My Antique Quilted Heart Nodder

Steve needs to keep a positive attitude and does not need to be worrying about bills at the moment so I don't want to remind him that our city and county land taxes have not been paid yet, and that soon the city will be sticking our name in the newspaper along with all the other folks that have not paid their land taxes yet for this year. We really need to get the taxes paid though so I think that from time to time I will just add some of my craft and doll items here. Here is my first one.

These hearts are straight from grandma's dusty old attic. She knocked off all the cobwebs, and blew off a little of the dust to bring these cute little hearts to you. She also has some of the pink shimmery silk ribbon for cancer patients who are looking for a cure just like my hubby. Also no two of these hearts are just a like.

To order one of them click on the link below.

http://www.raggedybritches.com/store/WsDefault.asp?Cat=Nodders

Worrying About Paying Our Bills

I was not working now, but we had been making all our payments on time until Steve got sick. We had put our tax rebate check in the savings account, and we were trying to not spend any more of it then we had to. Then Steve started having to go to the doctor about every day for three weeks, and every time he went they wanted their co-payments. Then Breanna sprained her ankle so she had to go to the doctor which was another co-payment, then they wanted to put her in a cast which was another co-payment. Then I had a problem with my blood pressure which took three trips to my doctor and two trips to the emergency room to solve which all took co-payments. I finally picked up the nerve to look at our checking and savings account, and there was not much left. We will need about $1000 to make our payments on the first and we had less then $500 left, and with Steve working less then 20 hours per week there was just no way that we could come up with the extra. Steve has been restoring an old 1978 Mustang that he had put about $1400 in so far before he got sick. He told me to put the Mustang on Craigslist and sell it for him for $1000. It sold the next day. Our bills will be paid for this month, but I hated to see him have to sell his car to do it. I am not going to tell him that we are still going to be a little short because we still need to pay the land taxes on our house.

Hubby's First Radiation Treatment

Steve had to go in to be fitted again on Wednesday, and on Thursday they started his radiation treatments. He has appointments now every day of the week at 2:45. The girl who gives him the treatments is young, pretty and really nice so he has not been complaining to much about having to go yet, but I know that the complaints is coming. I take my doll dresses with me to hem while I wait on him, but he is in and out so fast that I don't have the time to hem but just one dress.

On Friday his radiation therapist surprised us by giving us four $10 gas cards to help us pay for the gas to get there for his treatments. She said that the cards came from the American Cancer Society.

Hubby's First Chemotherapy Visit

Things have been getting kind of hard here lately because Steve has not been working much at all. We kind of wondered if he would get paid for Memorial Day Monday since he had not been able to work Friday because they had wanted him to come in to the radiation lab to to be fitted for radiation treatments. We thought that he might stand a chance if he worked until lunchtime Tuesday then came home to get ready for his Chemotherapy appointment which we thought was at 1:00. That thought quickly died when I found his appointment letter while I was straightening the living room before I went to bed. I left Steve a note to wake me at 7:15 because he had to be there at 8:00 AM.

At the chemotherapy appointment I gave the nurse two disability papers to be filled out by the doctor then I sat down to hem doll dresses for the three hour wait. I am supposed to pick the disability papers back up when we go in for Steve's chemotherapy appointment next Tuesday. One of these papers was a paper that his work wanted him to get filled out for temporary disability, and the other was for a loan that we got to pay off some medical bills. It looks like they may pay this loan off for us from the way the disability papers is worded, but I am not sure. This is the only loan that we have with disability or life insurance on it, and sometimes I wonder how the rest of them will be paid.

Nagging Cough

Steve has had a nagging cough since last fall, and we finally were able to get together to take him to the doctor when my job at Jackson Hewitt was over at tax seasons end on April 16th. The doctor found something suspicious on his chest X-ray during the physical, and sent him to have a CT scan on his lungs. They also did not like what they found so they sent him to a cancer doctor who ordered a whole body CT scan, then sent him back for a head scan, then a lung biopsy, then finally a lymph node biopsy. After three weeks of waiting with a doctor's appointment somewhere just about every single day of these three weeks the doctors finally told us that he had small cell carcinoma of the lungs that had advanced to the lymph nodes giving him a C3 rating with a 50% chance of putting the cancer in remission with radiation and chemotherapy. This is the story of our fight for Steve's survival.