Brynlee's New Blog

Welcome to Brynlee's new blog. The Caring Bridge site was a great way to quickly get a blog going in order to keep everyone updated on Brynlee's status, but now that things have settled down a little bit I have decided to get a "real" blog going so that it can be more our style. I have archived all of the posts from the Caring Bridge site on this site, so you can get caught up on everything if you wish.

First and foremost, September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness month. The color of the childhood cancer ribbon is gold. I realize that we are essentially at the end of the month of September, but I wanted to do my PR for the cause.

Since tomorrow is Sunday I thought I would share a few thoughts that are more on the spiritual side. We have been through a lot over the last few weeks, but we haven't had to look too far to find other families going through difficult times just like us. Compared to a lot of other families, our almost 3-week trip to the hospital was very short. There are lots of other families that have been there longer and are dealing with a lot more than us. It's true that we had about 10 kids come and go in room 12 that was next to us in the PICU; however, there were several kids that were there before us and are probably still there. It puts things into perspective. Count your blessings.

Speaking of blessings...if any of you have ever spent any amount of time down at Primary Children's you might understand what I'm talking about, but there is a very special spirit in that hospital. I would especially note it in the PICU. There was a conference talk last April (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Semi-Annual General Conference) about a child who had surgery and was in the ICU and talked about deceased family members attending to her. Here is the link if you are interested http://lds.org/general-conference/2011/04/the-atonement-covers-all-pain?lang=eng It is a great talk. I definitely know there are angels ministering to the children in that hospital. Spending many hours sitting and pondering and thinking I often had such a feeling of calm and peace regardless of what the outcome was going to be. Don't get me wrong, I had many days that were more than hard to bear. I cried many times sitting on the 3rd floor patio overlooking the Salt Lake valley and driving home from the hospital. One of the worst days was the first Sunday following her diagnosis. We had been in the hospital for a week and had a lot of bad news thrown at us, and I was hoping it would be a great day. Our bishopric had come to visit, given us each blessings, and we were fasting on that day. I ended up having to leave the hospital early that day because it was too much. She had started having what the doctors thought were seizures, and I couldn't take it anymore. It felt like the news kept getting worse, the list of drugs and medications kept increasing, her breathing kept getting worse, and the cancer was in more and more places. Blair had already come to the conclusion or decision that Brynlee was going to make a full recovery. I was struggling with this and wanted to believe that she was going to be fully healed, but I was unable to find that same faith that he had. Shortly thereafter I read (I don't know if this is scripture or just from a talk) something to the effect of (I'm not a great quoter) that if you just have the desire to believe then a seed will be planted and it will grow. I can say that it has. Don't get me wrong, I still worry about the future, but we have seen many blessings come in the past few weeks. Although sometimes I feel helpless I am not hopeless. Anyway, I could probably go on and on about the different feelings and emotions that we've been through, but that's probably enough for now.

If Blair were looking at this he would say that he doesn't have time to read this dissertation. In fact, if you are still reading this Blair, I'm sorry for the dissertation.