huts). 

All work and no play makes Jack and Jill dull kids. Twice we went to Quero y Salado river jungle trip.  It starts with a 20 minute pineapple train ride.  This train was used to carry workers in and product out of the pineapple and coconut fields.  They were all wiped out by Hurricane Mitch.  On one of the trips we saw both howler monkeys and white faced monkeys.  The variety of birds and bats were awesome.  We saw alligators both trips.  See pictures below of large gator.

Click on picture to expand.

The mother of the TB/HIV girl has met with us several times.  The girl is doing much better.  The mother has figured out how to keep her daughter and the rest of the family safe in their hut cluster.  Maggie provided enough medicine to keep their dog free of disease for one year.  The last thing we want is for the girl with her weak immune system to pick something up from their mangy dog.

The little girl with a heart murmur will be sent to La Ceiba in early March as a Paediatric Cardiologist is visiting to look at sick children.  We hope she will get an ultrasound and the severity of her heart issue will be diagnosed.

There were two other cases that Janis, Anna and Iain saw.  The first was a girl with a very bad deformity in her foot.  Iain had only seen one other child with this issue in 25 years of practice, and that was this year.  He took pictures and information back to Canada with him, and will work with Canadian colleagues to see what can be done (possibly bringing the child to Canada).  Also, there is a lady who lives on the school property who had her jaw shot off while visiting her boyfriend who was in prison.  That day, there was a prison break and 78 people were killed, yikes.  Over the years, she lost her jaw and had some re-construction surgery but the American Surgeon who was looking after her died, and her treatment stopped.  Dr. McCallum (founder of Friends of Honduran Children) who is an oral maxillary surgeon and Iain will take up her case in Canada to see what can be done.

O h ya, I almost forgot about 12 finger Andres.  He is a young adult who was born with a tiny extra finger off the side of each of his baby fingers.  Iain said that in Canada, they would be removed when the child is very young.  Andres is 16.  So we cleared off the kitchen table, prepared the instruments, prepped the patient, and Iain (with assistance from Anna, Janis and Ben) removed the two extra fingers and the patient recovered very well.  Talk about your meatball surgery.  Many of us queasy type people stayed away for this procedure.

 

We also put on some public health presentation for dental care.  Each time, we had a liquid fluoride exercise for each child.  We also left them with a toothbrush and enough fluoride for each child for 1 year.  This program came from another Canadian volunteering in La Ceiba.  Her name is Anne Fowler and she lives part time in La Ceiba and part time in Haliburton. Below is a picture of behind the scenes at the dental puppet show we put on 5 or 6 times.

Click on picture to enlarge.

There were lots of memories of unique brigades we did.  There were machete wounds, a kid with an open sore from being hit with a falling coconut, kids with burns from falling into fires, and many other unique things.  Below is photo of Anna and Janis at a mini clinic in a small house. 

Click on picture to enlarge.

We met many wonderful people while staying with Monica and Jeffery.  All were from Saskatchewan, and we were kept busy defending the Ontario honour against those mean people from the west.  Just kidding.

During our stay with Jeffery and Monica, we were immersed in the great school that they have built.  This year they added a kinder class and grade 6.  In total they have 7 grades and over 200 students.  It is a well run school (no teacher strikes and world class teaching content).  We stayed in the teacher’s lounge.  It was a nice room with a fridge and shower/bathroom and a bed.  I still need naps most days, and if you ever try to nap at a recess time with 200 kids running around it is a blast.  Below is a picture of Janis outside of our room/teacher’s lounge. 

Click on picture below.

Bye for now

Janis and David

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Feb 10 - Three Weeks Into Our La Ceiba Primary Health Care Brigade

18. March 2011 by David Cain.

We have been in La Ceiba Honduras since January 20th, are are part way through the pilot project Primary Health Care Brigade.    We are staying with Monica and Jeffery Carlson of Brighter Horizons Ministries.  They are an NGO based out of Saskatchewan.  Their primary mandate is eduction of the poor in the slums outside of La Ceiba Honduras.  This part of our trip is not with Friends of Honduran Children, but is still in Honduras.

Their operation is located in the middle of this needy area.  The area is only about 13 years old and is made up of primarily squatters who arrived after the devastating category 5 Hurricane Mitch in 1998.  Many came with nothing and in 13 years have been unable to break their cycle of poverty. 

As Honduras is such a poor nation, there is little or no safety net.  For this reason, colonia’s like this area are severely under serviced and the needs are overwhelming.  Food, shelter, proper education, health care and village safety are all scarce or missing.  There are diseases that are a by product of living in squalor.  Scabies, tuberculosis, and malaria can be common.  Honduras has one of the highest HIV rates in our hemisphere (behind Haiti).

So far our brigade has been successful.  Janis has been doing hut to hut visits and finding lots of need.  We brought a lot of medication with us, much of it donated by various people, Sullivan’s Pharmacy and the Peterborough Medical Center, and Monica had some in her medicine cabinet as well.  We also purchased any meds needed along the way.  Thank you to the dance team that organized our November Blues dance (Lynn, Joanne, Gina, Teresa and the Don McBride band).  The funds covered some of the drug purchases as well as some procedures that we had to order.

In one hut Janis picked up a heart murmur in a very young baby.  When the Jamiesons come later this month, Iain will make further assessments on this little girl. 

On one hut to hut day, a 22 year old girl staggered up to the truck (she weighed 77 pounds).  Janis immediately did an assessment and the decision was to take her to the local hospital immediately.  During this visit, the girl was diagnosed with TB and HIV.  I am learning as I go, and once you have HIV you are more susceptible to infections like TB.  The next morning Janis, the young girl and her mother went back to the hospital where the young girl was admitted.  Janis had to tell the mother that her daughter had HIV.  We can only imagine what the young girl and her family will have to endure going forward.  She will be in the hospital for about a week.  The mother is going back to their hut to figure out how to isolate the young girl from the rest of the family when the hospital say is over.  This is not an easy task when you live in a garden shed sized hut.  The dance money paid for all the treatments, cab fare for the mother for the week so she could visit the daughter every day.  As well it paid for the food for the daughter in the hospital as the hospital doesn’t provide food.  Below is a picture of the brigade that day, and the 77 pound girl is behind the tree, on the right side of the picture, using the tree to keep herself standing.

 Click on picture to enlarge.

Janis had just finished a book called Mountains beyond Mountains and I was in the middle of the book.  It is the story of Paul Farmer and his quest to effectively deal with TB and Multi-Drug Resistant TB in the poor corners of the world.  His book was very helpful for Janis and I to understand this Girls situation beyond just the medical needs. 

http://www.tracykidder.com/books/mountains/

On one of our brigade days we visited a remote location where several huts were clustered together and four generations of people lived in the huts.  It was all dirt floors and old tin roofs with holes in them, and walls made of whatever material they could scrounge.  They had little belongings and little to eat.  They appeared to be a very tight family, trying hard to survive.  There was obvious malnutrition and various illness with this little cluster.  It reminded us of a little campsite and we mean that in a respectful way.  From this day forward we referred to this as the CAMPSITE.  It would obviously take many visits to assess and help all the health issues and some of the terrible living conditions.  They originally squatted on the land in 1999, just after Hurricane Mitch.  They now own the land and the huts on the land.  There was no obvious latrine and when we asked, they pointed to the field behind one of the huts.  Their washstand area needed lots of help and as you can see in the picture below, there is dirty water accumulated below the stand.  On closer inspection of the dirty water, it was full of thousands of white worms, and they get into anybody’s body who stands in the water and has an open sore or wound.

Click on picture to enlarge.

In the campsite, there is an armadillo shell drying on the fence.  This apparently is used to help treat asthma in children.  I searched the Internet when I got back to our computer but was unable to find any links supporting this.  Below is a picture of the armadillo shell.

Click on picture to enlarge.

We also took about 100 pairs of reading glasses to distribute.  Below is the Grandfather who lives at the Campsite.  He is about 78 years old.  We think he wears the hard hat all day because of falling coconuts but we are not sure.  Their property may be very humble but it is also lush and green and their view of the local mountain is breathtaking.  If this plot of land was in BC, it would be worth millions.  In their country it was undesired land.  Below is a picture of the Grandfather (a lovely gentle man) trying on reading glasses.  You sure know when they have the right strength as their eyes light up.  For some of them it could have been decades since they could read or do sewing or needlepoint.  By the way the glasses are quite sturdy, come with a hard shell and were purchased for about $3.00 a pair in Peterborough. 

Click on the picture to enlarge.

When one is in the middle of these hell holes, the nights back at the compound can be quite difficult.  You go over in your mind how much you have back home and how little other people have.  Why does it happen?  Why was I born in East City Canada with everything I need, and the people in the campsite (our equals) have nothing.  In the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, a Haitian women spoke about this very subject.  “God gives but doesn’t share.  God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he’s not the one who’s suppose to divvy up the loot.  That charge was laid upon us”

One of our other mandates was helping pregnant women.  We brought lots of prenatal vitamins.  Below is a picture of Janis and a nurse from Saskatchewan (Alfreda) as they meet with a local women near the river where she was doing her laundry. 

Click on picture to enlarge.

Enough for one day.  Bye for now

Janis and David

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Jan 20 - Finishing Up At Nuevo Paraiso

18. March 2011 by David Cain.

We are just finishing up 10 wonderful days at Nuevo Paraiso, the children’s village outside of Tegucigalpa. 

It has been an amazing time, and we were able to get to know the children much better.  We had some laughs and some tear.  Allison was with us as well as Joanne Durst. 

We had pizza night, dance night, and many mini activities, including sudoku school, and guitar lessons.

                                                  ……Click on picture to enlarge - Our farewell party at Nuevo Paraiso

We also travelled to some remote public schools to help Allison prepare for the Friends of Honduran Children Brigades for 2011.  Some of these schools have little or no supplies.  We also met some very needy people in the remote villages we visted, and hopefully we can help them and their villages with our outreach programs that our various brigades do each year.

One man who was in his 50’s was injured and could not work.  He was raising his 9 year old son and doing as good a job as he could.  Both were obviously malnourished.  A friend we met in Nicaragua donated $200 to us to use where we felt the most need was.  This money was used to help buy food for the father and son, provide them with a new bed, and buy school cloths for the boy.

 

                                                         ….. Click on picture to enlarge - Their living conditions

                                       ….. Click on picture to enlarge - The boy with a new bed and new school cloths

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Jan 16 - Reyes Irene Girls School Graduation

17. March 2011 by David Cain.

Today is a very special day.  79 young women graduated from the Reyes Irene Girls School in Tegucigalpa Honduras.  These girls work as street vendors or domestics and go to school on their only day off. 

Often times, they enter the school with little or damaged self esteme, and unaware of their rights.  It is amazing to see the transformation of these young women.  They learn their rights, gain high school diploma and often times gain a skill that will help them earn a better living and possibly a safer job.

A few of the graduates applied for and qualified for micro enterprise loans from Friends of Honduran Children.

To our surprise, Janis and I were the Madrina and Padrina for the ceremony.  We are travelling very lightly and the dressiest clothing I could come up with was a short sleeve shirt and blue jeans.  Our friend Quique commented that “That was very Honduran”.

During the speech portion Janis made a brief speech in Spanish congratulating these women on behalf of all the people from Friends of Honduran Children Canada.

Friends of Honduran Children has a great video about this school on youtube.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuvdmh_HRuI

We hope all of these young women fulfill their dreams and move on to new and better lives.

Bye for now

Janis and David 

Click on photo to enlarge

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Jan 12 - Wonderful Welcome In Honduras

17. March 2011 by David Cain.

Well, the volcano was not open for tourists the day we went as there were special meetings for the staff.  I guess we have to visit Nicaragua next year.

We took a 9 hour bus from Managua to Tegucigalpa.  It was a very comfortable bus, and we enjoyed the trip. We left behind great memories of Nicaragua and looked forward to our adventures in Honduras.  The people of Nicaragua don’t have it easy, but it appeared to us they were better off then most of the areas we know in Honduras.  In fact, when you cross the border from Nicaragua to Honduras, you can see a real difference and a poorer people.

We had about 1.5 hours of time off the bus during the two passport checks in the two countries. We met a lady from Switzerland.  She has been travelling through South and Central America for 2.5 years.  She stays at hostels, takes the chicken buses and hitchhikes.  She is going to return home to see her family in a few months.  She was told she had 1 year to live, with her second bout of Cancer.  She sold everything she owned in Switzerland, moved to New York for the year and spent most of her money.  That was 12 years ago, and she is still alive and travelling around the world.  She is in her late 60’s.  Her story is amazing.

We were met at the Tegucigalpa bus station by our friends and went on to Sister Maria Rosa’s house for lunch.  It was great to see SOR and our other friends at SAN (Sociedad Amigos de Los Ninos, the organization we help support in Honduras).  They have over 190 employees and run many social programs for the poor and impoverished of Honduras.

As many of you know, one of the key projects that Friends of Honduran Children - FoHC (The NGO that Janis and I volunteer with) supports is the Nuevo Paraiso Village (orphanages for orphaned and socially orphaned children).  Most of these children come from highly dysfunctional situations, often times too horrific to publicize.  FoHC has help build many of the 10 orphanages now holding 120 children.

For the last year, the 120 children have prayed for my recovery from Cancer every day at their dinner tables, nightly prayers and in church.  The sum of the power of this has been overwhelming.

When we arrived at the Nuevo village, we were surprised by the 120 children with a wonderful celebration.  The photo is below.  It was quite a site, and it was a sure way to make a grown man cry.  I have tears in my eyes just writing about this.

Bye for now

Janis and David

 

Click on photo to enlarge

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Jan 10 - Just Finishing Up In Nicaragua

17. March 2011 by David Cain.

Well we arrived safely last Wednesday Dec 28th in Managua and took the 1 hour taxi ride to our Spanish School.  We have been taking 4 hours of Spanish per day, and it has been great. 

We each have our own teacher (that is good, as Janis is much further ahead of me on the learning curve).  Each morning you start out with 2 hours of one on one conversation and then you have 2 hours of one on one grammar. 

Most of the students are from USA, Canada, England and parts of Europe.  For many European’s this may be their 3rd or 4th language.  For many of us, it is our second language.  We commented among ourselves that our teachers must think all the dummies come to their spanish school as the first thing they have to do is teach (actually re-teach) us basic grammer.  Remember pronouns, dangling  participles etc.

I have taken Spanish 101 more than twice and didn’t really get it.  Being here and doing this kind of focus is definitely the way to accelerate your learning.  Krista, Anna and Iain, there is hope for you, as if I can learn this way, so could you.

We are staying at La Mariposa Spanish school http://www.mariposaspanishschool.com/ 

Nicaragua is a wonderful country, with lots to see and do.  The people are wonderful and we feel very welcome and very safe. 

We have visited Granada and spent a day in Managua.  We also spent two days at the Pacific Ocean on the beach.  It was a wonderful experience.  Tomorrow we are visiting the Masaya volcano.  There are several volcano’s in Nicaragua.  http://www.google.ca/images?hl=en&rlz=1G1ACGW_ENCA311&q=masaya+volcano+nicaragua&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=zDAqTf78JsXflgfixYSjAQ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CCMQsAQwAA&biw=1287&bih=456

Back to the Eco-Lodge.  It is a beautiful setting, with lots of green, and many rescued animals, including dogs, cats, monkeys, parrots, toucans, and a variety of other animals.  The sounds are amazing in the morning.  You feel like you are waking up in the middle of an active jungle. 

Lots of hammock time, and often times you will be sitting by yourself, and a duck will walk by and honk at you while you read.  The other morning a hen walked into the serving area, climed into a laundry basket and layed an egg. 

Yesterday a hen ran by us and was chased by a rooster.  They ended up making out in front of us.  The rooster climbed on the railing of the fence in front of us and proudly announced cock-a-doodle-do.

Yoga and mediation by in the jungle is a very relazing and unique feeling.  The sound of parrots while meditating is very relaxing.

Bye for now

Janis and David

 

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Dec 24 - Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah & Our Blog Link Is Changing

24. December 2010 by David Cain.

Janis and I wish you all the best for the holiday seasons, and again THANK YOU for your support over the last year.  It was a very key part of our journey.

I am am moving this blog.  If your link gets broken you can always re-establish the link by going to www.janodavo.com  

This change will take place today or over the next few days.

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Dec. 11th - 8 Month Check-up & All Is Well

23. December 2010 by David Cain.

It has been a while since the blog has been updated.  All is going well.  I had my 8 month check-up and all is well. 

I am continuing to gain strength and stamina.  Weights and cardio are a key element in my routine.  I have gained some weight and continue to try to eat well.  A little saliva has returned but the taste buds are still not progressing.  It could take up to 2 years, so patience is a virtue.

Part of fighting cancer is the relationship you build with your medical team.  Below is a letter posted on the Internet by Betsy de Parry titled “An Open Letter To Cancer Doctors Everywhere”.  This letter sums things up in a way that summarizes how I felt at parts of the journey.

Dear Doctor,

Here we are, you and me, our lives connected by cancer. My cancer. Under the circumstances, I’m really glad to have you in my life, and I want our relationship to be very, very long and very, very good, but since I can’t find a manual on how to build our relationship, I’m guessing that, like any good one, it has to start with trust. 

But trust takes time, which we don’t have, so I have some things to ask and say.

First, just what am I trusting in you? That you’re brilliant, cool under pressure, experienced, knowledgeable and up-to-date on the latest miracles of modern science for my type of cancer? That you won’t be too proud to call in colleagues or send me to them if you get stumped or run out of ideas? That you’ll always be honest with me no matter how hard it is for you or me? That you’ll help me set realistic expectations without ever stealing my hope? That you’ll be my strength if I’m too weak to be strong? That you won’t give up on me if the going gets rough and it looks like I won’t be one of your success stories?

Do you understand that it’s hard enough to put my trust in you, but even harder to put blind faith in the people I can’t see but on whom you rely? Like the pathologists who look at tiny pieces of me or the radiologists who interpret pictures of my innards. You may know their credentials, but I don’t.

I get that you went to medical school to learn how to identify and treat disease, not to listen to me blather on about how cancer is more than a physical problem. That it’s really personal. That it sweeps us patients and our families into a tempest of confusion, fear, frustration, vulnerability and isolation from the healthy world.  I’ll try very hard to check those emotions at the door when you and I visit, but if they creep into the examining room, is it too much to ask you to recognize that I’m not just a collection of cells that needs to be fixed while you work to fix my wayward cells?

And Doc, surely you know that your sophisticated equipment can’t see the parts of me that make me who I am. And I am not my cancer. No machine can identify the parts that make me love and laugh. And none can calculate how very afraid I am. Of what lies ahead. Of dying. Of pain. Of medical procedures. And of becoming a number in a bureaucracy where no one will care whether I end up running a marathon or being turned over in a bed like a piece of meat on a rotisserie. Could you occasionally share my fear and shore up my hope?

Doc, I’ve tried to put myself in your shoes, but I can’t imagine how, day in and day out, you see humanity at its weakest and still find the strength to help us. I’m just glad that you can. And I know I need much more from you than you need from me, but I’ll do anything to help you help me, if only you can squeeze out a little time to teach me how to be a good cancer patient in addition to everything else that I ask of you.

Neither you nor I can predict the future, Doc, and I don’t expect you to do more than is humanly possible. But may I trust you to treat my future as if it were your very own?

Respectfully,
Your Patient

The ending is so profound “you treat my future as if it were your very own”.  That is a similar statement made by Jack Nicholson in the “Bucket List” movie when his assistant asked how Jack wanted him to handle his health issues.

As you may or may not know, Janis and I had planned to go to Honduras for 3 months early this year, but delayed the trip because of my cancer.  Well we are back on track and in full force.  We are leaving on December 28th and have an action packed 3 months, including”

-  Two weeks in Nicaragua for Spanish school

-  Two weeks in Tegucigalpa having meetings and working with Sociedad Amigos de Los Ninos.  www.honduranchildren.com

-  Eight weeks outside of La Ceiba doing a pilot project on Primary Health Care.  We will be joined by Allison for a week, Maggie Himan (veterinarian) for about 10 days and the 5 Jamieson’s for a week (they will do both medical work and building support).  Below is a document that describes what we are tying to do.  We are very excited about the potential this brigade could have on the impoverished people in Honduras that we can affort to help.  We are hoping to do a separate blog about this trip.

honduras-2011-la-ceiba-primary-health-care-brigade-january-march-2011.doc

Thank you again for all of your thoughts, prayer and support.

David

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Sept. 18 - Yippie - I had a 6 Month Perfect Check-Up

18. September 2010 by David Cain.

I had a CT scan and a check-up with Dr. O’Sullivan and Dr. Irish.  They said all looks great.  Dr. Irish said my check-up appointments are becoming boring, and we all agreed that is a great way to have them.

Both Janis and I felt more internal pressure and concern during the weeks leading up to this check-up.  There were no particular reason or symptoms, I guess it was just human nature.  We hope we are able to relax much more prior to the December check up and beyond.

As you know one of our anchors throughout this cancer journey was working with people who have been through head and neck cancer in the past.  Dan Duggan had a blog that Janis used as her bible for trying to figure out what was going to happen.  Dan wrote an amazing blog, and kept in contact with me throughout, sending a little tickler e-mail just at the right times. 

Janis and I made a camping trip to the Finger Lakes a few weeks ago, with the goal of looking up Dan and his wife Peggy.  They were performing in their home town (they are amazing musicians and put on a great show).

We spent several hours getting to know each other and sharing stories.  It was a magical visit and we now have two new great friends.  Thanks Dan and Peggy.

When you go through something like head and neck cancer or any life threatening event, it changes you.  We all are affected in different ways.  Janis and I felt that if once I was better, we would focus more on what is important to us.  One of those areas was our ability to help out in the world as best we can. 

At the same time, Dr. Jim McCallum (founder of Friends of Honduran Children Canada) was wishing to retire from the volunteer position of President of Friends of Honduran Children.  He has been volunteering in Honduras for over 30 years.  He wanted to step back (not down) from FoHC.  To make a long story short, he is now Past President of FoHC and I have accepted the position of President of FoHC.  To me, this is only possible because Jim is staying active in FoHC and guiding us through the transition.    www.honduranchildren.com

Janis has just become the chair person for the Reyes Irene Committe within Friends of Honduran Children.

Honduras

Janis has been quite busy with the Reyes Irene Committee.  They have a very special guest up for 3 weeks from Honduras (Mae Valenzuela)  They just released a new DVD and it is on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuvdmh_HRuI

There are several things coming up in the next few months.  

1.  Reyes Irene Presentation at the Peterborough Public Library - Monday September 20th at 7-8pm

2.  Reyes Irene Dance at St. Alphonsus Hall on Firday September 24th - Mae is here from Honduras and we will have Salsa Dance lessons from 8-9 followed by a DJ Dance.  $12 at the door.  Hope you can make it.

3.  Friends of Honduran Children Annual General Meeting (AGM) - Sunday October 3rd 1:30 - 3:30 pm at Grace United Church basement.  If you can make this, you will hear all about what has happened in Honduras and what will be happening in Honduras.

4.  Dance - Fundraiser for - La Ceiba Honduras - Primary Health Care Brigade - Saturday November 13th at Knights of Columbus Hall - Near Hunter St. and Reid Street.  8pm start.  (Live Band).

So as you can see, we are busy getting on with living.  I am a little behind schedule on my rebuilding of my muscle tone, and am re-committing to stepping up weight training to re-establish quad muscles that will take me where I want to go. 

Still no saliva (maybe that way forever).  I have a little bit of taste coming back, but not very strong yet.  I can eat many types of food, as long as I have lots of water. 

Napping is still happening every day.

When I think back to the thick of things, week 6-9, it is now becoming a fleeting memory.  The pain and suffering thoughts are in the background and the kindness and support memories are in the foreground and that makes it bearable.  I can never thank my family, friends, medical team and acquaintances enough for the unconditional love and support during this period. 

Below is a picture of Dan and I.

See you at 7 pm - helping cancer patients through their journey

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